skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to plug skill gaps within startups
As a startup (especially those without access to large capital), it's likely you're going to have skill shortages on your team.

On our team, we have skill gaps when it comes to sales & marketing and it's been hindering our performance.

My default instinct is to try & solve problems on my own through reading books, videos, etc. These are useful, but my realisation is there's a big difference between the ideals presented in a book versus nuance that only experience can deliver.

Assuming you don't have the budget to hire, what strategies have worked well for you to plug your own skill shortages?

My inclination is to find a consultant that charges by the hour to help us along, but keen to hear of other strategies.
Being on a jury was one of the few times in life when taking notes paid off for me, mostly to correct the memory of other jurors! oddly some judges don’t allow it.
Ditherer: Apply dithering and retro filters to images and videos in the browser
If you have a laser weapon that can target one, it's probably trivial to target all of them one by one?
I think it's tricky to a have credit card required for a private search engine unless there's a way to use it without the cc.

Would love your thoughts on our approach: We (you.com founder here) think there should be two modes:

1. personalized mode where you have convenience, personalization (that clearly many people want from Google) and maybe even things like credit cards in the future, localization for directions/restaurants/weather and other useful "search apps". Even then, that mode is much better than Google in that we dont store IP addresses, don't track users across the internet, no targeted ads, etc.

2. hardcore private mode where you can be super private and nothing gets stored/logged/saved, no localization, everything proxied (slightly slower), no credit card needed, etc.

We have those two modes.

What I've seen sometimes is that new smaller private search engines like you.com that have much better privacy than Google get shot down because they still have some analytics etc. and aren't insanely private in all situations, eg.
* we got criticized for having a mailinglist (easy to subscribe to or not)

* doing in-house/on-prem analytics to know if you have bugs and issues in eg your ranker (how else will you ever be independent of Google/Bing and build an actually competitive search engine?)

* trying to provide people with personalization (so they can downvote SEO/ads) - requires a login etc.

The result is that most people (outside HN here) just stick with Google - where they get completely tracked everywhere and for everything.

Sometimes it feels like perfection in privacy is the enemy of progress?
There are still places without ATM and internet for the true adventurer. The adventure level can range from easy in places like Papua New Guinea to moderate when you go deep inside the Amazon forests to hard where you have to survive on the North Sentinel island.
Healthiest response in the thread.
The only way I can see of retrofitting end-to-end encryption into email is to use DNSSEC / DANE. But this will require new MUAs.

DANE for SMTP, however, has created pretty good email security -- hop-by-hop, yes, but it's much better than before.
So that's the full list of successful startups for a developed economy polity with twice the population of America over the past 25 years... Not exactly impressive.
So the solution is to chase whatever the market dictates as "well paying", despite being against your interests, maybe drop whatever responsibilities you might have or just, like you say, live in mediocrity, if your socio economic situation forked your chances from the beginning, and your inherent abilities just don't cut it? Do you walk by the less fortunate, and think, they just didn't work hard enough and "kind of" are at fault for their own situation? Because that's a very typical American way of thinking, one that people adapt in America to cope with the poverty around them. I've seen it, from aquinteces who became big, moved to America, and slowly changed their view of people to cope with their suffering and their own fortune, partly due to a really badly made social system. And unfortunately, there are plenty of places like this besides America.
Didn't vanced get killed by Google?
You misread! its "Freightliner" not firefighting.
The article talks about Freightliner trucks, not firefighters.
Crazily, it plays better on the Steam Deck on than on many gaming PCs. Valve did some special optimizations for it specifically in the translation layer. Since all Steam Decks have the same hardware, they were also able to ship out precompiled shaders, avoiding all shader compilation related hitches.

Digital Foundry made a nice video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1HuX2_Hhss
I think the article is on Frieghtliners not firefighting trucks. But robbery is still absolutely an issue.
Currently there's a famine going on in Eastern Africa. Children are dying daily of acute malnutrition in Somalia. I don't think life is too rosy for them.
Always a few bad apples. Probably the same people stealing catalytic converters
Is taking a boat across the ocean more carbon-friendly than jetlining?
Maybe they're in a country with a bank transfer system that doesn't suck. In most of the OEDC there are free transfers that take <2 hours even in the worst case.
just because most business historically were content with batch, does not mean they will not benefit from streaming/realtime.

batch is business as usual, while realtime is disruption.

compare to banking: payments historically were batch (ACH), but realtime payments have disrupted it (zelle, venmo, fed wire, etc.)
Of course you have to (or, well, obviously it depends on the laws of your country, but let's be real — what country would agree that you don't?). But there's no earnings, if all your earnings are in magical Warhammer 5000 Gold™ that your government doesn't recognize as money.

(Of course, to be fair, income tax isn't the only tax you are supposed to pay, so I'm vastly oversimplifying everything here, but, again, I'm doing so because all of this isn't the point.)
I think it tells a lot, but not that it's necessarily something new (in that we're devolving). The use of fear mongering is evident throughout history.
You are now international:

https://pplware.sapo.pt/internet/duckduckgo-apanhado-a-dar-p...
Interesting read though I think he focuses a little too much on the hardship of his travels and not enough on the joys of his journey. Or maybe his travels were not that pleasurable -- that is the impression I got anyway. Also unfortunately, the pictures do not have captions (where are those two fellows on their small donkeys?) and it seems the digital scan of the 35mm could have been a little higher quality. Lastly, if interested in a good read on a similar subject checkout "L'Usage du monde" (The Way of the World" in English) by Nicolas Bouvier. He covers similar territory but expressing more of the delights of wanderlust (as well as the hardships).
Dang, wish this title was updated to be less misleading. I spent way too long looking for functionality that didn't exist. The author (not same person as poster) posted in the comments:

> Where are all the dinosaurs? Despite the title of this post, the visualization isn't really meant to show an exhaustive list of dinosaurs or fossils (the list doesn't even show on mobile).

That said, this is a really cool visualization of how the water fill and plates evolved over time. Love it!
This is entirely dependent on whether or not Nestlé MBAs calculate they can make a profit with this bottling "Desert Air Water".
Roundup of Bootstrappers Breakfasts and Related Events in June 2022
It's a really good one, right?

It's definitely effective. DjangoCon is one of the best conferences I've ever been to in terms of diversity of both the audience and the speakers. And that takes a lot of work, it's not something that just happens.
Trying to figure out exactly what the rules are is abusing the system now?
Theme for June is "Do What You Love"

With the change in the economic climate starting to affect at least follow on startup funding, many entrepreneurs--encouraged in many cases by venture capitalists--are rediscovering the power of bootstrapping. Hopefully, it's just a flashback to 2008 and not 2001. So we are adding a lightning question for this month's breakfasts: "What do you enjoy about bootstrapping your startup? What psychic income do you gain from entrepreneurship?
Good point! We've been selling for several years, but legal isn't our only/primary market. We've made much more headway in the higher education market, since students have to read so much on screen (and don't have these perverse incentives related to billable hours!).

But we actually run into the same buyer/not user problem on the licensing side of our business. Textbook publishers don't really care about the student's user experience, for example. This is because the textbooks are assigned by the professor, so students don't have a choice about which textbook to purchase.

Fortunately, we're finally going to launch an integration with a digital textbook platform. Not surprisingly it's a reseller platform, not a publisher. Unlike publishers, their product differentiation is more about the UI, so they're looking to provide additional value by adding our reading enhancement tech. [1]

1: https://www.beelinereader.com
I'm not speaking for you personally but instead the body politic as it were. I'm putting forward my theory as to why you see plenty of negative stories in the press about ICE but not the CIA. The media manufactures consent to steal a phrase in one case but not the other.
Makerpad looks like a no-code tool, not something built with no-code tools. Their job board shows they are looking for traditional programmers with Java and similar skills.

At first glance it looks like they’ve reinvented HyperCard (circa 1989) or something similar, but for the web. Dreamweaver (now an Adobe product) came out in 1997, got lots of use back then, but I haven’t seen anyone using it for a long time.

This space is fairly well explored and has been for decades. That doesn’t mean the tools are useless, but I’m not seeing the big innovation that will let non-programmers write sophisticated software.
> This is fairly easy to recreate on your computer.

It is trivial to. The only tiny hiccup is that the wasm file cannot be served via a file:// URL due to XHR restrictions, so you'll need a local webserver for it. No big deal, but a slight nuisance. Richard added a new feature to his althttpd web server just to support this very dev effort. From the fiddle source directory, do:

althttpd -page fiddle.html

and it will start up a web server and launch your browser with that page. althttpd only works for Unix-style OSes, but ... that's okay :).

> What I would like to fiddle with are compilation options, extensions, pragmas and their combinations.

The build process for fiddle is literally a single compile command (using the emscripten compiler, emcc), and build time with the -O0 optimization level is fast (a few seconds on my modest i3-based NUC computer), so such fiddling is trivial to arrange for. If you do so, and find anything interesting, please post about it in the sqlite forum.
nah, it costs A LOT of money to build an up-to-date index of the web.
we're doing it slowly on you.com - one sources/url/app at a time.
Not at all, at least in the USA.
There’s no one shot kills. If you get one shot it generally just means you don’t have enough vigor.

I’m not clear what you mean by outside the main quest line. The main quest line is the only noteworthy content. Everything can be done at a later level and probably will unless you’re using a guide to find everything in order. Malenia and mohg are outside the main quest line, technically I guess.
Can someone explain the significance of this like I'm 5?
In fairness it took me about 2 months to withdraw from an "instant access" account around the new year, because my bank demanded documents that don't exist in the country I'm living in. They also refused to even stop paying me interest that creates a tax liability, so I'm going to have to file a tax return to report less than £2 of interest this year.
> And yet very few developers would want to go back to the days when we had no syntax highlighting and editors couldn't hold more than 64kb of text at a time and the OS could only run one thing at a time.

Syntax highlighting, multi-megabyte file editing, and multitasking were all standard on ordinary software development PCs twenty years ago; perhaps closer to twenty-five.

And those ordinary software development PCs had eight, sixteen or thirty-two MEGAbytes of RAM -- not gigabytes, like today. If you're saying syntax highlighting, multi-megabyte file editing, and multitasking are the reason we need three orders of magnitude more RAM to get the machine to do the same thing (only often more slowly) now as then, you're either selling something or you just don't know what you're talking about.
That's either a silly tautology or false. Jews live in the exact same "consumerist society", but did not lose the sabbath. Even the most progressive Jews I know rest on the sabbath in some form or another.
The author is suggesting that Databricks should sell a product with infinitely scalable storage and is queryable via SQL or Python... isn't that exactly what they're doing?

Databricks has a product called Delta Lake that covers the infinitely scalable storage part. Here's a talk from a Delta Lake user that's writing hundreds of terabyes / up to a petabyte of data a day to Delta Lake: https://youtu.be/vqMuECdmXG0

Databricks recently rewrote the Spark query engine in C++ (called Photon) and provides a new SQL query interface for data warehouse type developers.

Databricks recently set the TPC-DS benchmark record, see this blog post: https://databricks.com/blog/2021/11/02/databricks-sets-offic...

This article doesn't align with my view of reality.
There is no line. If Google decides to ban you, your only recourse is to post online and hope your story gets enough traction for it to become a PR issue for them.
>"A buyer is going to prefer a law firm that minimizes expenses."

Yes, but I feel like this only works up to a certain point. There is absolutely a sense that high caliber attorneys charge more and getting a "cheap lawyer" instinctively sounds like you're setting yourself up to fail - despite the fact that the lower price firm is probably just as apt as the firm with the brand recognition.
There's no link to any external source code anywhere on the page, and I tried googling for "PlasmaX Login"/"PlasmaX" and found nothing but the Pling link.

Just because LinuxFx re-uploaded this theme to Sourceforge doesn't make it GPLed.
There's always Tasmota [0]. Personally I prefer ESPHome but recently tossed Tasmota on some OTS Sonoff plug switches. Best part is you can just drop ESPHome firmware in the Tasmota OTA upgrade and switch at any point.

[0] https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
On this page:

1. scrolling is strange

2. zooming is scrolling?!
fair point, I dont think that AWS/GCP will just let databricks eat their lunch. big cloud providers will try hard to steal market share from DB
It is hard and expensive to diffuse the brine that's left after the freshwater is extracted. The whole ocean is not affected but it's the area around the plant. Which can be a very large.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/slaking-the-world....
Keep in mind I was spitballing. Don't take the Librem example too seriously- I didn't know about that stuff, and it certainly changes the way I view Purism.

> This is why FOSS can't "win".

I'm not really sure what "win" means in this context. If "winning" is what Chrome is doing right now, I don't want Firefox to "win" either. Competition is good.

If your argument here is that FOSS can't produce a "better" product, Firefox is as much a counterpoint now as it was when it broke the IE hegemony. For the user, it's just as good as Chrome. It even provides some features Chrome doesn't have (for example, popping out videos and actually-good ad block). Nobody cares about how chrome is 50% (i.e. 0.8ms) faster at responding to thing X.
Saw this in consulting. Members of my consulting team were not a good fit for the project, but the consulting company prefered to leave them on the team because it paid everyone's paychecks, except the clients. The client will complain about the teams performance, but this is actually desired, if the client isn't complaining you're not slacking as much as you could be.

Same thing happens with individuals and hourly work, to be fair, but an individual can have integrity or at least find an excuse they're at peace with. When it's a group - a company - that is slacking some like myself inevitably feel they're being dishonest.
Sex is a very primal need for most people. Lack of it for long time drives people crazy. It's just how evolution has primed most homo sapiens. Going to south asian countries is cheaper for sex travellers probably. You can rent a gf experience for few weeks at the same cost it will take to hire an escort for few days in the west.
I was allowed to take notes, but I was not permitted to bring them with me during the deliberations. Were you allowed to look at your notes, and share them, during the entire process?
This is actually a very interesting point. I think what this points out is that society thinks an athlete who is good at throwing a ball earns their money more than a tech executive, and honestly I'm not sure I disagree.

One gets to where they are with extreme practice, talent, dedication, and typically a generous portion of privilege while growing up.

The other (tech execs) often get where they are by lying, cheating, manipulating, and with nepotism.
I sometimes wonder how it must've been like to be born German in the early 1900s. Now that must've sucked.
Curious if you think Uvalde massacre could have not happened if the 18-year old had a revolver instead of an AR-15?
Anyone who makes a remarkable discovery in mathematics is going to be considered a genius nearly by definition, so by this, "genius" is all that is involved.

But oppositely, the definition of genius overall is fairly fuzzy.

And especially, people have made important contributions to mathematics without showing "early promise".
Sounds good but where are you going to get the energy, in space, to disable 42k of them? Plus the ones that are coming. It's a no win for China.

Interesting how Starlink has transition to a nice to have civilian project to a must have national defense project. I bet that the defense department will work hard, along with SpaceX, to make sure all 42k are deployed.
The speedup is due to vectorization, not Rust
I've been beating a related drum on HN for years, about billing hours, and I'll try not to repeat too much of it:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I know this post is mostly not about billing strategy (though that's what the thread is now about), but I'm going to chime in with a simple bit of advice for tech workers that I believe is universally applicable:

Bill days, minimum.

A lot of the pathologies involved in metered billing, time tracking, and perverse incentives vanish when you bill days instead of hours. People have all sorts of weird excuses to talk themselves out of billing days --- "what if I only have an hour worth of work to do?" Bill a day. See how easy it is?

The last consulting company I built had a minimum billing increment of a fiscal quarter. I co-ran a consulting company for almost 10 years that did minimum-daily billing, for a pretty big and diverse set of clients, and nobody pushed back on the billable day. Bill days (minimum), not hours!
Absolutely. I'm certainly not a geologist and I know it's clearly not a 1:1 mapping, but certainly some thing can be said about, say the India shaped floating land mass that drifts towards where India is located in the past 100 million years and if you wanted to say where Mumbai was, the answer, if there is one, is probably found somewhere on that giant island and not at the exact place it is today

There should be something better than this.
The interior screens dim. They are better than many ICE vehicles in this regard.
Yea, agreed, Spark definitely isn't a database, it's a query engine.

I agree that the traditional Spark notebook query interface was a lot easier for people with pandas (or DataFrame experience) to understand. But their new SQL query interface is easily understandable for DBAs.
The models do sometimes generate verbatim copies of their training data. Here's an example, Copilot regurgitating Quake code, including sweary comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710287
I'm becoming more and more critical of these gigantic platforms.

Perhaps we (for a random definition of "we") should have legislation requiring these companies to provide warranty for the services they provide, under a common set of minimal and inalienable rights, when the service is "free" but the company has revenue from ads and such. Having warranty for the services require some level of tech support, of course.

Will this scale for a Google-sized company? Probably not, but that's their problem. It would even be better, for us as a society, if this makes these companies unsustainable; I can only dream of they being replaced by thousands of smaller ones for which the approach is sustainable.
How does rocky fit into the picture? What’s different between Rocky and Alma?
Running an abuse prevention system is adversarial. If your abuse detection system isn’t perfect (which is of course impossible), then having a transparent anti-abuse system is the same as not having an anti-abuse system.
Oh, hey akuchling, Sean here, LTNS! If you're working there, it's got to be good! I'll take a look, thanks!
In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia
I dunno how well that solved things as a practical matter. I recently began running a Prosody server to host a group chat (MUC) among myself and some friends. Some of us use Conversations on Android, and one uses Monal on iPhone. I also use Monal's macOS client.

The original setup was confusing. I ended up hacking some modules to debug why notifications didn't seem to be working, but eventually I got everything working. (I also wrote a module to sandbox Prosody using pledge and unveil: https://github.com/wahern/prosody-openbsd)

Then OpenBSD 7.1 was released, which upgraded Prosody from 0.11 to 0.12. It's roughly around that time that the iPhone Monal user stopped seeing notifications for the MUC. But the Monal app also updated around that time, so it's difficult to place blame. As far as I can tell notifications seem to be going out to the push server, but it's still a bear to debug and I haven't had the time to properly analyze things, let alone fix them.

I also installed macOS Monal on my young son's macbook so he could IM me while at work, but for some reason desktop notifications don't work at all for him, not even 1:1 chats, and neither pre- or post-Prosody upgrade. (They work for me on my mac mini, though.) We can still chat, but he has no idea if I replied unless he's monitoring the Monal chat window. It's most likely a client-side Monal or macOS issue, though, because Monal doesn't even appear in the Systems Preferences -> Notifications & Focus application list, and side-channel push notifications shouldn't even be involved.

Years ago I used Adium on macOS and ejabberd server-side and things seemed to work more smoothly, even when chatting with Google Talk users. But now Adium is no longer maintained and has fallen behind in extension support. In some ways the XMPP ecosystem seems to have regressed even for the simple stuff, let alone the more complex mobile and MUC support.
Many of these thefts are related to economic issues but they come and go. Here's the NY Times in 2008 talking about an epidemic of catalytic coverter thefts

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/us/29converters.html
If they suspect and sue it would come out during discovery. There is very little you can do to hide that fact at any point.