skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: To Pivot or Not to Pivot?
Hey there,

So I've been working on https://buymeadomain.com which is a platform for founders & indie hackers to raise their first-ever round of funding in the form of "domain-name investment". They can submit about their project/startup idea along with the domain-name needed & an interested investor can buy them the domain in return of a certain equity.

I did some soft launches & got some feedback. The thing is that this is not making sense to many people out there. They are saying that if a founder can't buy even a domain-name why would anybody invest in him or that the domain per say is not such a big investment & there are many other expenses like hosting & all.

After all this feedback, I'm thinking of pivoting this into some sort of product hunt for investors where founders can submit there project, create a buzz, get signups & thus attracts investors. The investors can browse along the products & invest in any of them as an angel investor.

But then again as per Y Combinator's Michael Siebel, great ideas always sound horrible at first & people think they are not good enough. What do you think? Is this the case with buymeadomain.com or do I really need to pivot it to what I described above?

Let me know your thoughts .
What was the Great Scare?
I don't think I've ever used the phrase "legacy system" to something from the 90's, even. Mostly it's software in that twilight zone of 5-10 years old. Built with "modern" expectations and dependencies, but every system around it has migrated to a new and shiny tech stack, and all the subject matter experts are long gone...
It seems like we're not going to bump into those limits, though, so it's moot.

Only because people who got the vaccine are significantly less likely to require hospitalization though. At the start of the pandemic there was a very real possibility that we'd actually run out of ICU beds and ventilators. Much of the 'flatten the curve' effort was to protect healthcare services.
Here's the story. A middle-size publisher contacted me about the problem they had: someone was distributing their PDFs online using various services, but mainly Scribd. At that time (it was maybe 2012?) it worked like this: the attacker released a document, notified his group, and they started downloading. The publisher immediately filed the DMCA copyright infringement notification and it was handled within 3-4 days - more than enough for people to download the "release". It was going on for a long time and Scribd refused to remove the account of the attacker.[0] After a couple of months they finally gave in and deleted it but of course a new account was immediately created. It was not a mouse-and-cat game, but more like mouse-and-turtle.

So when they asked my help I told them, you don't have a copyright problem, you have a SEO problem - since people looking for their publications could find them easily online with the stolen copies sometimes appearing higher on SERP than their own. They said they would address that and they somehow came to terms with the fact that the past documents are lost, but they would like to avoid this situation in the future.

I checked some of their publications. They were moderately priced and the content was quite interesting. Many of their customers were very supportive - actually they were sending reports when they noticed the pirated copies. And they weren't saying "Why should I pay for your books when I can get them online?" but rather "Please take care of protecting your content since we want you to survive and publish more books". So, to answer your question, I was very happy to work for them, and I would do it again.

[0] I was told they changed their approach later and started to collaborate with publishers.
Without a name is hard to trust your story
The reduction to 27 months was voted through CA/B (where either CAs or Browsers can effectively veto, like the way Northern Ireland is governed) but only after Ryan suggested Google might just unilaterally impose 90 days if the CAs rejected a reduction.

The reduction to 398 days was imposed by Apple, unilaterally, although in practice the ecosystem went along with it. It actually took a few weeks to get clarity on exactly what Apple intended, they just basically blurted it out at a meeting.
Fig: Autocomplete for the Terminal
Just out of curiosity, have you tried psychedelics? Don't mean to imply that you are fully wrong in what you said, I just want to further know your perspective on it so I can reply based on that.
> That textbook definition of “valid” only applies to purely deductive arguments. Outside of mathematics, most arguments humans make have a significant non-deductive component (inductive and/or abductive). So, unless we assume that moral reasoning is closer to mathematical reasoning than to the kinds of reasoning we normally use in the sciences and humanities-a very dubious assumption-the formal concept of “validity” you are invoking has rather limited relevance to morality.

I don’t have any sense for the various properties of inductive arguments. So to the extent that moral arguments are inductive, I have nothing to say. Thanks for pointing out that I’m assuming moral arguments must be deductive. Any recommendations for an introductory text on inductive arguments?

> That’s why I read your statement as intending “valid” informally rather than formally, since in its informal sense the term is not restricted to purely deductive arguments; and informally it is very much a normative concept (formally, I think it has multiple formal senses, some of which contain more normativity than others)

Understood.

> I think your overall point is, you are expressing scepticism about claims to know the truth of some particular moral proposition, grounded in a more general scepticism of the possibility of any moral knowledge at all.

Yes, that is my point.

> I think that kind of general moral scepticism is (usually) a form of normative scepticism. The big problem I see with normative scepticism, is that attempts to argue for it logically and rationally turn out to be self-refuting, because logic and rationality are themselves normative concepts.

This is the first time that I’ve heard of normative epistemology, which I gather is what you are talking about. One thing I will say though, thinking about this seems smoother than thinking about normative morality because (I think) I don’t have as many childhood memories of people telling me what I ought to think compared to those of people telling me what I ought to do.
How safe is US compared to EU?, you can get shot in US literally anywhere. Doubt anyone doesn't have a gun there. It's true you make a lot more money there but every day is a Russian roulette.
Do you mean water, electricity etc? Because in 1919 those were not universal (not sure about how 'common' they were in London, but in much of Western Europe they weren't even that), and heating would have been done through coal too, I presume. No double glazing or any other insulation really, wooden stairs and wooden beams between floors, no hot water taps, ...

'Living' (as in, living in a house) back then was vastly worse than it is now. Just over the last 10 years, the required (as in, required by building codes) comfort levels of houses (in Western Europe) have gone up so much that they add at least 20% to the cost of building, not counting inflation. (source: am a part time real estate developer).
"private property is subordinate to the common good" is even in our "Constitution" (grundgesetz, literally foundational law), although it has been neutered by precedent and other laws.

The right of way is a concept which is still strong in a bunch of countries, including England and famously Norway where "Allemansretten" allows "all men" the right to camp in public spaces.

I personally find these habitual rights an interesting expression of positive freedom, laws and customs limiting the power of those that have a lot of it (i.e., property owners) to monopolise and exploit, thus creating a public good. I think we should have more of it, especially in the physical but also the digital realm.

Particularly, the concept of adversarial interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interopera... is connected, it would be a different world of Google, Facebook and any other platform were obligated to make their internal APIs and documentation available at cost+a legislated profit margin do anyone can be compatible with them.
Anecdatum: I have maintained my web site since 1995 and have my own domain since 1999 (http://t3x.org). I have never had a "business" nor have I dreamt about big money. Give me back the old internet anytime!
That's sort of how it works.

They sort the people who need a new liver by chance of surviving the operation, expected years to live, etc. Some alcoholic who's already worn out one liver won't score very high on that, so there'll be other people who rank higher. And then everyone waits. If that area then has a few weekends with many horrible traffic accidents, even the alcoholic might get a liver. But generally there are too few healthy organs and too many people waiting for them, and that alcoholic waits in vain.
There are many opinions of different users on the Internet about the online casino license. I personally believe that this should be treated objectively and impartially, because if there is such an organization that gives permission for the operation of gambling clubs, and, moreover, operates legally, and is also in demand, then it has the right to its activities. It also issues licenses to legal online casinos and gambling houses that operate in accordance with accepted regulations and therefore, in most cases, within the framework of the law. Even if you look at the online casino reviews website Jennycasino.com , you will see that many licensed clubs are published there, they are legal and work well, offering good conditions and sometimes generous casino bonuses https://jennycasino.com/casino-bonuses , and in general on in good standing and with positive reviews.
> …meteorologist Eric Berger explained…

Lol.

Eric Berger is one of the most notable space and launch journalists, if not the one. Whoever is covering space news should at least be aware of that, leave alone not referring to him as a “meteorologist.” Meaning that the Guardian article was drafted by someone who is not exactly well-versed in the domain area.

So, yeah, Ars version would certainly be a better choice here as the source.
A vast majority of people should create paperkeys. I will just note that if one creates a paperkey by printing it out, they are transmitting their secret key over the network to likely an internet-connected printer that also sometimes stores documents in its cache for a while.
Ban algorithmic recommendation. It's the only way people actually start organizing and curating content. You know, like libraries do.
> regulate diagnostic tests

If only there hadn't been a major high profile collapse of a fraudulent diagnostic test company recently.
If you're anything like me, or anything like 90% of humanity, you can't rely on motivation to progress in life (whatever your idea of progression is). None of the platitudes or self-help-shaped advice you read here or on Reddit will help you with that. You can't trick yourself.

What works for me is, as much as I don't like the word, discipline. I take an hour every week to review my routine and plans, when I'm inspired and motivated. The rest of the time, when I'm not motivated, I spend executing what I wrote down. In the beginning you will feel miserable, angry, and sad. But after a couple weeks you get used to being your own boss. No matter what you feel (unless you're physically ill), just do what's written down and defer the decision making process (is this what I should be doing) to that planning hour.
In a word --- greed.

Despite what Gordon Gekko told us, it isn't always good. Working to wring every last dime out of any system leads to self destructive behavior. In the end, Gordon Gekko himself served as an example.
Erlang/OTP profiling: eprof vs. AdventOfCode Day6
This is going to get very interesting for insurance companies.

For example, say this was law as it is called for. Yet, insurance companies may well put a very heavy premium upon such usage features - be that with the car company for indemnity liability insurance or the car owner themselves.

Which may see a situation in which, this comes to pass and if people unable to use the feature as the insurance premium will be extremely high. More so given without data for actuaries to do full and clear proven risk analysis, will see it hedged to the worst case. After all - insurance companies are in business like every other business, to make money and will protect their own interest first.

So very interesting times ahead and certainly, be a long road (excuse the pun please) ahead until we see driverless cars as normal.
Absolutely! Was really enjoyable to read! Thanks for this!
"Not too long ago you'd have a house with a spare bedroom or two or three. "

Uh, not too long ago it was absolutely normal for a family of 10 or 14 to share 3 or 4 bedrooms.
Very true in India too. You stick out as backpacker very clearly, the prices are set accordingly. I found it extremely hard to haggle with my european mentality, and ended up agreeing on still too high prices. It took some time to get better.

Then you come back to western world (or anywhere else for that matter) after 6 months of such training and you find out you haggle harder than any locals, sometimes to the point of offense.

The most important point in haggling is to not show too much interest. It helps to have an idea about real local prices of items, otherwise its just shots in the dark.
Ironically, while my dog is happy to eat his own shit, _citrus_ is a bridge too far, for him and most dogs, which is why citronella is used as an anti-bark collar component.
How can you be so sure that future phones won't have so much more antennas? Is there a technical limitation (e.g. limited space) or too much cost per antenna that prevent it from happening?
Maybe this is my naive European view, but taking a yearly vacation doesn't seem like a "rich person" thing here. You don't need to be earning vast amounts to afford a weeks package holiday in Spain.
That's what I pondered doing. Do you have any code you can open source? Thanks.
I agree that Bitcoin wasn't explicitly designed to store data.

It was, however, designed to be uncensorable. Your second sentence there is - well, indeed. It _is_.
Isn't Dhall basically the same (=have the same set of features)?
the down-vote thing unfortunately is not unique, Reddit has the same problem, but worse.
I once made a simple comment there where I just told an anecdote about something that happened, it wasn't anything serious, political or controversial or unrelated to the parent post, but apparently it rubbed someone the wrong way and he took it upon himself to go trough my comment history and down-vote the last 60 comments I've made.
The SomethingAwful forum somehow survived the migration and keeps going strong. Goons do populate Twitter and Discord, but it did not empty the forums.

I think that the strong moderation has helped to make the forums offer something you cannot easily find on the newer social platforms.
As someone with a bit of experience in robotics, I've always viewed these economists as "useful idiots", unknowingly doing the bidding of firms who sell us the dream of advanced automation (e.g. Tesla, Uber). The economists were clueless themselves, but the companies selling the dream profited immensely thanks to them.
Perhaps we will get less ransomware as they change over to this.
Is there a book or blog or video series that “holds my hand” and walks me through the Doom code base in detail?
The way LE and others keep breaking this process and the tools around it is certainly not a great endorsement for having it integrated into a service.
Apple: "Safari is the most locked down and secure browser that never runs anything without user's permission."

Also Apple: "We have built in a long list of exceptions for Apple services, because it's impossible for an Apple service to have an exploit."
Same was for Taj Mahal some... 13 years ago. Foreigner price (apart from few neighboring countries) was at least 10-20x the price of local one. Still, well worth seeing that marvel
I'm not sure if you're joking but the only reference I can find is the "Blue Dog Coalition" which takes its name from "being choked blue" and the term "yellow dog Democrat", which in turn seems to refer to what now goes by "vote blue no matter who" in the sense of "they would vote for a yellow dog as long as it is Democrat", which in turn uses "yellow dog" to refer to "low value" American dogs with no genetic link to any established European dog breed.

Whew, what a ride for a non-American to figure out what any of these idioms are supposed to mean.
> Under that definiton either both the 24th and the 22nd centuries are post-scarcity or neither are.

Not at all. People need much more that wheat and widgets.

> "Post-scarcity is not so much a matter of material wealth or natural bounty, but an organizational option for society".

No doubt. Also, a lot of consumption and therefore scarcity is induced by culture.
Funding Software Supply Chains
Maybe being slow to navigate is actually a feature, standing against the endless algorithmic torrent of 5 second tiktok videos and meme doomscrolling.

You're supposed to take your time checking out cool shit people make for the love of it.
Ignoring optimization goals such as time, cost, distance, road type, and safety:

It's not economical to solve the TSP perfectly for real-world problems, so heuristic algorithms are used to deliver good-but-not-perfect solutions(s).[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
I find the lack of humor disturbing. I’m told/observe it’s due to the plethora of native tongues, neurodiversity, timezones, caffeination and other variability hereaboots. Idiomatic expressions and deadpan, in particular, seem to set off the kerfuffles, ke?

In my experience, forum moderation is Sisyphus-complete and utterly thankless. The fact we have had this refuge that functions as well as it does for as long as it has, well, res ipsa loquitur. Thanks, mods, fwiw.
You could always hash the IP on the client side before sending it to your counter. That way you have no information which you can backtrack to a specific IP and therefore a person.
It means the stereotypical commenters are 20-30 year old, white, male, single, programmers, living in the Bay Area and making $400,000 per year.

Which is good if you want to know the latest Google gossip or many tech questions. But not as good when we are talking about topics that are less directly in the experience of the above people.

As an example when you are talking about public transport they have experience that comes from living in the US. Rather than somewhere a bit less car-centric.

A tech example might be that money and VC dollars are plentiful but programmers are expensive and that non-programmers are less important in a business.

There are plenty of people that are not like that, but the site has a definite bias that way.
Find out how inaccurate your Covid test is
The University world is so insanely broken.

There is so much money flowing in, and yet, all we hear about is students who are poor, and teachers who can't live off their salaries.

The whole thing seems to be setup so that young academics are constantly at war with each other, so that they have to write papers after papers for free and send them to these prestigious journals, which they actually pay for reading through their universities.

Honestly, from the outside it looks like a weird servitude system.
It's not just a factor, cars are straight up unaffordable for much of the population. One local politician was roundly criticized for a gaffe where he said that "everybody has a car, we have two".

The public transport system certainly does make live easier without a car though, as does the ubiquity and low cost of taxis and Uber-style rideshares.
Best analysis I've read on HN in a long while. Straight to the point.
My generation (the people between 35 and 50) is the most nostalgic about the good ole Web of yore, yet we are the generation that turned it into the ad-ridden cesspool we currently complain about.
What we're missing is not the Internet-that-was, rather our ability to spend time on useless projects in a wilder environment without thinking about the economic implication. In a way we just miss being young.
Our only advantage was that our parents' generation mostly didn't know what we were doing (especially here in Europe), so they certainly didn't expect for us to get a dime out of that blipety-bloop computers or whatever-they're-doing-in-their-room.
The good news is that a big part of that Web is still alive, in different ways, in small secluded forums and communities, inside multiplayer gaming platforms, and so on. The problem is that today EVERYTHING can be monetized, and everyone is sort of expected to do that. Just remove the layer that tech capitalism has ingrained in our brain, and you'll see the old internet is still here. We just changed, and capitalism adapted is all.
Do something for the sake of doing it. On the Internet or otherwise, and you'll magically get back at least a sliver of that feeling you're missing.
Yes it's a very valid concern. And you don't even have to go into porn territory, if the blockchain containans personally identifiable information, and it does, then it's probably in violation of the GDPR in the EU.

Immutable data is almost never a good idea in practice.
Even though the situation described is strange to the point of having never happened in history you would still need to ask an admin to write policy to implement your interesting audio permission scheme just the same as one would need to ask an admin to add a group or you know automate the process with a gui or integrate the change in groups into updating or software installation.

I am sure that somewhere having an actual programming language available vs list of what can and can't be run with or without a password would enable some additional power in terms of control of the system but I cannot for the life of me imagine a situation where it would be all that useful.
That's the cheeky part of the comparison. Cherry-picking two distant points in time and two very specific categories of people.
That's not really a fruitful line of argument. The natural continuation is that, of course, we are also free to criticize someone for trying to shut others up.

Censorship has many forms, and is not exclusive to the government. Corporate censorship [1] in response to social pressure seems to be the dominant one in our era.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_censorship
Have a look here https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says
I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to:

- rent a house

- hire a house guardian

- hire at last one maid

- hire a chauffeur if you own a car

It was also recommended than they come form the local neighborhood.

It was a social norm, and if you do not do it you can expect the local policemen to "fine you" every time you take the car, the food cost to be x5 the price (or more), and many other additional costs and life inconvenience than just made more easy and cheaper to just hire the people.

That said the work was real.
A good chauffeur, will negotiate prices and bribes for you, and recommend you the good places.
The house guardian was also your speaker with the neighborhood committee (with was in fact a government organization).
(I will avoid the more complicated subject of the maid...)

This was OK if you where a man, a couple or a family. If you where a young woman... good luck with this.

There was a way to avoid all this: living in a flat in the city center and use taxis.

(For Addis Ababa this may not be true anymore because the city was changed a lot from the big shantytown it was then)