skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I've got my first paying customer. Now what?
In 2019 I've started developing a project for my wife after consistently hearing her complain about the current software they had.

It's nothing fancy, but it was made specifically to solve the main pain points she had.

Fast forward, she convinced herself that the product is way too good and we should try selling it to other business. So, she made a couple of videos demoing it and spent 20$ on ads in Instagram. We got a couple of interested people, but no one actually asked for using it.

Last week we got an email from a company that was interested in trying in. Then we created an account for them and shortly explained how to use it.
They've got really impressed by and now want to use it.

For now, I've said that they can have a free trial for a month. But they already signaled that they're interested in paying the price I've proposed.

So, what's next? Should I go after bootstraping a company? What about taxes? GDPR? SLA? Should I go after a lawyer and accountant?
My current recurring cost for maintaining the system is ~10$ and I'm expecting to start receiving ~$200 per customer.

This should be just a side gig, but I think it might actually grow.

In addition, I'm currently living in Italy, but this client (and probably others comming) lives in Brazil.
what is Intelligence?

from wikipedia... "Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. "

I'm sure Einstein had most of these abilities in abundance

I know a lot of people who would consider themselves as smart and they lack a lot the above skills
Engines? Sure. The actual FAL where all comes together? The logistics that come with it? Not so much.
It's not a myth and a few simple google with give you plenty of evidence. Here's a few:

- Cancer

- Weight gain (alcohol is more calorie dense than sugar)

- Birth defects

- Drunk driving: 10K deaths a year

- Violence / sexual violence

- Overdosing

- Withdrawal can cause death

- Did you know date rape drugs wouldn't work without alcohol? (2) It's only the combination with alcohol that causes the victim to pass out.

If you actually look at how alcohol has an impact on the body, it's effectively a poison. It has no medical benefits and only consequences. The whole red wine thing has nothing to do with alcohol but some of the enzymes in red wine specifically. Just drink grape juice instead.

I really don't care if you give yourself cancer. That's a personal decision but consumption of alcohol leads to so much crime and impact on others. Weed not so much. As a society, we've made a decision to tolerate it but it's still there.

1. https://drugabuse.com/blog/marijuana-vs-alcohol/

2. https://www.drugs.com/illicit/ghb.html
In case anyone is wondering, his sentencing (which was supposed to be Oct. 19) was pushed back to Nov. 15 at the last minute. I posted the court document on my twitter.
https://twitter.com/ChristieSmythe/status/145120886972475392...
For a number of years, the FM patent was the most profitable patent that Stanford owned. It's interesting that it was a patent from the music department - not engineering, not biotech that made the most money...
Why shouldn't the state put more focus on Chicago? The rural areas are a net drain on state finances and are kept afloat by the "liberal hellhole" that they hate.
But that’s my design. Senators were never supposed to represent population proportionally. That’s what congressman are for, senators represent a state.

If you want pure proportional representation then you need to dismiss senate, and change congressional election to nation wide proportional system. Afterwards you wouldn’t even need states anymore.
I can't quite recall who eloquently described this discovery as "Christopher Columbus was the last person to discover America"
I wish there were a high resolution high speed capture of some of his card manipulation so you could appreciate how he does it.

Penn & Teller show off how one of their tricks works (supposedly!) and it doesn't detract from its enjoyment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhnATlPdG6A
"there are always smart people who can help me understand better, or execute better,"

Not if everyone becomes an Idea Person like pg proposes!

There's more to "do" than just "discover new things". What's the point of discovering new things if we don't use them for anything?
A Q&A on Hypersonic Glide Vehicles
Wow that is a great story. I am glad there was at least one rep (you) who understood apache configuration.
Yes. The westernmost county in MD is considered part of the Pittsburgh PA media market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_Media_Market
I think the key thing that superior intelligence gives you in science is the ability to survey a large field of knowledge, quickly identify the essence of each idea, zero in on what's worth pursuing and what's worth throwing out.

Research is like a crowd of people painstakingly searching through a cow pasture to find little gems buried in the dirt. If your vision is clearer and you can move 10x faster, you can run circles around other people. You can look over hundreds of leads, intuitively sense what works and what doesn't, and narrow in on promising ones.
I'm not sure how smart you are, but there's a lot of wisdom in what you said. Smart is multi-dimensional for me anyway.
I am unsure about the specific details about IR that's emitted (though at first glance it seems we do emit the alignment attribute now, I think?), but transmute is, as the documentation says, "incredibly" unsafe:

> Because transmute is a by-value operation, alignment of the transmuted values themselves is not a concern. As with any other function, the compiler already ensures both T and U are properly aligned. However, when transmuting values that point elsewhere (such as pointers, references, boxes…), the caller has to ensure proper alignment of the pointed-to values.

This code is doing the latter incorrectly, and therefore invokes UB, as far as I can tell. To be honest, I don't use transmute very often and so I don't have every single last corner case about it memorized.

It's not so much an "issue" as it is "Here's an API that's extremely sharp in Rust, and a similar, but less sharp API in Zig."
What about general relativity.
Disagree as an end users blogs are an inconsistent dump. I know what to expect from a twitter thread every single time. Its the same experience, no matter what.
I addressed this in my comment:

> Regardless, I haven't noticed macros being a footgun in CL. Sure, there are doubtless people out there who have abused it (and will continue to do so) - but that's true for every language feature; meanwhile, it doesn't seem like macros themselves are actually a problem, in the sense that they're particularly easy to abuse compared to the rest of the language (a distinction that I might give to C raw pointers, for instance).

Nobody contests that CL macros can get obtuse - but that's not special. You can write obtuse code in any Turing-complete language. Does that mean that we should abolish Turing-completeness? Of course not.

How much Common Lisp have you read and written?
His book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering goes into some of this (and is just generally great): https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
Pittsburgh is much more culturally rural-white than Baltimore
The kids I grew up with in High School that attended the "Gifted And Talented" courses didn't really end up topping the gene pool after I met them at our 20 year reunion. The girl from our year book voted "most likely to succeed", did not meet her goals of being president, and probably may never do so... She actually had some rough life experiences like me too since then... I no longer have childhood goals of exceptionalism as a desire, nor the right social and political positioning for the role, not the right contacts or money. I just want to be happy and live on a tropical beach with a good wife and good kids without money problems to be honest.

Exceptionalism in this world is indeed luck, especially when you consider that there are almost 7 billion other people on this planet besides us, and limited world resources to share amongst us all...

To think that any one individual reached a point of higher talent or intelligence than everyone else is a total consumerism-driven lie. Movies and TV create celebrities because it drives profit and merchandise, not because they really feel the actors they back are unique and worthy. We find out often the people branded as "exceptional" suffer greatly for it very often because they gain popularity and consequently can't live up to the standards portrayed of them.

The biggest lie we can tell ourselves is that we're exceptional beyond everyone or anyone else, physically, spiritually, mentally, or in any other way. Somehow there's an ever present ideal pushed by Gyms, Churches, Psychologists, News Media, TV, and Movies that exceptionalism can exist, but it's simply not sustainable for any individual, and there's a pile of discarded celebrities down the hill by the river in Hollywood to prove it...

Once we're humble in life, and we realize that opportunity, paying attention, learning things, proper positioning, luck, and circumstance are what grant us the most potential for success -- It's the actions that we take to seize opportunities, THOSE ACTIONS WE TAKE are what set us apart from others who may be hesitant, not ready for, and/or unaware of and to the present opportunity.

When we reach points of success, it's important to remind ourselves of others and their situations and to not look down upon them, and to help others to succeed as much as possible in order to not feel isolated in ego and self praise.

I may sound like the Dali Lama here, but fighting against our own internal ego in a world like this one is a constant battle, so I work hard every day to keep everything in this kind of context in my own life, and I'm not perfect just like everyone else. Whenever I'm driving my car out in public though, everyone's a "frickin' idiot", that will never change... :P
Child support should not exist at all, for similar reasons why someone who steals your car should not demand payments for maintenance, instead they should return what they stole and go to jail. Should be a political topic indeed.
> do you have compute, do you have load balancing, do you have rbac, do you have DB? do you have storage?

Yes, they have all of those things. They have a pretty decent webpage that goes into more detail. https://www.cloudflare.com/
Their card reader probably worked fine. My theory is the cab driver prefers to use their own payment methods because they are “off the record” and they probably turn into cash in the drivers pocket much faster than using the one provided by the cab service.
Causing problems constitutes whatever the management of the platform thinks so.

I am proposing a right to overide management in exchange of giving up your anonymity when you have problem with the management of the platform if you think that you still want to participate in that platform.

I'm proposing a system where platforms lose their ability to censor people if the people in question are ready to bear the personal responsibility of their actions.
Tesla’s driving data storage system hacked by Dutch investigators
Here in the US, and I assume in Canada as well, there are two main kinds of car insurance:

Liability - that pays for damages/injuries to others

Collision/Comprehensive - that pays for damage to your car

It sounds like the author wanted Liability but didn't want to pay for Collision. If you have significant assets and/or a cheap car, it may be to your advantage not to get the collision. Except he didn't use the customary terms but described them rather elliptically.

In fact, take the money you save on Collision and get more Liability is not a bad idea.
My sister and I were just talking about this. We'd been coming to realize independently how much faster we think than average people. We didn't realize it growing up, since we went to gifted schools our whole lives (public schools we tested into, not private) and everybody was bright there. Living life outside of the gifted bubble has given us perspective on how lucky we were to born this way.
Tesla announces plans to triple the size of Supercharger network within 2 years
> They are doing the same thing now, playing with the same fire that has pulled the United States rightward and backward over and over again for the last 40 years.

"Rightward and backward over the last 40 years"?

Its no wonder i disagree with so much of the rest of the author's points; we apparently inhabit different worlds.

This sounds like "we propaganda priests must not stray from the dogma even as the flames begin to toast our toes"
Article is devoid of information. What are they actually doing to outrun the supply chain crunch?
This does not answer the question - is it Open Source License or Source Available (TSL) https://www.timescale.com/legal/licenses
If posting your question where a subject will be used (email, forums, reddit, etc), don't just make the subject "need help!". You've made it luck of the draw who clicks through. "Need help with React Router" will likely improve the quality of people who click through.

Similarly, on chat programs, don't PM people. Please! If you have a general technical/business/etc question, a channel is a far better venue: everyone in the channel can be a candidate to answer. You increase the odds of someone being available to answer. Your answer goes into the search history and possibly helps other people who currently have the same question but are afraid to ask. It's also really unfair to put all of the onus onto one person via PM. If the person you would have PM'd is able to answer, they can also answer in the channel.
You are conflating two different tax benefits.

The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion essentially sets your tax rate to 0% for the first $108k of earned income. It has no effect on earned income in excess of this threshold, or on unearned income such as investment income.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...

The Foreign Tax Credit subtracts your foreign tax liability from your US tax liability. In other words, you only pay US taxes to the extent they exceed the foreign tax rate. You can use it on any type of income, but you only get a benefit if the foreign country actually taxes the income.

https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...

You may not double dip: So if you choose to take FEIE for some part of your income, you cannot take FTC on the same part of your income. However, you can take FTC to the extent you have income not eligible for FEIE.
You might want to update the guidelines (or your reaction to these types of situations) to be consistent, dang.

> unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

This scenario clearly meets those criteria.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

The OP specifically said he wanted to have an intellectual discussion about how anti-intellectuality has recently become a prevalent issue among a particular political party, something of interest and concern to all people, regardless of country or political affiliation. I can't think of a more extenuating circumstance, especially with the disturbing historical precedents we've seen in the last century around this issue, but it's disappointing to see that you disagree.

You are trampling curiosity in the name of avoiding trampling curiosity.
It's part of the HTTP standard for `Authorization` header, and there is the possibility of some HTTP client / server breaking if you don't add it.
Who has a right to profit? Especially when profit comes from harm.

I believe but cannot prove than most targeted advertising is fraudulant. When whistleblowers leak those metrics, this might be a self correcting problem.

Meanwhile...

There are plenty of other ways to run a business.

metafilter, craigslist, ravelery.org, others do well, without harming their users.
It all depends. If one side believes the election was stolen and proceeds to rig elections in their favor in retaliation. America is done. We're at a point where fact don't matter. This is story illustrates that. Fact that SSN were sent out publicly doesn't matter. Fact that any security expert would say this wasn't hacking doesn't matter. Experts no longer matter. Whether they are doctors, scientists, etc.
Fun fact: they would be moving from the state with the highest median household income to the state with the lowest. I suppose this would only make Maryland richer by that metric.

Personally, I’d rather cut my own foot off with a rusty steak knife than live in West Virginia, which has basically nothing going for it except some decent wilderness. It doesn’t help that I have relatives there who love the confederate flag and decorate the back of their truck with a few iron crosses. Maybe they’d fit in among the residents of western Maryland.
Yep I was really pleased to see that ikea has started offering cheap galvanized steel shelves (named “Hyllis”). Glad to have something fully recyclable.
Is this a mistake/typo in the article?

> Just 20 >>= half >>= half >>= half
Nothing
“Having ideas” isn’t “being an idea person”—the latter I hear colloquially to mean “spitballs superficial proposals that other people sort through”. I also don’t think what you suggest is what pg suggests. Einstein had ideas, but he didn’t just blather about them at a high level until some smart person did the “real” work.

I also didn’t mean to suggest I’d rather “just have ideas”, I meant “I’d rather have ideas and a difficult time executing on them” as opposed to “being smart with no ideas at all.”
No, 23-fold means "multiplied by 23" - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fold#:~:text=mult...
Using Google Map's measuring tool, Garrett County is 115km from Pittsburgh, PA, 231km from Baltimore, and 207km from DC. It'd make sense that news from Pittsburgh would be more relevant to the area.

Also, according to Wikipedia, Garrett County is part of the Pittsburgh Media Market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_Media_Market
> Instead he demanded cash, and drove my colleague to an ATM against his will holding his luggage hostage.

This is kidnapping.
Xbox isn't sold so much as a general-purpose system that users have traditionally held the uppermost control over.
Thank you for clarifying my point, and attaching precise terminology to it!

Come to think of it, that's probably why people mistakenly think that Lisps are so hard. The syntax is scary, and easy to bikeshed - even though most of their semantics (for CL and Scheme, at least) are really easy, and very similar to Python.
E.ON seems bigger than PGE (assuming you go by market cap), and I have no clue who is actually the biggest. And these each seem to represent one single regional power company.

OTOH, I didn't realize Tesla's market cap has grown that big. That is indeed kinda insane.
I guess the first bridge builders never asked a scientist. Science of bridge building came much later then bridges.
They are not taking on more liability.

The insurance company now has no responsibility to repair the insured vehicle so they have less responsibility.

I suspect Collision insurance is very profitable compared to liability.
I think the author betrays their own political bias here, as journalism has become infused with over-the-top moral panics across the board. We've replaced single-issue moral panics with moral panics about nearly everything. We have a moral panic about racism, anti-racism, anti-anti-racism, transphobia, radical trans activists, the covid vaccine, the people who are skeptical of the covid vaccine, etc etc.

It's a bit parochial to talk about moral panic journalism and only hone in on one specific subset of it.
Separate things. Black Panther activity in California led to Reagan passing some restrictions in that state. I'm referring to jurisprudence at the higher court levels, which generally did not support the very strong individual rights to gun ownership that you see stated as "basic" rights now. The popular (and largely in practice) understanding of what 2A means for an individual is pretty different today, and very expansive.
The twelve ways to improve your sleep hygiene Infographics
> definition of the reach of the Pittsburgh television and radio media as defined by Nielsen in a prime sense

Ah. I never understood anything to do with Nielsen. Makes sense.
Couldn't they have found a nearby open source maintainer and handed them 11 cents? Maybe they don't run a petty cash system.
> Credit card transactions take far less, and they deal in legitimate risk (chargebacks, stolen cards, fraud, etc).

For high volume merchants.

For mom and pop shops they usually pay a fixed fee + %. For transactions under $5 they can lose money on a sale which is why you quite often see minimum purchase prices or discounts when paying with cash. In some states however there are no laws protecting small businesses and processor contractors usually have a clause forbidding merchants from steering customers away from paying with a card.

A local baobao shop by me offers a 10% discount for cash transactions, that tells me they make more money offering a 10% discount than accepting a card. When I was in Georgia my drycleaner told me she didn't make money on any card transaction under $25.
There is no mechanism for dissolution.
I think the point is that bridge building originated as a craft that was informed by a lot of examples that happened to survive (ie. survivorship bias) leading to rules of thumb and patterns that gradually yielded to scientific explanations (often driven by trying to understand failed bridges designed according to rules applied / patterns extended outside of the context where they were valid).
We all have to climb the latter of love, one rung at a time.
Well, in the case of Bitcoin, the value didn't come from nothing. The mining analogy itself was part of the concept.

There's definitely a wastefulness aspect that may have been underestimated, though...
The purpose of the senate is to make sure that low population regions have a voice, and that majority interests don’t trample minority interests.

To say that one party doesn’t want people to be represented at all is a ridiculous straw-man.
>You may note my username is simply a plain old name and it's my real name. I cannot any longer support anonymity save for cases where safety demand it.

Please ask yourself how you would feel if this site did that -- or even, in fact, if HN didn't actually make anon accounts (without even requiring an email confirmation) so easy that it's an incredibly common occurrence.

One of the things I like about HN is that while anonymity is certainly possible having an identity which is known to the community (whether that be one's actual identity, or in my case a pseudonymous one), allows us to build (and/or repudiate/destroy, as we choose) credibility and engage in discussions over time.

I will say that 'nobody9999' is not the name on my passport, nor is it the name I use with my bank or (when I actually used such things) social media accounts.

However, a search through HN's archives will, nonetheless, provide a history of my comments and submissions.

Should I turn into a raving asshole, the admins/moderators can sanction/ban me without ever knowing my 'legal' name.

That makes a lot more sense than forcing folks to tie their legal identities to everything they do online.
Not at all, Github adds some more or less useless features to git without tackling any of the basic problems with git.
Can we all stop for a second and appreciate the "Graphical Abstract"? IMO it's great, and every paper that where such a thing is reasonable should have one!
I assume that isn't done because the value of the good is too low to justify the effort of repo'ing it.