skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I enjoyed this article, but I think it glosses over a very important part of my (and my cofounders') own motivation for starting a company: vision.

Sometimes you see or believe something that others simply can't or don't, and you want to do something about it. Trying to find a (usually narrowly-defined) job that lets you work on these things can be very hard because there usually has to be someone looking for solutions to these hard-to-see problems, and you sacrifice a bunch (more) of your autonomy in the process.

Founding a startup is a great solution to this problem; convince some capital that you have deep conviction and competence to make a material change in the world and put in your own elbow grease to prove it. If you are willing to work hard you don't need very much money to amplify the impact of your own decisions and efforts and the snowball grows, attracting more resources along its path.

It's still really hard to do, but founding a startup remains one of the best ways to prove out a hypothesis in the real world and achieve actual change, while still allowing for a decent income even in the event of failure. It is worth it if the mission is compelling.
Wendelstein 7-X stellarator is being upgraded [pdf]
It’s very unfortunate but again they didn’t happen in Portland, OR.

While there has been some property damage in Portland, OR there has been very little violence so it’s odd that the federal government is ramping up a military like response in Portland, OR.
Certainly, it's all part of the negotiation. You could negotiate retaining x% of the stock (along with rules regarding stock type, splits, etc.). Another common negotiation when selling your startup would be to retain a position (e.g. lead developer, marketing manager, even CEO!) for x months or years. Or an option for right of first refusal to buy it back if your purchaser ever decides they want to sell the company (or its assets) in the future. Everything is negotiable, but you should always have a lawyer help work out the agreements and details.
Everyting in Fintech involves a mountain of paperwork and regulation. And probably a huge amount of money from the get-go.
This is what suggests that: "For the time being, Mastodon remains a small enough presence in the social media sphere that this kind of attack hasn't been worth the time."
Chinese fintech giant Ant to go public in dual Shanghai-Hong Kong IPO
Not all of them but certainly a few of them. Growing a bootstrapped business slowly meant fewer rejections, less stress about expected growth (hiring, sales) and more control over your role at the company. But eventually you'll hire employees and you will spend less time writing code. I wouldn't necessarily say that's bad though as you might discover that some of those other aspects of running a business are even more satisfying. And you can always make time if you really feel the itch to program something again (once you've hired people to handle support/ sales).

I generally encourage interested people to start their own companies. But I advise against taking VC except for a few use cases that make bootstrapping unrealistic.
I think we had enough evidence lately that the German government is corrupt and they all have their snouts in the trough, almost regardless of party. Talking about fleecing.
For object storage, Stackpath gives you free SSL and it all can be automated via their API.

I made these benchmarks recently and Stackpath didn't do too well but it's still an option you could consider.

https://www.pierbover.com/posts/static-hosting-benchmark-202...
It could easily still be luck if they bought Tesla or TECL 3 years ago and that is where their 4x return came from.

Regardless, even if you have a strategy that works for now, that doesn't mean it will continue to work forever. Anyone investing that isn't an expert in a particular industry in which they trade is basically just guessing. Any insight they have will almost invariably already be priced in.
Smart man, IMO:

One tycoon said he decided against participating after his doctor told him it would take at least a year to assess the new vaccine’s risks.
Nice post, tnx for sharing this stuff and your mistakes.

Did you actually launch something in the end, or did you give up before launching the product? Can you provide the link to the app. I'm curious because I think there is a market there, in general time tracking tools are really bad for some reason. Harvest is the only one that is ok for me.

Also, time tracking is something that can be used by any agency not just freelancers.
An open source project management tool with Kanban boards
We've been running for about a year now and had zero problems with it. (~20TB total, few single instances, serving as S3 backend to Restic - handmade HA - backup service)
HN is, broadly speaking, ad free and has a high degree of technical experts.

More people mean a broader dilution of the level of discourse and knowledge, and greater and greater incentives to market / spam / propagandize.

ad free in the sense that there are no obviously in-your-face efforts at graphical marketing; HN is run by a strartup incubator and has a startup focus; flogging your latest release is the raison d'etre of the site.
One obvious example would be to fully automate social engineering email scams. Imagine how much disruption it would cause if spearphishing became as common as robocalls have become post-automation.
Kindergarten is meant to ease the transition from daycare to school. Kids who attend kindergarten have better lifelong outcomes than those who skip it. In fact, it's the children who are dumped straight into grade 1 who are in more need of a "daycare" environment, because by and large, they do not have adequate preparation.

And two parents working full-time, with a single child, do not have the resources or additional children required to provide a classroom environment. We're both software engineers. We prefer our children to be taught by people who specialize in teaching children.

Your parent got downvoted because the comment is a shallow dismissal.
meredydd 1 day ago [–]

I am deeply enjoying this comment thread - it's a bit of a Barium Meal [0] for determining how many people read (a) the headline, (b) the first paragraph, or (c) the whole thing before jumping straight into the compose box.
How easy is it to tweet as anyone? – Twitter Hacks and Bug Bounty
So you add the customer domains to Cloudflare?
Sounds like run-of-the-mill bad faith discussion :/
I think this illustrates just how complex the topic is, though. Hugging Face is awesome, and Transformers has done so much to democratize NLP, but does it exists without labs like OpenAI releasing models like GPT-2? The ecosystem is still young and fluid, and as a result, it's super complex. I completely understand the critique of what OpenAI is now vs. what they positioned themselves as early on, but I think it is also a symptom of all the open questions around how ML research is to be done in a way that maximizes community benefit while remaining sustainable.
What's wrong with Adevinta? I haven't really use any of their services. But I just went on shpock or what not and it seems fine?
It’s done in dedicated silicon in order to deliver better battery life and better performance, given how extremely computationally expensive it is.

Playing back vector video is simply much less expensive, as it’s doing much less work. Assuming content like the sample videos here, I would expect vector video to be immediately competitive with raster video codecs in power efficiency and performance, once you shift the bulk of the vector rendering from CPU to GPU.
It's a chicken and egg problem. Is the absence of a path to accrue wealth the reason why Somalia doesn't have a well-functioning political system, or is the bad political situation (part of) the reason why it's so hard for Somalis to accrue wealth? I don't think it's one or the other, it's a complex interplay of both.
Ironic since the internet (ARPANET) was specifically designed to not have a single point of failure
"which they do not perceive" is key here. I suspect that HN readers tend to an above-average degree of sensory sensitivity that causes them to notice things most people don't. Add to that even a little training/experience in audio and the noises that drive you crazy are likely completely inaudible to others.
This is neat, looks like a market that will grow. If there’s a system that builds in multiple things like tweaks carbonation, diagnoses water, mineralizes taste, that would be useful.
+1, this was exactly how I got my professional programming career kicked off -- learning programming from Minecraft modding and networking from there.
Modern heat pumps can get a coefficient of performance of around 3, meaning that for every watt of electricity going in, you get 3 watts coming out inside your home (the other two watts are being removed from the air outside). For everything that isn't a heat pump, energy in = energy released in your home (coefficient of performance=1). So in the end, you get like a 33% rebate on cpu usage via heating cost savings(very rough number, since the actual coefficient of performance varies wildly on outside air temp)...non-negligible, but it doesn't make it free unfortunately.
Admit it, you had to google IBM IMS, didn't you, HN drones? Only question is, did you do it before or after furiously downvoting me?
I mean I have a teapot on my stove. It's orbiting the sun. So you're correct.

*I know what reference you're making, I just like to be a pain. :)
another in this category for multiple devices: https://diybookcovers.com/3Dmockups/

i love collecting little tools like this, lmk if anyone has one for mocking phones, tablets and desktops.
...or my favorite incongruity--being very concerned about little things, but being 30, 40, or 50 pounds overweight!

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/global-shift-obes...
Speaking of unconscious bias, this quote from the original article made me raise my eyebrows: "We wanted to identify how good an average person on the internet is at detecting language model outputs, so we focused on participants drawn from the general US population."
We're incredibly excited about GPT-3. I think there is a fair bit hype exhaustion, especially from the likes of OpenAI ("our AI is too dangerous to release"). So this is completely understandable.

However I think what's missing here is our benchmarks (a la Turing test) are about negation as opposed to affirmation. We tend to evaluate AI on whether or not we can discern the fact that it's AI. We seek to negate it as human, as opposed to affirming it as human (or close to). And this is not the right mindset when it comes to AGI because the gap between "obviously not human" and "human-like" is enormous. These are all definitely steps in the right direction, and the applications for even robotic process automation will be huge. But we're not even close to having nets that can reason about even the most basic things.
Sure you do. If I hand you a few sentences in a language you can't comprehend at all, you won't be able to create a plausible continuation.
There are lots, and lots, and lots of books. With those that have been filtered by time and decades to centuries of fans and specialists, if you can’t get something out of them usually that’s your fault—which is fine and normal, since for most people getting acquainted enough with literature from a different place or era to enjoy it takes some deliberate effort, just like learning to appreciate new genres of music, or film of a style you didn’t grow up with, or a genre of video game that’s not immediately rewarding. And that’s just fiction!

Maybe try poetry? Though, same applies. Anything that’s not popular, recent fiction aimed at a grade 8 reading level is going to take some effort and practice to learn to appreciate and fully understand. Literacy is a very wide spectrum.

[edit] incidentally, for whatever reason, I find drawing book recommendations from strangers online nearly useless. This goes double for genre fic and non-fic. For other media it works fine. Dunno why but I think part of it may be that people read more differently, and for more reasons, than they watch movies or listen to music play games. I also find it’s easier in other media to quickly spot people with tastes that are very contrary to mine, and so ignore them.

One thing that seems to help is that more people are able to say “this is trash, but it’s my kind of trash, but hey, here’s this other thing like it that’s actually good” with film than with books. Something about books seems to make people use a much broader and less-differentiated or less-well-tuned definition of “good” and then just apply that same label to everything they read and don’t hate.
nAbs don't last forever, for any infectious virus. That's what T-Cells and B-Cells are for. This vaccine showed a T-Cell response, which means it SHOULD last long enough. T-Cells from SARS survivors have lasted 11+ years. But we won't know until 2-3 years from now. We can't wait that long. I say ship it to production now, and do a v2.0 release later.
That was such a great, prescient quote by Abraham Lincoln.
Moon Disaster–a deepfake movie about the Apollo 11 disaster
Ok but then your whole point is basically "things can change in life". It's true and it's a good thing to be risk adverse but it doesn't bring much to the discussion at the end of the day.

The more interesting questions is "can you actually, consistently, make money if you are good and spend a lot of time analyzing the market. In other words "can you actually have an edge on the market". From what I've seen it's so but most people don't believe it.
A Better Way to Evaluate GPT-3 (and Other NLP Models)
SaaS Lessons
>it allows readers to judge the legitimacy and relevance of sources for claims made.

And that leads to a world where HN commenters trip over each other in a rush proclaim that Ghandi is morally equivalent to Atilla the Hun because he once said something that they can twist as not being totally in support of whatever the fashionable morals of the minute are.

Point is that if people don't like what they read they'll do all sorts of mental gymnastics to delegitimize the source even if it's a squeaky clean source.
I wish you the best!
I want to use Reflect to test my game with many concurrent, simulated players. For context, the game needs to properly handle 50 players at once.

The pricing (6 hours of testing for $99) means that if I want to do a 1 minute test with 50 concurrent players, I can only test 6 times a month. A big benefit of testing is to ensure we ship reliable software, and we plan to ship much more often than 6 times a month.

Is there a way you could price by unique tests instead of hours tested?
You mean you don't `curl | rg` web pages?
"Your app will go down when half the Internet goes down" is not that big of a deal to most software companies, because:

1. no one's going to blame me if my app goes down when half the Internet is also down but they are going to blame me if my custom solution to the same thing causes an outage,

2. there's no way my custom solution is going to achieve the same uptime. AWS/Cloudflare/Azure are not perfect, but whatever I roll for myself is almost certainly going to be much less perfect.
Generally better, but the answer is a little more nuanced.

We had access to data describing how DNA influences iron levels, and how DNA influences years of healthy life. This showed that the same DNA variations that change your levels of iron in the blood also change how many years you spend in good health.

Now, these genetic effects are relatively small, so we can confidently say that people who carry genes which cause them to have slightly lower iron levels (i.e. one standard deviation) than the population average will be healthier, on average.

However, extrapolating that further can be dangerous - for example, anyone with iron levels three standard deviations lower will not be three times healthier, they'd have no iron in their blood and be dead.
> Many of these companies should have had fail-over to competitors at least for reliability.

How would you even set such a thing up? I fear that you might get a couple of collusionary companies that bail each other out and smaller providers might just be left out to dry…
"OpenAI is governed by the board of OpenAI Nonprofit, which consists of OpenAI LP employees Greg Brockman (Chairman & CTO), Ilya Sutskever (Chief Scientist), and Sam Altman (CEO), and non-employees Adam D’Angelo, Holden Karnofsky, Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Tasha McCauley."

https://openai.com/blog/openai-lp/
It still has trouble running on Windows, unless you're using WSL2 in which case it runs like a champ.
This blog post was my bi-yearly reminder that a thing called Mastodon exists.
Seth, congrats on the funding.

> The foundational invention is the TileDB universal storage engine based on dense and sparse multi-dimensional arrays.

Want some advice? Find a way to explain TileDB not to sound super intelligent, but to help readers understand. You will be much more successful if you do just that.

Added bonus: start with what problem TileDB solves, that current solutions don't solve.

Edit: 1) scalability for complex data; and 2) deployment; seem to be the problems you solve. Is that correct?
> Did you find anything other that was very wrong in my comment?

I'm not sure about the statement that "Datalog is evaluated from the "bottom up". [...] datalog will first generate the set of all ground atoms that are consequences of the program in the context of which the query was made, then determine whether the atoms in the query are in the set of consequences of the program". I think it's true that Datalog behaves as if it were evaluated like this, but AFAIK Datalog systems can do lots of very aggressive optimizations that change the actual evaluation. I'm not an expert on Datalog.

Anyway, I was mostly dissatisfied with the general thrust of the comment, trying to establish a "subset" relationship. I think the article's "cousins" comment is fair. Prolog is older and influenced Datalog very much. Prolog is also Turing complete, so it is strictly more powerful. But Datalog's semantics allow some optimizations that wouldn't be possible in Prolog, so it can be a lot faster on appropriate classes of problems.
This is a little bit of a misnomer. Anybody can pass on the virus. If you have it in your nose and you sneeze, you'll spread it everywhere. If you have it on your hands and you touch high-traffic surface areas, you'll spread it. The point is that if a high number of people are vaccinated, then it won't matter if the virus fragments are spread, as long as it's not causing disease then it doesn't matter.
Well, the site may be active once you are finally able to solve the CAPTCHA.
Presumably they also kept 900million from the auction fees... Right? ;-)
They all right. I think there is some nostalgia goggles there, same with Planescape: Torment.

Decent writing, for a game, but the isometric view isn't great and the gameplay is clunky. Plot and theme-wise it holds together better than Fallout 3 -- which has plot holes so big you can drive a bus through them -- but FO3 was a lot more fun to play, at least the first 2-3 playthroughs, and has so many freakin mods it's a different game.
You cannot really do espresso in 5 minutes practically at home. Heat up the machine, fill water, grind beans all takes time. And you need to do clean up after. It takes 10 minutes on avg
Sure, I made plenty of bad predictions too! I have written about some of the harmful effects of trust and bias in automation, feel free to check it out:

https://breandan.net/2017/02/02/trust-in-automation/
Taleb's Book Recommendations
That’s awesome man!

I only started deep diving into permaculture a couple months ago, but it pulled together many things that I had been exploring for a long time. It was like coming across the keystone piece in a lot of things for me. But it has been chasing me for a while. I had been fascinated by the design diagrams I would see popping up, and finally looked up what this funny word “permaculture” meant.

I think permaculture is the next evolutionary step for our civilizations, even if on the surface, if appears to go backwards. But it is not. It is progressing forward into post-industrial, decentralized practices. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and it was easy to be blind to what “Information Age” meant (globalized control of industry), but I now see what it really enabled is the decentralization of agriculture and industry through the interconnecting web of relationships of people. We finally have the technology that put us on par with the mycellium network, and start understanding — having the lived experience of — network effects of ecology.

It definitely affects how I evaluate tech and startups.

Pretty much, almost every permie I have encountered have this intense optimism and fertile generator of fresh ideas, even with COVID-19 going around the world. I don’t think there are many other groups that are like that. It is good to see :-)
Money has always been gamified. It's not so much about purchasing power, but about status - and in the big leagues, it's about political leverage.

VCs are really playing a status game, and the promise is that you too can become a high status player with a public profile and significant economic leverage. It's a completely traditional patronage relationship, based on the promise that if you win a round of the game, they will help you level up.

Ideally you both exit with a unicorn level IPO. That's a real win - for you, but also for them.

So this is not primarily about being able to afford to pay the bills. Or even about "changing the world" by providing a new kind of service. It's more like an economic and political sport.

A win leaves you with plenty of cash, but it also gets you entry to The Network, and eventually you may even graduate to coach yourself.

This is why VCs aren't interested in growing stable, unexciting, but productive businesses. Those are low-status beta plays, and no one ever became a thought leader by funding a small beer Wordpress consultancy - not even one that has been around for more than a decade, is comfortably profitable, and the business owners can afford to retire at 40.

The real stakes aren't money - although that's certainly a factor - but Network profile and reputation.

As a bootstrapper you can choose to play this game, or you can choose to ignore it. And ignoring it is perfectly legitimate. There's a huge amount of stress involved in going full SV, failure is far more likely than success, success is far more likely if you're already in or around The Network, and not everyone cares enough about the benefits to consider it a worthwhile tradeoff.

Anyone who does choose to play it should be aware of what they're getting into, and stories like OP's can do a lot to make the tradeoffs clearer.
Nope. Even from my coffee snob friends, only one has had a capsule machine and abandoned it anyway. And he's the kind that owns 3 different french presses to start with.
They do mark the vast majority of it as "notional". As you say, that notional value is immaterial: it doesn't actually correspond to anything of value, more akin to you and I writing each other quadrillion-dollar IOUs.

It does, however, give a kind of hint at why derivatives have such an outsized effect on the economy. People treat that fake money as if a tiny amount of it were real -- like getting a bank to loan you ten grand backed by my quadrillion-dollar IOU. It can easily become a tail that wags a dog, especially since it's so volatile -- it can evaporate in an instant.

It's almost Heisenbergian -- the net value is indeed zero, but somehow it manages to make a tiny difference anyway. It's only important because it's so vast.