skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Looking to Set Up a Digital Agency (Python/Finance/Data Science)
Hi

I am thinking of setting up a digital agency, probably focused on python development with a specialisation in finance and data science. I'm wondering if anyone has ideas on how to market such a service in the early days and attract the first clients.

A bit of background:

- I have a finance background with 15+ years working in the financial services industry
- I subsequently co-ran a consultancy where we did a lot of development work, amongst other things, mostly finance/data heavy stuff in python (development work was for internal projects though or as part of bigger non-dev projects, so existing client contacts wouldn't help)
- I've also been developing web apps for > 10 years, various technologies incl. RoR, JS, React, SQL, etc, so generally have quite a technical background

I think to start with it makes sense to focus on a niche (hence python, finance, data science) rather than offering full stack development.

I think I have the right background (finance & dev work) but no existing client relationships. I'm trying to avoid platforms (Upwork, etc) and generally prefer the idea of setting up an agency rather than freelancing work (for various reasons, incl. better rates etc, being able to take on larger projects, more professional appearance in front of potential clients, quite enjoyed running a consultancy previously, etc).

If anyone has ideas on how to get a venture like this started, I'd be really keen on having a chat (contact details are in my profile). And of course if anyone would be interested in teaming up let's also have a chat!

Thanks
Markus
But they already do that with warrants. As long as they have a warrant and aren't breaking encryption by putting in backdoors, they should have the ability to listen in on conversations.

That's how it is now without encryption.
Website shows number of deaths around the world due to poverty
A New Era of Innovation and Trust in Data
Web Development with Windows 10
Useful Values / Guiding Principles from Ethics
I think the title here is overly inflammatory.

To suggest there is a 'fair right' to data behind encryption for goverment use, to my mind, somewhat misses the point of encryption and privacy in general. This is the point I believe we should be arguing.

Your representaiton of the article as a 'declaration against encryption' somewhat undermines this argument, and polarises it into an 'us vs them' debate.

For accuracy, this document is titled:

"Draft Council Declaration on Encryption
- Security through encryption and security despite encryption"

Its pretty handwavy, overly general, and seems to call for some sort of 'back door' from the tech companies. Missing the point really, anybody wishing to use strong encryption for criminal purpoes can do so so with very few resources, and quite independently.
Quite sad that a lot of hard work basically went down the drain because of no apparent fault.
Trying to decide whether to use this - is there a list of apps that I will be able to install when I use this?
I don't understand all of your questions, but the proprietary part of the "dual license" can be anything the copyright holder wants. Qt is probably the most famous dual-license software. Check https://www.qt.io/pricing for some but not all details.

It looks like this is subscription-based, so I'm guessing you can update for the length of your subscription.

Perhaps you're asking whether you're allowed to use development patches written by external people that you'd maybe find in github discussions etc.? If you need that, you will probably have to negotiate for that option yourself. If that is your question, then that isn't really a naive question at all.
I am often shocked by the tastelessness of food in the Netherlands -- in contrast to anywhere I have ever lived. But the future is promising, as there is so much room for optimization.
Call me weird, but I would be more willing to support it if it was an open source system that I could control.
Would you mind going into detail on your setup? What do you use to do this outside and inside GCP?
Until your house burns down.
It’s Time for a New Old Language (YouTube, 2017)
> but about networks which are systematically and in actuality doing things like trafficking children for sexual abuse

The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation. --Adolf Hitler
That’s not me. I do my 3km run couple of times a week, and a yoga and I’m happy
> Making the world a better place by allowing big corporations to generate solid fake test data for their QA flows.

--- Random Guy in a random Silicon Valley episode

Not compromising your vision? Not to belittle Marak's work here, it's certainly valuable, but it doesn't sound like something that one does to make the world better, but like something that is useful (nearly) only in a corporate context and should be done for a decent salary.

But you know, that's just like, my opinion...
I suspect that's more of a reflection of IE's market share than the security of the browser.
+1 for Speech and Language Processing.
Not only helped me with NLP but really solidified backprop.
The point of open source is that you can't make money off of (selling) it (directly).¹ Neal Stephenson memorably described open source as a tar pit that eats up opportunities for profit in software development. I realize that sucks if you need an income, but if you write open-source software, that is what you are supporting. (And I say that as an open source dev.)

When you license a piece of code under the GPL, you are saying "people who write opensource code should not have to put effort into remaking this." When you license a piece of code under BSD, you are saying "Nobody should have to put either effort or money into remaking this." Like it or not, that's what the license means.

¹ Yes yes, distribution fee, I know. And you know damn well that's not a workable commercialization strategy.
I don't like it because they advocate a social credit system as an alternative, but their criticism against back doors is on point.

I am in communities that don't use such tools and somehow there is no problem that would require any, but if that is the preference you have the option. I don't see further issues.
Ryan Holiday's debut book was called Trust Me, I'm Lying and it pretty much outlines his early internet marketing career and all the nutty tactics they used. He's very blunt and the stories he tells should be required reading. I respect him for being honest.

He doesn't address the weird Timarkothy Newmanson metamorphosis into esoteric actualization guru that coincidentally seems to occur to all of these guys once their hack-the-system-to-print-money tactics stop working, but you don't need that outlined. It's the only book from these guys I can stomach.
I can imagine this will lead to having your dev account blocked as likely it will violate the T&C and if it doesn't, then Apple could easily update it.
It's crazy how well most AAA games work:

Jedi: Fallen order worked out of the box, no sound issue.

Mass Effect: Andromeda works flawlessly, perfect frame rate, surround sound worked perfectly. I just got one crash to desktop over the whole playthrough and I suspect it was due to something else (updated packages while running the game). Incidentally, the game is great, esp. compared to the negative review; I'm still shocked by the discrepancy.

Same for Witcher 3, GTA V, No Man's Sky ...

More recent games often still have issues. RDR2 is just getting playable, but it's getting fixed faster. There's also less and less annoyances: just a few months back alt-tabbing was very dodgy, now it's extremely robust. Also multi-monitor support seems to work perfectly nowadays. I had some issues with controllers but I haven't tried recently.
Given the market share:

> edge 5.83%, IE 2.15%

It's not unexpected that people don't spend lots of time on IE 0days. I mean, Links was the least exploited one with 0 cases.
We also have unlawful state interception as evidenced by leaks from Snowden and multiple others. I think states currently should not get any concessions from secure communication platforms.
Oral sharing has been the human way of transmitting stories for tens of thousands of years. Your newfangled "written books" are just a novelty :)
A simulation of 3D space that I came across is what piqued my interest. https://youtu.be/xdZNwlzaUxI
When will you be graduating, summer 2021..??
i’m sure some politicians will understand this as:

“ok then let’s attack general purpose computing/your control of the cpu”
You certainly can, but why? It’s a problem easily solved by not giving away free lunches or adding terms.

It seems odd to me to have the solution completely within my power to fix, but not fix it, and complain about the situation.

In my view, the license is specifically made to allow reselling. That’s why I pick MIT, Apache, and BSD. If I don’t want people to resell then I pick GPL or some other license.
> It's just working itself that sucks.

AKA alienation of labor, as Marx put it:

> labor is external to the worker. It does not belong to his nature. He does not realize himself in his work, that he denies himself in it. That he does not feel at ease in it but rather unhappy. He does not develop free physical and mental energy in it... The worker is only himself when he does not work, and in his work he feels outside himself. He feels at home when he’s not working. When working he does not feel at home...His labor is not voluntary but forced.

tl;dr:

> You don't hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.
Except this is not what a p-value is supposed to tell you in the first place. It's supposed to tell you how compatible your observations are with the ASSUMED theory. The minute you use it as an interpretation of a posterior probability (let alone a malformed one), you have violated the assumption on which you rely to interpret it.

To use your own example. If you picked a coin from said bag which is mostly full of otherwise unbiased coins, and your hypothesis is "this coin is not biased", a sequence of ten heads would be largely "incompatible" with your hypothesis (as if the hypothesis of unbiasedness was true, you should only expect this result 1/1024 times).

It is up to you to then place this result in the context of other prior assumptions etc, and say "yes it's incompatible but still very likely". The p-value does not preclude you from performing a post-hoc analysis of the base-rate if you so wish. It just so happens that the 'assume a hypothesis' approach is a useful one in the absence of all other information. Which is not so different from a Bayesian saying 'I'll use an uninformative prior and let the data speak for itself'.

But using it as a test of posterior probability, especially when prior information exists, and saying "ha see it sucks" is not a fair criticism for it (whereas criticising its use as a test of posterior probability is).
Yeah it is getting better the last year or two
Coal Consumption in U.S. Electricity Sector Plunges 30%
That would be a negotiation between the library maintainer, who is running a business selling commercial licenses, and the potential contributor, who wants to be a paid supplier to said business. If the negotiations fail, the contributor’s code is neither merged into upstream nor sold as part of the commercial offering.
Better source: https://developer.apple.com/testflight/
Do you mean that there are simply too few 0-days to make this claim?

Because in that case I disagree: a 0-day is an important event, every single one counts. It's like nuclear bombs: statistically, it indeed makes no sense to say "amount of employed nukes per capita" or so, but it still makes sense to say "The US employed the most nuclear bombs" and "Japan has seen the most nuclear attacks on it's citizens".

Or am I missing your point entirely?
> Well, kind of. Squats have different limitations than DLs. But even a kid can squat (and their knees do go past their toes so cut the BS about that)

What BS? This strikes me as an incredibly naive take on squats and people's ability to do them. Likewise, a kid is a bizarre benchmark, because they haven't yet had decades to abuse their body. Duck feet/knocking knees/knee valgus or even shin splits will make squats incredibly uncomfortable if not implausible to do with correct form. Add to that years of being a software dev. I imagine there are many other conditions that would start you at -2 or more in terms of progression.
Review sites are the worst. I frequently start reading reviews I've looked up on google that seem pretty legitimate, only to realise by part way down that it's clear the 'reviewer' has never actually seen the product and is just aggregating content from amazon reviews and spec sheets.
I have hundreds of books I take with me everywhere now

This is an underexplored cultural shift I think. In the past your books and your music on LP or CD and your movies on DVD or VHS were part of the decor, usually on prominent display in the living room, the room of the house where guests were entertained. Even your games carts for your console would be in that display. Seeing what was in your host's collection was a part of getting to know them better, and of course, they might choose to curate their collection knowing it would be perused by visitors. That doesn't happen so much any more, for some people, it has never been a part of their experience. I wonder what has replaced it.
So far only about 92% of people have died.
This landover should not be surprised if workers start tp show up late as a rule. After all, showing up late means same money for less work.

In modern world, of course business owner can set salaries however, but should accept consequences on turnover and company culture.
Yes, I always enjoy planning out block diagrams easier with a whiteboard than paper due to easy erasing and colors!
First passengers travel in Virgin's levitating hyperloop pod system
https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/93442
Another cute poem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579272
0. the price is close to zero. that’s why most people don’t care about it.

1. it’s not hidden. open dev tools, see what the page does.

2. someone has got to pay. either a subscription or with your data, the salaries need paying once per month.
Xwm – a tiny XCB floating window manager
That's great news! I'd be glad to buy this one even to play with RISC-V asm, but still might do some home automation with it.
Because I want to give my software away to individuals and small companies, but if someone gets big enough that they can afford to pay, I want them to pay me then. I don't want to discourage them from using my thing when they're small.
The FSF has been saying this for decades.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry that so many proponents of non-copyleft software are belatedly discovering that grasping corporations will take and take without ever contributing back.

Now do you people see why the GPL matters?
Bobby Tables strikes again. https://xkcd.com/327/
Tesla are the only car manufacturer that really understand how to do software. It will take a long time for the others to adjust. VW recognise that they need to do a huge amount of work in this area. See https://thenextweb.com/cars/2020/01/17/vw-must-become-tech-c...
How to Train Your Own Object Detector Using TensorFlow Object Detection API
The Covid-19 RT-PCR Test
I find the tech elistist attitudes very off putting to new users. Recently there was a discussion about mhz vs MHz after a new user posted short question about a transmission heard in 6mhz band. One user answered his question while the rest argued over the use of millihertz vs megahertz when clearly the context was megahertz. A quick search of the forum showed less than 6 posts in 10 years of users inquiring about millihertz. Clearly the OP quickly typed mhz instead of MHz and then was chastised for it. Not a very good way to welcome people to the field.
One of the reasons why I don't do weightlifting stuff is that they seem a lot riskier. Same doubt here. These people who recommend weightlifting stuff (I don't mean in any way to discredit Robert Oberst, Eddie Hall... I follow and watch Strongman scene and really enjoy these guys), are they recommending it as "you should get a weightlifting coach and learn the movements properly" or "go to the gym and do power cleans as you go"? I find powerlifting a lot easier to learn alone, youtube only. And less riskier with the progress of increasing load + nonstop learning.
So satisfying on a tablet…
screenshot (in use): https://i.redd.it/ve0ra9qip7y51.png

Took heavy inspiration from dwm, bluewm, tinywm, lainwm and the likes to create what I would consider a minimally viable window manager solution. The project is C99 POSIX and MISRA compliant, which promotes portability, security and safety of the source.

I would say the target audience are those that spend most of their time staring at a single terminal and periodically need to jump into a GUI based application (e.g. web browser). There are many projects like this, but I am hoping to improve on previous ones by reducing the overall complexity (per the KISS principle) and improve upon documentation.

I am still developing my C programming skills, so all feedback is welcomed. =)

Enjoy!
Hm, right at the start in the "Warning about licenses" they seem to try to make the GPL apply to a concept, an abstract algorithm -- kinda like a patent? But I don't think that's how licenses like the GPL work? And hence that this is not legally binding in any way? At the very least, it reads rather strangely to me. Perhaps someone who knows more about licensing that me can elaborate?

To clarify: they claim that after reading the article, any independent implementation of the algorithm (even if it didn't involve looking at their code) must be licensed under the GPL. But that seems to go against everything I thought I knew about "clean room reverse engineering"?
The contributor would need to either:

- Agree to a Contributor License Agreement that grants the project owner an irrevocable world-wide commercial license (probably missing a few adjectives but you get the idea)

- Transfer the copyright

- Release to public domain
Most software sees many more zero days; usually you'll look at these kinds of things over tens or hundreds of exploits. It only takes one zero day to hack someone, of course, but by their nature they are perishable items and often single-use.
See also [0], which talks about how Chicken SCHEME (which compiles to portable C) does it.

[0] https://www.more-magic.net/posts/internals-gc.html#managing-...
I used to worry that pen/paper wasn't the perfect note taking system because it lacks the searchability of digital notes - but over time I have realized that the primary purpose of notes for me isn't long term but short term. Writing something down, like the author states, helps me focus and accomplish the task at hand, and the more I worry about the long term value of the notes the less I take notes because I am worried about making the notes perfect!

What I do now is use a stack of nice small notebooks from Field Notes (no relation, just a customer), one for each project. I just scribble things in when I need and it helps me push forward!
I do garlic at commercial scale with fertilizers but my own food is grown 100% organic. There is a big difference in taste. What we should keep in mind though is that organic is difficult/expensive to scale. I doubt that it will be possible to feed the entire global population with 100% organic food. So that tasteless tomato that you buy at the store might not be the best but it does feed you.
Slightly OT (but maybe not, as the article is about running strange things on the EV3): The EV3 is an incredible platform. I worked a bit (and am currently writing part of my PhD about it) on declarative Programming on EV3.

You can find Prolog-bindings provided by me on the EV3Dev website, which are about as fast as the JS bindings and make for quite a fun weekend, combining declarative planning and plan execution in the same language. You can find my paper on that here: https://dx.doi.org/10.18420/inf2019_ws41

And if you have a lot of spare time on your hand, you can get both HUGS (a Haskell implementation) and PureScript (using the JS bindings) running on the EV3. What you should not do, is try to run clojure, as the runtime is too massive. You can try other JVM languages, but I would suggest you don't.
I mean sure there is the GCHQ and all of its shenanigans, but none closely resembling a system where the police track your movements every single second via video feed.
> Recording from the radio is technically unlawful

I thought this was settled the other way in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....
Maybe you commented in the wrong thread?
Life would be hell for a man with multiple orgasms. Imagine an itch that won't go away no matter how much you scratch it. The male urge to mate is very strong, but goes away the instant the act is completed. Sex does indeed mean everything to men some of the time, but it means very little most of the time. Without that relief and absolute end to the act it would be more like a never ending drug addiction than something worthwhile pursuing.
I expected nothing less from the EU. They say that strong encryption is important to our society. It is important for privacy. And then they go on explaining how they're going to undermine that encryption. I absolutely hate this double speak. They do it all the time in the EU.
You can reason that they didn't exhaustively search all the area the animals could exist in, so they certainly missed a huge proportion of the total population.

It's a tradeoff. They had to kill two animals in order to adequately catalogue and study this species.

Just as it would be a tradeoff to decide and take some for captive breeding. Which may also fail.
How to buy it? Tutorial?
I have a hard time figuring out the point of vegetables. They are so low calorie that I’d have to eat a massive amount of them to have them contribute any significant amount to a meal, more than what is really practical. They are not really an efficient source of protein, carbs or fats the way lean meat, grains and beans and nuts are. So what’s the point? Vitamins and minerals?
New powerful pixel art editor app for Android. Create little arts.
UK firm to turn moon rock into oxygen and building materials
I did two things once it became clear that working for home was going to drag on for months:

- bought a really good office chair. Herman Miller Aeron. Incredibly expensive but also no regrets at all. I sit in this thing for 10+ hours a day with zero issues.

- bought a pull-up bar. Great for either an exercise regime, or just for something to do when you're pondering a work related issue.
“We have received reports” is the same BS the Trump folks are trying to pull with their “voter fraud hotline” today.

You’ve posted an op-ed that offers no actual evidence.
The Codeless Code is great and very entertaining, and sometimes one can learn some lessons from the stories. One that I remember to this day and always consider when building an application is the The White Pearl[0].

[0] http://thecodelesscode.com/case/73
This website seems to be a great resource in finding exploited zero days for each browser, but using it for any kind of security comparison is likely not a good idea. Generally, "number of CVEs" is a flawed comparison metric for almost every kind of question you're going to ask, and CVSS is not particularly good at matching severity in the sense that most people might care about it.
Did the Amiga actually have an MMU capable of running Unix? I seem to remember an early version of the m68k port faked fork by copying memory back and forth (so each "forked" process saw the same memory addresses), but I might be confusing Linux with Minix.