skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Early stage startup, first customer wants equity?
We're a team of 2 building a SaaS service for a niche industry. The product/service is subscription-based SaaS -- we have hopes of charging $10k-$20k per year. (We've validated this price-range). We've not taken any funding from anyone, but both have savings to last for a while.

We have been working with company X to develop our beta. So far, it has been very productive, but no money has exchanged hands and only NDA's have been signed. There was a handshake-level agreement that our product would be tailor made to their exact situation, and they'd be our first customer.

Now that we're closing in on an initial beta release, company X suggests out of the blue that, in order for us to keep working together, they'd want a piece of our company. (No specifics yet, but we're expecting the discussion to be 5-10 points). The equity would be vesting over a few years, and would have no 'privileges' like voting/etc (only value will be at exit). In exchange, they'd continue working with us to develop our core product, be our first paying customers, and also work as our sales team. And, in their, words, "align our interests".

The last part, helping us sell, is compelling to us because we don't have many connections in the industry, whereas the company is multifaceted and deals with many of our potential customers.

The crux of the matter is: if we do go through with such an arrangement, how do we structure such a contract? Company X has assured us that if they don't meet certain 'benchmarks', they'd return our shares. What would these benchmarks look like? For example, is it appropriate to ask that they help us sell to, say, X leads per year? agree to commit to purchase Y licenses per year directly? Help us launch ancillary services? Provide us with access to certain sensitive data?

And, in exchange, what do we offer them, besides developing the services to their needs?

Sorry for rambling on, but all of this is new to us and any insight is appreciated.
We use CL for production (embedded/distributed system). CCL and Lispworks on low end ARM32.

We do use JSON but mainly for the product's Websocket API towards higher level SCADA system. As we have control over both ends there isn't much trouble really.

The project has soft realtime component also implemented with Lisp, and at least Lispworks exposes a substantial degree of control over GC. We however didn't need to tune anything thus far.

The system has perhaps a dozen direct dependencies to the libraries, luckily few of them posed any challenges in use.
Snake Battle Royale – 100 snakes fight with each other
Interesting Ideas That Will Influence the Digital Future
A bit surprised there is only one King game in the list of showcases considering how prominently they are listed as the previous owner.
How about don't? Datadog offers everything that grafana does plus alerting, as well as more and better integrations (databases, AWS, middleware, etc...).
Enforcement of policies and laws is rather weak and varied. In this world, even penalities imposed by courts for violations are hardly deterring big corporations, there are plenty of recent examples for this. This article fails to convince me about the effectiveness of the principle.
Nah, Bluesfest in Byron Bay...
Sure, I agree, but so far unregulated capitalism served only those companies and nations that already had market advantage. Forcing "liberal" economic changes in South and Latin America caused their markets to crumble under global competition. You always have to regulate markets somehow. The anti-monopoly laws are an example of just that. Now let's ask ourselves how is a monopoly in a certain area of information brokerage any different? I think classical media gave a very good example of what should be avoided and we have to remember that those actually split the domain between themselves. In the case of internet giants it is often a division based on functionality, so each player owns almost a monopoly of one form of expression. YT Twitter and Reddit are the prime examples. Those three altogether cover almost all of meanigful ways of communication. Most of what's left is just too short, shallow and spreads not that well. Ok, there is still Facebook et al, but you will probably share content created on those 3 big platforms anyway. This is not a game. This is a breach of trust on an unprecedented level and is a direct threat to the future of humankind.
You're closing 3 popups on every website because the authors of those websites are huge assholes. There is no need for a consent popup on a website unless the website is doing something shady. Perhaps the greatest failure of GDPR is that this point needs to be explained ad nauseam.

Anyway, this is irrelevant. EU was explicitly not meant to rule on healthcare-related matters for its member nations, so it's not ruling. That's a fact of the matter. Perhaps after all of this, people will vote to include healthcare into the EU's purview - and only then we'll be able to criticize its response to the next crisis.
Agreed. We had the same stories here in New Zealand, a country which currently has 40 active cases and less than one new case per day (7 day average). Yet we constantly hear how we are running out or going to run out of X or Y. More often than not I think it is logistics. Despite being a small country with centrally funded healthcare, the management of the health system is very decentralized geographically. So some doctor somewhere runs out of something, and runs straight to the media who are happy to run it on the homepage.
Can you share the outputs please?
Fair point, but there are standard ways to package npm deps in Debian: https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/npm2deb

For restricted environments limited to things you can get from standard repos this is the only way to get NPM deps.
Clojure has a good ecosystem and you can fall back to Java's ecosystem if needed. It has excellent support for json, and
acceptable async support (I use manifold + aleph, but there are other options). It runs on the JVM which has world class GC.
Awesome! Thank you for sharing this. I've been trying to get better with my Linux CLI knowledge, and this will really help.
I would be interested to know what teenage engineering say about this. Hopefully they'll approve and provide more details. If it's "You will void your warranty", then I would avoid buying from them.
I think it all depends on what you are using bookmarks for. I bookmark sites I want to check out again in the near future, but searching in my bookmarks/tagging as memex does has never been an issue for me.

If it is something worth searching its text, then it is something worth saving offline, reading and annotating. I use Polar [1] for most and wallabag [2] for its .epub converting ability - especially if there is mainly text that interests me and a lot of it, so I can read it on my ereader. As soon as Polar manages .epubs I shall import all my .epub articles into it. :)

[1] https://getpolarized.io/
[2] https://wallabag.org/en
Show HN: Hands-On Data Science Course
The EU response to covid-19 is in vaccine development (funded by the EU and helped by freedom of movement for scientists); temporary restrictions on travel into the EU for non-essential purposes; coordinated effort around reducing restrictions; joint procurement and provision of medical equipment and PPE; increased production of PPE; €160m for startups with innovative ideas to tackle covid-19; an EU wide data platform; support for businesses during and after lockdowns; support for education; relaxation of state aid rules to allow governments to support businesses; coordination of freight transport across Europe with priority for items in high need; etc etc.

There's a bunch more stuff.
Anyone remembers the old grafana? Just few htmls and css/js, upload to static web server and bam! you got a dashboard!
> We would need alternative weapons like high powered tasers.

This sort of idea usually comes from folks that don't have much, if any, experience in combat -- or with violence at all, for that matter.

There's a reason that anesthesiologists are some of the most highly-paid (and highly-stressed!) medical professionals. Namely, that due to some rather sensible quirks of evolution and biology, it is absurdly difficult to, in any reliable way, rapidly yet temporarily incapacitate a human being without outright killing them.

Tasers are fantastically unreliable, typically only provide one or two "shots", and can not be reloaded in the field. If you are up against multiple assailants, a Taser is absolutely useless.

Also keep in mind that the sort of situations that police have to deal with evolve very, very rapidly. Seriously, watch some of the police body-cam videos on YouTube -- you can go from "routine traffic stop" to "armed combat with a numerically superior force" in a fraction of a second.

Fixing this would require doing some things that are politically very unpalatable, sadly.

The big one would be to focus on rehabilitation and prisoner care over punishment.

Suspects would be a lot less likely to fight back against police if (a) they felt that the justice system would treat them fairly; (b) the conditions inside of jail were safe and sanitary; and (c) conviction didn't absolutely screw your chances of future employment.

We'd also actually be better off if police only carried firearms (no tasers, OC spray, batons, etc.)

The more weapons you give a person, the more likely they are to use any of them -- e.g., an officer with both a Taser and a pistol is more likely to use both than an officer with only a pistol.

Ending the War on Drugs is also a good idea.

Finally: eliminate civil forfeiture, and pass a law mandating that all monetary punishment (from speeding tickets to fines levied against corporations by the EPA) be passed back to the taxpayer as a refund. Remove the revenue incentives for police departments to behave badly.
Interestingly, if you watch the Erlang: The Movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmOlCy0oBM) they use the term 'declarative programming' to refer to what we would now call 'functional programming'. It's an interesting way of thinking about it - these sort of declarative interfaces are very simple in languages with first class function support.
You make a good point. Indeed a transfer function is usually used to characterise linear systems. However, non-linear systems also have transfer functions, it's just that they are not scale invariant. Transfer function technically is just the "function" characterising the relationship between input and output. In a time-invariant linear system this is the ratio of the input spectrum to output spectrum, and is invariant to the scale of the input, and so can be characterised by a matrix multiplication (ie a linear transformation). For non-linear systems such as distortion, you now have a time-varying linear transfer function, a gain, depending on the amplitude of the input. So overall it is non-linear, and must be characterised by a function (the distortion curve), not by a single linear operation. One of the consequences of this is that it's a lot harder to go between the time domain and the frequency domain when dealing with non-linear transformations, so frequency analysis becomes more difficult -- but not impossible, depending on the system. For instance Chebyshev distortion can be analysed in the frequency domain.

So, non-linear transfer functions can be seen as arbitrary functions, or can be seen as linear transfer functions parameterised by some parameter that varies non-linearly with the input (eg a gain modulated by a non-linear function of the input amplitude -- distortion). This second view is called "linearization" where you model a non-linear system with a local linear model, based on the assumption that non-linearities are smooth when viewed "close up", and is needed to apply certain linear control methods to non-linear systems.
Transparency is key right now.

Your "grumble" is likely someone else's "professional concern".
Hmm, "A marketplace for golfers" I'm not sure that is an actual bad idea.
F# might be interesting as well.
Making Friends and Finding a Place to Pitch Your Tent
> And if the answer is: "but network effects", why not Facebook messenger? it has the same reach if not greater.

The last message in my Facebook messenger is almost a year old when a single person wished me a happy birthday.

My WhatsApp is 'a bit' more active than that with 9 different groups / people in the past 7 days.

I know only a single person that doesn't use WhatsApp. He uses Signal over privacy concerns.

In my experience Facebook messenger usage is a rounding error.
I use lispworks, the CAPI works well on allmost all platforms. They know what they are doing. Books: common lisp recipes, PAIP, ANSI COMMON LISP. The few libraries you need are very good.And you need Quicklisp. I stopped using C, C++, pascal, fortran, javascript. Altough they all are just fine. You still have to learn the craft of programming. Just go for it.
I use `man -k` (which is the same thing) all the time.

It has a slightly different use case though.
I agree that the UK response has not been as good as some other countries.

I feel though there is a lot of political propoganda going on. This MP complained about a lack of PPE at a care home she worked in, but the care home sacked her for lying as they said they had plenty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-525680...
Ask HN: Best service to upload user documents securely?
Hi everyone, as part of a side project SAAS I'm building, I want my user to be able to upload documents (PDF files of up to 4 pages I would imagine). Those document can contain sensitive and personal information, so I'd rather not have them on my server for security reasons. Ideally, I'd like an API from a third party service which allows me to integrate a document upload and retrieval from the interface of my webapp, without those documents going to my server.

I must not be searching for the correct thing as I fail to find even one service doing that.

Any advice?
Please calibrate your scale, keeping in mind that you also need to grade US and Brazilian response on the low end.
Yes, these are straight lookup tables/mappings, not transfer functions, which use complex math - and s-plane to z-plane transforms for DSP - and can implement various filter shapes.

This is a good entry level guide to distortion, but it misses a few points.

The first is that any non-linear mapping will introduce aliasing which folds back below the sample rate. The more clipping, the more aliasing you get. In commercial DSP you deal with this by oversampling, applying the distortion, and then filtering and downsampling to remove the aliasing.

If you don't do that, the sound that comes out is nasty and crude with none of the creamy warmth of the real thing.

The other is that high-quality amp distortion emulations - Kemper, etc - are more like real transfer function emulations. They're also level-dependent, so the mapping that comes out isn't one-size-fits all and responds to dynamics.

That doesn't mean delay/echo/reverb, it means a network of very short delays characterised by a Volterra series and/or some form of convolution which models the dynamic tone characteristics of a real guitar amp.
In the age of hidpi displays with tiny pixels, why are people still designing monospace blurry fonts? Wouldn't a well-designed bitmap font beat all of them in crispyness?
Yes, if you read the letter ignoring the context of the direct quotations in the news article then it's not evidence of bad faith on the part of the govorner. What's evidence of bad faith by the governer is the fact that she has told the news organisation:

>Rebekah Jones said in an email to CBS12 News that her removal was "not voluntary" and that she was removed from her position because she was ordered to censor some data, but refused to "manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen."

But now that you know what she's said to the news reporters, you can see that the context of this email is trying to inform people that the data isn't trustworthy without directly accusing anyone of wrongdoing that may lead to her being fired.
I am not paying for my cellphone, I see everyone is on WhatsApp already and I call them on WhatsApp.

That said I live in India. I already pay for fiber gigabit connection at home, so spending extra on mobile is not worth it for me.

That said, most of job is done on email/WhatsApp and I rarely need to call anyone.

And if need comes, I'll just recharge my mobile through internet and get it going within 5 minutes.
People are still bitter about this aren't they? I voted remain but it's time to move on.

The idea of a "cliff-edge" is yet to materialise.
Oracle´s Java 25th Anniversary Event
Show HN: A New Free Object Detection Coronavirus Face Masks Dataset
To add, it's a bit concerning seeing that the military has put a ban on enlisting those who have tested positive, were hospitalized, and recovered without the ability to be waivered. (I mentioned this in another post about a week ago when it was reported).

Then just a few days ago, it was reported that ~13 sailors who were positive, recovered, isolated, then tested negative two times in a row, retested positive and some were showing symptoms again.

It could be due to inaccuracies in testing, but given that some showed symptoms again and tested positive, it seems possible that they either didn't develop an immunity and caught it again, or this could be a chronic illness.

The reason for banning enlistees being a vague "as a precaution", is a little suspicious. Who knows though. Regardless, it's a something to keep an eye on as it develops.
Chinatown Businesses Reopening – Las Vegas Local Breaking News, Headlines
But then the government also politicise it by telling lies about there own performance. If there isn't enough PPE then they should admit to that.
I think the main problem is that webRTC started from VOIP standards. That's why we're stuck with SIP and thousands of RFC's that seem very daunting for a newcomer to webRTC. I guess that's also why so many webRTC developers seem to come from spain (they were always big in the VOIP world with companies like telefonica).

It's getting slowly better since the standard introduced concepts from ORTC.
Isn't the answer at the moment "we don't know" - I'm no fan of the current government but I don't think it helps blaming them before someone has analysed the relevant facts.
Probably it's closely connected to hygiene practices in the care-homes.
I think I've got a good guess what data she didn't want removed or changed, and it's not exactly good for her case. On May the 5th, they day she was removed from her position, there was an all-time high spike of 113 reported coronavirus deaths due to Florida reporting a bunch of old deaths all at once: https://www.tampabay.com/news/health/2020/05/15/florida-adds...

This did not represent an actual spike in deaths which had in reality been declining, but if I remember rightly some people did spin it as deaths increasing due to the lockdown being lifted. Deaths by date reported are conspicuously missing from the current version of the dashboard; it only has dates by date of death, which is far less favourable to the claim that lifting the lockdown is causing an increase in deaths.
Another possible trick is to focus on time slots, rather than the task itself. When I procrastinate, it's because the task itself appears too big, too complex (or maybe even too boring) to even start on. The trick, then, is to say to yourself that you're going to spend 4 hours working on it, rather than saying that you're going to complete it. Completing the task may seem overwhelming, for various reasons, but setting aside 4 hours to work on it is not overwhelming.
The word used was scam, not spam
Freedom of speech doesn't really care if information is correct or incorrect.
Async stuff in Python can be encoded in multiple ways, with gevent everything is a regular function.

http://sdiehl.github.io/gevent-tutorial/
This is one of the most caring communities online. Recently an interview was published on the site's homepage. The subject of the interview, an endurance motorcyclist, had recently posted on her Facebook page saying her sister needed a new kidney. After the interview she was flooded with offers from the ADVrider community offering to be donors. One of them eventually donated their kidney.
Great use of interactive visuals/audio to help explain things.

(I look forward to this becoming more common.)
this works both ways. if a couple is expecting a child but can't afford to take time off for childbirth, is it freedom or justice?
They mention a table has 8 operators only. I'm guessing the 90 minutes includes the client waiting time on the phone.
Conscription is a much heavier restriction of rights than being told to stay at home, yet it's been used multiple times in the US during the 20th century. Seems ahistorical to pin this on some sort of recent cultural shift.
That is why I said "At least for a while" at the end. You can take initiative and feel responsible in that 2-5 years.
Original Epidemic Calculator is here: https://gabgoh.github.io/COVID/index.html
Wow, this will hopefully ignite a sleuth of creativity. I think their choice of using lua to script while also having a pretty great user experience (in v2 and v1) should put them on the radar for most indie developers now. Hopefully this also creates some friendly competition with godot (though I think they have the momentum) but for 2d prototyping for programming novices, I'll always recommend defold. Kudos King.
Not only they tested early, they have the capacity to test ten if not hundreds of thousands of people a day and have laboratories spread across the country working with the government, rather than against it [0]

Sure the UK was slow at testing but there are still ways of getting a private testing kit for yourself in the UK. Thus, it's very easy to blame the UK government for the high death rates and slow response when you have people risking their own health by ignoring government advice across the UK and not taking their own responsibility to be socially distant, i.e clapping for carers whilst being very very close together.

Therefore in the UK, it's everyone's fault for not taking this pandemic seriously enough (All the UK media outlets comparing it to the flu and SARS 2003 death rates), unlike other countries locking down their borders and testing very early.

[0] https://www.thelocal.de/20200429/german-coronavirus-testing-...
There are _already_ several "Linux-like environments" on Android that use proot. GNUroot, UserLAnd, Linux Deploy, AnLinux, Androlinux, etc.

Some of them _literally_ just package existing Linux distros such as Debian (e.g. GNUroot) in a way thatis much more compatible and easier to mantain than something ad-hoc such as Termux.

Termux became popular _precisely_ because they did NOT use proot. Proot is great in theory -- using ptrace and hooks in order to simulate a more Linux-like environment, ala Cygwin. In practice, it is just goddamn slow, and ptrace just introduce MORE compatibility issues than the native Android does.

Termux had a shitton of disadvantages compared to the proot-based distributions, such as for example the fact that every package had to be patched in order to use the non-standard Android directory structure, making compatibility with native Linux binaries utright difficult (not even ld is where it should be) and reusing Linux distro scripts impossible.
But _still_ it became the most popular because proot is just worse.

No wonder they completely ignore all requests to use proot.

If you want to use proot, there is no point at all for Termux to exist (or at least, for Termux the distro; the terminal emulator itself may still be interesting, your mileage may vary). There's little point remaining for patching packages for Termux; you can use Debian packages, so just go and use Debian.

And to to top it off, what if a future Android breaks proot, which looks likely?