skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: My startup bit the dust. No other experience. What should I do now?
It's been over a month now since the emergence of a patent owned by a large, litigation-prone competitor came to light, causing us to shut down. I'm now trying to figure out what to do, but I have no proper software or corporate experience outside my own company, so I'm not actually sure what is a realistic next step.

Here's my resume highlights:

- CEO of a 4-year bootstrapped wearable sensors company founded straight out of college.

- Shipped 3k+ units

- Built a machine learning pipeline to solve arbitrary inertial gesture classification problems, deployed working model to hardware prototype

- more info, cv, etc: matoles.com

- B.S. Materials Science/Engineering

- Location: Seattle

- Age: 26

In the long run, I would like to start another ML company. Therefore my short term (2-4 year) objectives are:

- Work in the data science / ML field

- Make a lot of money

- No regard for work/life balance

Here are my questions for the hivemind:

- How feasible are the following routes, given my resume?

- If you had my resume and wanted to optimize for the above,
what would you do?

- Are there any routes not on the list that I should consider?
Are there important steps I'm missing?

- What gaps in my resume can I fill in the next 3 months?

1. Become a data scientist / ML engineer at a large company

1a. Study a lot. For the purpose of this post, let's assume my technical interview skills are in the top 25% of FAANG applicants.

1b. Publish 2-3 portfolio projects and maybe a paper on our startup's IP

1c. Apply to every relevant job I can find

2. Apply for leadership/non-IC positions at smaller companies

2a. Practice interviewing with colleagues in management

2b. Apply

I am concerned that my resume does not look like that of a typical management applicant. My experience shipping hardware might make up for this at a hardware/ML startup?

3. Do software or hardware (without ML) because the economy right now is garbage

Thanks everyone.
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Luxury car brands are Apple like. Reputation is everything. They don't want someone modifying the car causing it to fail and becoming a big news event. So many stories about explosive batteries and chargers on phones are the result of some dirt cheap china part being used but the news just reports "Product from corporation bursts in to flames"
Thank you for sharing your perspective! Good idea on doing something different from the daily job to generate the energy/drive. I should do that more often.
> I have no idea why state election officials would say that these are illegal when they allow people to in person collect other peoples ballots.

Because it is, in fact, illegal; there is a significant difference between each of these things, with a descending degree of voter knowledge and ability to make an informed choice about the security of their ballot:

A voter electing to entrust their ballot to a specific person.

A voter placing their ballot in a a known-unofficial collection box operated by an unknown person.

A voter placing their ballot in a fraudulently-labeled-as-official ballot box.

Allowing the first does not imply that the second should be legitimate, much less the third.
He’s an extremely wealthy individual. His “voice” aka his “speech” aka his ability to influence the actions of the government via political donations is orders of magnitude greater than pretty much all of his employees. He ain’t being silenced.

The only people being silenced here are the LGBTQ+ kids going to that abhorrent school he donated $250,000 to
Exactly same argument can be made for being woken up by a call at 2AM.
Is there a user control on the device to restore it? If not then it is bricked to that user. Bricked is relative to the users ability to fix it. At some level of skill and money nothing is "bricked" since you could replace or reflash anything.
Is there any way to block this kind of posts in HN? some browser extension maybe? I just want tech related news not get depressed with this kind of posts.
I have run AWS vs colo at scale. For the cost of precisely 1 engineer fully loaded, I can have 500TB of bandwidth per month, every month. Guess what, it isn't going to take just 1 engineer to maintain your homegrown worldwide CDN.

Does it make sense for FAANG to run their own datacenters? Yes of course. Does it make sense for you? No. This is what I don't get about arguments for running a bunch of VPSs-- for literally any environment that isn't thousands of engineers, it is more cost effective to let someone manage your underlying infrastructure for you, and any workload at that scale, you aren't contracting with some random bare metal hosting shop.
You couldn't play immediately, lots of new releases were fake and artists didn't get anything from it. But that close.
Is there a way to preview how the A/B test feature works?
Yahoo Groups to shut down forever on December 15, 2020
It's the Nobel Prize. If I'd won the Nobel Prize with my buddy, I'd be right pissed if he waited till breakfast to celebrate. I'd be slightly bitter he came over at 2:15am without a bottle of bubbly. Are you really that dead inside?
> But you forgot that always-on server it lives on.

A better comparison would be "Serverless" is "FCGI in shared environment"... if such a thing exists...
> Despite OpenOffice having barely any development in 10 years, many users still have never heard of its successor

That sounds like a publicity failure and/or a failure to work together on the same project.

The obvious solution is to unfork and to restore the openoffice name and domain, but I guess that would require the two groups to actually cooperate with each other.
Although... if I was building an election model, I would include candidate height as one of my predictors.
Because the general principle of patents is that the owner is granted a monopoly on its use. You can add in exceptions, but it turns into a can of worms. eg. should "home" users be able to bypass patent laws in any product? what counts as "home" users? can other companies abuse this to bypass the patent system entirely? eg. you invent a widget, you patent it so competitors can't rip you off, but they sell widget kits: parts that allow a home user to assemble their own widget, exploiting the home use exemption. should that be allowed?
Previous discussion(1 day old) on the same news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24746001
Jack+Ma+–+The+Inspirational+Story+of+Alibaba+owner+
Can't wait for the codeless revolution! :)
Recruiters are not bottom of the barrel. How is this the top voted comment? Where do I even start here!
I tried to get a company name or mailing address out of them once, but they're pretty cagey.

They were definitely using a soundboard, they'd repeat phrases that were approximate answers to my questions.

I eventually got a Google voice number in a different area code than where I have ever lived, so it's just really easy to see them coming now.

Automatic call screening is another solution. Or the authentication protocols that are rolling out way too slowly. Or just using OTT services. We never fully fix any old communication systems we just make new ones anyway.
You seemed to imply that war on terror is a war on people unoppressed by the state, whereas, ideology aside, people under Taliban and ISIS are as far from that from that as you can possibly imagine.

Pretty sure Hitler didn't see himself as evil either. Your point?
Wonderful book and very thought provoking. Agreed on Daemon being fantastic. I read these as audio books on the treadmill .. can't give it a higher recommendation.
You'll get a better response posting this to an HVAC specific Reddit.
> Ok. Rewording: more purchasing power buys a nicer home in a nicer area and lower purchasing power in a less nice area with not as much amenities.

It's irrelevant to the question of whether a feudal system of land ownership is the best one.

The outcome you are describing - variation in purchasing power of luxuries - is a normal thing in societies that more fairly distribute opportunity. For example, Scandinavian countries do not have complete equality by any stretch of the imagination.

That's not the scenario described in the article nor does it describe the magnitude and rigidity of the phenomenon in feudal societies.
It certainly didn't originate with Schmidt, but according to this, it probably didn't originate with Friedman either:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/10/10/spoons-shovels/

Though he's best known for it.
> Am I the only one to find it strange that a country without a central, government run, citizen registry, has a public voter registry with actual party affiliations?

It doesn’t. The United States has no such voter registry.

(Individual states do, but individual states aren't the country.)
This post is getting lot less traction that I would have hoped for me. I would like to see an ELI5 breakdown of various product decisions for say, instagram, pinterest etc
Please leave the profanity in Reddit, it doesn’t serve you well in this audience. What you bring up is one of the elephants in the room regarding any mail-in ballet scheme. Manageable as a small out-of-band exception process, problematic for broad implementation.

A lot of COVID risk avoidance is reasonable, if annoying. In-person voting, however, may be a hill worth dying on, metaphorically speaking of course...
I've started using it to replace bash for automated testing. It's easy to add since I'm already installing pytest et al in the container/env. Makes it easy to test situations where I have some python program interacting with other programs thru pipes and such.
Would you sum it up for me and give me examples? Which programming language is generally faster than C that is also high-level? Why do you think people go for C if they want performance? In practice it seems like it is the fastest, popular, stable high-level language out there that has been around for decades.

Maybe Forth whose compiler is in assembly, but due to its type system or lack thereof, doubt the same optimizations can be performed.
I think humor should be less than 1% of the content on this site TBH. There are a lot of ways to get entertainment on the internet. I come to HN for serious conversation and insight.

I also think it should be like little gems sprinkled here and there to break the pattern. Any more and it desensitizes me - this is why I don't like going to Reddit.
Do you want to wake up at 3am to determine that yes, the broken pthreads implementation really is broken?
Online vertebrate palaeontology conference censor blocks the word “bone”
> No it doesn't. It exists to protect national interests.

This is meaningless, and to the degree that it has meaning, ridiculously overbroad. Almost all activities that "protect national interests" are not military. The definition you purport to provide here does not distinguish the military from anything else.

What actually defines the military is that it achieves its goals through the use of violence. And the police belong in this category too; there isn't a difference. Saying the police are not military purely because they wear a label saying "the third amendment doesn't apply to us, for reasons that will make sense if we beat you enough" would be the same error as saying that a newspaper didn't enjoy freedom of "the press" if it published online (and therefore didn't use a printing press).

Actually, it would be more like saying that the New York Times didn't enjoy freedom of "the press" because they're "the Times", not "the press".
Lots and lots of people have severe, physical, visceral responses to anxiety that can often be not only distracting but downright awful, feel-like-you’re-dying kind of feelings. This kind of anxiety response is entirely independent from day-to-day ability.
The Importance of Memory
> Couldn't someone gain access to a registry of voters for the dem party, cross reference w/ ballots, and purge non-GOP votes?

If one was a little more motivated, one could also get FEC donation records and also purge GOP voters whose donation history in the current cycle indicate that they were likely to vote out of line with the party endorsements.
Tagref: refer to other parts of your codebase in a robust way
The dy­ing art of dows­ing
Nope, data says suburban automobile traffic is more dangerous than urban automobile traffic.

https://injurylawyer.com/pedestrian-accidents/high-rate-of-p...

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-15-mn-58713-...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448007/

https://www.collinslaw.com/blog/shocking-report-reveals-subu...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/019443609029503...
It’s still a very young ecosystem. Serverless hasn’t had its Rails moment (yet).

I don’t think it’s as bad as people make it out to be.
And Netflix has nothing over VLC!
> Ok so the company tanked, and they took in investment.. But none of that makes it necessary to do a reverse split.

Perhaps doing the reverse split was a condition under the investment? I am unsure how this fits into the picture. Did reverse split reduce share values further?
Growth mindset.
There's the Comic Book Guy I knew would show up to condescend to an otherwise kinda funny story.

Technically, it's the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Totally not the Nobel prize. Never forget that. (rolls eyes)
I care. I'll submit that it's got it's complicated parts, but on the whole it's no more than c++ (also complicated, given).
No, this is only in the undo path when stealing already failed. But waking all waiters is kind of crazy.

Microsoft’s equivalent API (WFMO) is free of spurious wakes, I can’t imagine how much harder that makes everything
Wish I was wrong, but here comes the weekly HN UFO post.
> The robbers were head-to-toe in kevlar and had armor piercing bullets, the police didn't.

No, that's not true. They didn't have head to toe armor, but they were armored where the police where trained to shoot:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout#Death...:

> After retrieving [a pistol that had been shot out of his hand], [Phillips] placed the muzzle under his chin and fired; he was simultaneously shot by a bullet fired by Officer John Caprarelli that severed his spine.....

> Later reports showed that Mătăsăreanu was shot 29 times in the legs and died from trauma due to excessive blood loss coming from two gunshot wounds in his left thigh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout#Weapo...:

> Following their training, the responding patrol officers directed their fire at the "center of mass", or torsos, of Mătăsăreanu and Phillips. However, aramid body armor worn by Phillips and Mătăsăreanu covered all of their vitals (except their heads), enabling them to absorb pistol bullets and shotgun pellets, while Mătăsăreanu's chest armor, thanks to a metal trauma plate, successfully withstood a hit from a SWAT officer's AR-15.
I totally agree with this. My only real complaint is managing these one off items. Team member 1 puts one on a VPC the other doesn’t, another team member ties one to RDS and doesn’t automate auth...etc.

It’s great but you have to put management of usage in place first.
I've been doing the no car thing for 4 years now after my last car was totaled in the middle of the night while parked. The thing that worked for me was to compute out the total cost I was spending per month on the car and set that as the cap on my car rentals and zipcar. I never even come close to that limit, and knowing that limit lets me feel free to spend.

When I did the math the insurance was close to 50% of my cost. Rest was depreciation, then gas, and maintenance.
Spotify should definitely allow users to shift self created playlists. That is user data and very important to some as it takes years to build.

Though I don't agree that Spotify has to let users transfer Spotify curated playlists as that is a business strength. Songshift seems to show Spotify curated playlists on their homepage like Discover Weekly so I can see why Spotify won't like this.
Perhaps a dumb question from one fairly unschooled in ML: Can't ML be used to augment traditional procgen methods to create unique ornamentation and art styles on top of traditionally procedurally generated level layouts?

IMO, despite how interesting procgen levels themselves can be, they ultimately suffer from "sameness" - similar looking building facades, trees, stonework, etc. become boring fast. Couldn't one create separate training sets such as plants in varying biomes, unique architectural styles, and divergent cultural artwork, and then apply these sets to create new textures and primitives for decorating levels? This would keep different levels/environments/dungeons/whatever feeling fresh while saving on the laborious work of drawing "stone texture #43" or having the same painting in every tavern in the land.

Obviously I'm thinking of graphical rogue-lites like One Must Fall or In Death, or RPGs with procedurally-generated elements, not classic text-based games like Rogue or Hack.
Show HN: Search Engine for 'Going Deep'
Communities (not just reddit) often contain rich information that is otherwise not covered by traditional outlets. Google is great at providing a high-level overview but not that good in letting me go deep. So I developed this prototype that only surfaces results from forums.

Note: this is literally 'do things that don't scale', and only works with 3 queries: 1. mt rainier climbing 2. tornado potatoes 3. ps5.

What do you all think? would something like this be useful?
Being asked to perform a complex task while someone else is both watching and judging you is way different from just talking through a non-technical interview. It’s an entirely different experience. Speaking a foreign language is hard, especially under pressure, but it’s absolutely nothing like trying to solve a brain teaser while the clock is ticking.
If you had a friend, they might come over to tell you.
Here's the beautiful thing about thinking serverless. "Are you really sure that it all re-ran?" Yes I am, because Dynamo streams or Kinesis streams guarantee message delivery. If my Lambda code has a bug in it, which yes sure that happens, I can as part of my exception catching, put that message into a dead letter queue and process it later or report on it. No polling, no querying, I know exactly what went wrong and when.

Meanwhile, I don't have to do things like /make sure the ETL process is running/ or /clear out a bunch of logs when a disk inadvertently fills up/ or any of those other stupid last-century compute problems. It's just a far, far easier way of thinking about application development.
And phones don't have Winamp...what is OP expecting people to do, download MP3s on Napster and sync it with iTunes?
>""Pure carbon is not magnetic," said Yankowitz.

"Remarkably, we can engineer this property by arranging our three graphene sheets at just the right twist angles."
If it weren't for the neighbors having the patented seeds I imagine they'd also have no legs to stand on?
I have friends who are economists, and I get in this argument with them all the time over beers.

There's economic optimization, and social optimization, and those are two different things that are often totally orthagonal.

Economic progress is often horrendously negative for people's lives and livelihoods. People don't just pick-up and move, or re-train in a completely different field with the fluidity that is often indicated, and disruption often destroys lives. This is why income inequality is getting really worrisome, and there's the huge debate over college education costs, and you see so many people now living in their cars because they're chronically under-employed. This is why Trump was pandering to Pennsylvania coal miners and the like. There are millions and millions of people kind of stuck and not sure how to move forward. Everybody in this country can't just be a fullstack web guy, and the alternatives are increasingly working for minimum wage at two jobs, each of which keeps you under 20 hours so they don't have to pay benefits.

That being said, you can't just put the brakes on progress so that people doing things that we don't need anymore are kept happy.

Ideally, we'd have mechanisms in place to help people transition, but we really don't. The best we have is things like the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, various infrastructure programs (just big employment schemes), and affordable Community College vocational programs. The worst we have are predatory vocational programs that re-train people with useless skills, which are essentially scams to cash in on predatory student loans and GI Bill money.

This is the crux of the 2016 election, and although the virus has hijacked 2020 it probably would have been the crux of that one as well. You have Yang and Sanders proposing massive reforms, AOC with the Green New Deal, contrasted with Trump pushing a regressive approach, and everybody's polarized and yada yada.

Nobody has a good answer yet, or 300 million people wouldn't currently be arguing about it. Ideally we'd have a temporary system of 'engineered inefficiency' in the economy that would help people with legacy skills transition into new fields when employment dried up. But, nobody knows how to politically design, implement, or fund anything like that. So, what we have is this and it sucks.

I hope people smarter than me are working on this problem. I feel horrible about all the folks who have just gotten screwed, and have lost their homes, and are trapped in cycles of poverty. But, I mean, we are debating with strangers on the internet, so you know, no ill will towards anyone even if they disagree.
> And, if I did build a system with a ton of active users, Lambda handles the scaling of that.

This is a bold claim to make without verifying it.

> Another reason I spent the time to create this build system and write all the code to handle user accounts, etc.

But did you also spend the additional time to scale test it and verify it won’t break in confusing and annoying ways when scaling / spiking up? (see the other discussions re: connection pooling above).

The reason a lot of folks are skeptical is that in practice there don’t seem to be a lot of great examples of stateful services using a “pure” serverless lambda pattern but with arbitrary dependencies that actually do scale smoothly and don’t break in annoying ways such that you end up building something more complicated than just using App Engine or Heroku...
Binpacking little things onto big things with PAE
Does that include petrol or not? Either way sounds like an exaggeration.
Spotify is also the company leading the charge against the openness of podcasts. That entire industry has traditionally run on open standards which prevents gatekeepers from interfering with podcast creators, podcast app creators, or end users. Spotify is trying to end that by buying up the exclusive rights to numerous podcasts, killing the open feeds for those podcasts, and forcing all listeners into the Spotify app.
WPM is not the bottleneck.
> It's that it makes that level of code reuse that much simpler. You have all of these helper infrastructure functions that you implement for every single project you work on, and reusing that glue code is so, so much easier in Lambda/GCF/AF/etc.

That sounds great until you need to add a feature or fix a bug in the reused code. Then you deploy a change to a Lambda function that impacts X other projects immediately, with no chance to test each of them individually.
I mean there's a lot of problems with patenting manufacturing processes. How do you argue this is a solid model for growing fruit?
You mean, Monsanto? No. Monsanto's patents were valid regardless of how the farmer got those seeds. The action of willfully concentrating the resistance genes is what got him in trouble.