skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I paid $15k for a failed dating startup's customers. I spent 6mo building it out before eventually canning it. My go to market strategy was to develop it as a freemium social app w dating features coming in once the user base took off.

The primary gotcha was something for syncing your instagram, spotify, audible, and a handful of other services and generating a graph based recommender engine whereby people could share their "snapshots" and engage in a micro-community of people sharing their "feeds".

The music side of things had a reactive element whereby you could enter two artists and it'd give you 5 suggested options you might also like between them to make the data input side of things exploratory but informative. In my testing, my friends were able to add 250 artists in under 5 min w each finding 3-5 new daily-listen artists the first time through.
I think using Android can be either a low income signal or a Grey Tribe [0] cultural signal, and people on dating sites might want to screen out either (or both).

Like you said, it’s about arbitrary norms, but we make assumptions about others all the time based on which norms we follow. An analogy from a different angle is that texting your Tinder match from an Android phone is a bit like applying for a tech job with a @hotmail.com email address.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
Sure. But the A/B tests aren't testing things like "which color combo leads to faster comprehension and response among people with colorblindness" and more like "do we get more money from our customers if we put the sales banner above the corporate logo or below it?" The former situation could be beneficial to the user while the latter is beneficial almost exclusively to the site operator.

Oh wait. You were being snarky. I see it now. Very droll. Yes. Didn't we put a clause in the Terms of Use document saying users agree to be our guinea pigs for various inhumane interface experiments forever!?
I do not like apple at all and do not use their products and even I recognize this is a dumb move. They have tricked people into their walled gardens for years now and this might be the thing that finally wakes people up to the fact they are manipulating them into apple only services
With or without this? https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/3/4/18216045/ren...
Coming never to Firefox, Edge, and iOS.
This is bizarre.

If this were an in-depth announcement with a long and well-structured technical justification attached, I could understand. Though I suspect I'd likely disagree with the decision, I could probably accept it as a simple different of opinion if the arguments were evidently well-thought-through and considered.

This blog-post is so lightweight. There's no technical analysis. There's barely any justification. Yes we know SMS is insecure and yes - it seems plainly obvious that having them in the same UI could pose UX challenges & user confusion issues. So improve the UX and clarify the distinction. Did anyone in Signal consider the userbase or the advantages of this feature at all?

Definitely the end of my Signal usage anyway. It's my main SMS app: my primary motivator is SMS UX, the ability to securely message a tiny subset of my friends is a very nice but ultimately non-vital bonus. Having a separate app for those people isn't worth my while (they're on other platforms I use more).

The migration off it will be an unwelcome pain...
How did you find your technical co-founder?
Honestly, this has been the hardest part for me in building a startup.

Especially interested in personal stories of people who found a technical co-founder or technical co-founders who were enticed to join another person's company.

In my own learning - and in contexts like this (hacker news), I find that my strategies are best informed by hearing other people's stories. I've read all the books and blogs, but it's also useful to hear personal examples.

Things I've tried
-lots of networking
-messaging engineers on LinedIn at similar companies and having coffee
-asking incredibly well connected people who support my work (CTOs at some of the most successful companies in the world) to make intros.
-doing trial projects with people
-asking advisors who are techies
-asking friends who just sold their companies
-asking engineers from companies that just had big layoffs

Things I haven't tried
-asking a sibling/childhood friend

Pro of not having a technical co-founder: I've had to ramp up a lot on my own knowledge of technology and not build up too soon

Con: Much better to have someone with in-depth years of experience, vision for scaling technology to reach millions of users.

One of the biggest challenges has been someone quitting after six months to return to a 9-5 job. In the beginning, the idea of building a company was exciting for them, but when they saw the reality of it, the possibility of failure and the potential of massive success, they got scared.

Not everyone has the stubbornness and appetite for risk necessary to be a founder.

So, in a nutshell, I'm curious to hear your stories if you had success in this, especially if it was hard in the beginning.

I am fully aware that this may be entirely due to some personal failing, but some mentors have suggested that it's just hard and I need to keep trying, which is why I'm asking for stories.

Also open to not having a technical co-founder. I've built the whole platform myself and it works and is growing. But still...

Thanks so much for your insights - and especially personal stories in this area.
The way that these programs work, it is no questions asked (intended to get even criminals to turn in firearms, to prevent them from using in future crimes/suicides). So a "show ID to turn in" policy is a non-starter.

Shameless promotion, but even absent such gaming I am quite skeptical these are cost-effective, https://andrewpwheeler.com/2022/08/21/gun-buy-back-programs-....

Making it so they only take working handguns, and if the gift cards were more on the order of $25-$50 makes it a more palatable to me from a cost-benefit perspective. But still evidence they actually work is pretty slim.
One could argue this is exactly the corpo-hate I was referencing earlier. What do we get out of being so cynical?
dLink, right?
Another for the list!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33101237
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33098944
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33098231
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33097517
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33098944
> Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative?

Because, for the most part, the (so called) left has signed on (at least in the USA).

> Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

Strange? Why? It's universally embraced. It's the status quo. It's ubiquitous...like air They give names to anything outside that circle but never the cicle itself. It's also a slight of control hand. Orwellian. Without the necessary words, how can we discuss something? The winner is writing the rules. And like Fight Club it persists because no one talks about it. They can't. No words.

> With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

This persists today. Journalism is supposed to be objective and truth-seeking. Instead, the winner has made them into sock puppets. More Orwellian-isms.

Yet point any of these things out to the average punter - leaning left or right - and they just wave their hand, mumble "conspiracy theory" and shove their heads deeper into the sand. Sight the likes of Klein or similar and the choke on the idea of reading a book.

Note: I'm not being a critic, just the messenger.

We're in The Matrix (so to speak), it's only going to deepen its bite going forward.
He transferred $21,000 of the public funds to his own pocket in an honest and legal transaction. On the whole this strikes me as a virtuous and patriotic thing for him to have done and I can only aspire to be this enterprising in my own business affairs.
Or maybe... find a way to not be creepy? They're the ones trying to convince people to move from VSCode.
This e^n times! If there is no n, there is no exp!
this scales with the amount of requests and can be used as a blueprint for deploying any AI model. Really cool!!
Have trouble keeping track of your keys? So does Toyota
The downside is that they will opportunistically send your messages via Signal. If the recipient chooses to not have SIgnal installed any longer, then your messages go into a black hole.

This became much more of a problem for me after they rolled out their shitcoin; suddenly my techie friends were just not responding to messages, and Signal as my main SMS app was not falling back to SMS for these folks.
Construction in North America has destroyed a lot of the indigenous archeological record, however. It's more valid to say they didn't worry about it, but perhaps should have.
So for about $10 billion dollars + operating costs (which would be less than importing) San Diego County would be free and clear.

San Diego City budget is $5 billion: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/fy23ab_v1execut...

San Diego County budget is $7 billion: https://www.sandiegocounty.gov/content/sdc/openbudget/en/hom...

This seems that if they needed to they could do it.
I want google maps to use my position data so that I know where traffic jams are in real time. It has saved me a bunch.

Apple Maps still sends people to strange places when you leave the city. (Apple Maps once sent us to the middle of a farm field, which was funny at the time, so I was glad it happened.)
It needs to die when a federated replacement is available by default on all phones.
Thanks for the reminder, just donated $10. Also, this is a hit piece by a right-wing guy who hates free access to information.
We get to keep some of our privacy by being cynical I suppose.

As they say, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice - can't get fooled again.
You're effectively arguing that we need price stability in housing, something that should be a given. Unfortunately we've adopted a policy of price growth in housing which has made it untenable for new buyers. If we could ensure that housing was a stable asset in both directions then we'd generally be in better shape.

I'd suspect that many Nimby issues would go away if people didn't view their house as their retirement. To your point, interest rates are not the only mechanism for this - and direct government construction might be more efficient.
Yes, this is an idiotic decision that makes me question the decisions being made as a whole by Signal.

Does anyone have recommendations for a good default SMS app on Android?
I don't know what team your on, but I've been WFH for nearly a decade, and for important meetings, it's always camera on. Even then it's a challenge.

There's nothing more frustrating than a colleague obviously not paying attention, or grocery shopping with video off, on a call where they're essential. And then you have to repeat.. etc.

I'm all for VR meetings if they can nail things like eye-contact, accurate mapping to mount movements and body indicators that show attention and focus.

Because right now, too often zoom calls are a dumpster fire distraction, which is exhausting for all involved.
> There are a few reasons why I think this happened to me. Being a young Black man in the tech field put me in a vulnerable position where different equals disposable. Maybe being privy to Rick's inherent lack of knowledge of the very thing he professed to be an expert on gave me some perceived leverage over him; thus, I was a threat to be eliminated.

He could have started with this. Such victim mentality.
Isn't the problem the lack of gatekeepers? There are tons of new stars the problem is they're becoming social media stars first and pop music stars second. The people who would have used music as their ticket to fame and fortune are using Tik Tok/Youtube instead. You don't have to sing which is hard, you can just wear a bikini and do some viral dances. Then when you're a star, you put out some half baked terrible pop music to cash in. You share a much smaller percentage of your money with the labels this way.
I'm not following. Your link appears to be specific to corporate environments. The title of the document is:

"VPN overview for Apple device deployment."

It further states "Secure access to private corporate networks is available in iOS ..."

An individual iPhone user who is not using a company issued device would not be beholden to MDM restrictions or profiles. Nor would access to "private corporate networks" be necessarily relevant.
Chromophobia: Men in Black – The Fear of Color in Western Culture (2019)
The answer is this: They dont want to add RCS support or spend the time to do it. It's all bullshit top to bottom.
They can easily provide a feature where the employee could flip a switch and temporarily (semi?) hide herself, signaling that she is currently occupied with something else. Yes, in a Zoom setting, she doesn't have to broadcast that. But that's just cheating.
I also used some Forth professionally. Triangle Digital Services TDS2020 Forth SBCs (Hitachi H8 microcontroller). Also they had a smaller SBC the TDS9092 [1] which I used to turn the bitstream of data from a GPS chipset into NMEA strings.

I wrote Modula-2 on DOS for the data loggers and Forth for the embedded stuff. Happy days.

[1] https://www.triangledigital.org.uk
Wow, I use this feature so I only have one messaging app to worry about.

It was seamless and I didn't see much of an issue with it.

I guess Signal is going to become that app that is only opened once a month or so. No more donations from me.
What people are concerned enough about a Terms of Service change to leave Whatsapp, but struggle with the unlocked icon next to "Insecure SMS" in Signal?

What people know that Telegram isn't end-to-end encrypted, but think SMS is?
this is effectively going to remove signal as my messaging app of choice. i understand that messages that are not signal messages are not secure, but it is not going to be possible to convince anybody i know to download a special app if they want to talk to me. they will just send SMS, and I will have to respond via SMS, and it wont involve the signal app.

i hope they reconsider this decision; i have been using the product since textsecure and I would hate to stop doing so because they no longer support out-of-network communication.
Even if you start the discs at the same time, they won't finish at the same time. The timing skew on CD players was such that you'd actually accrue a few seconds of error over the course of the songs. I think I remember reading that this even surprised the Flaming Lips.
I'm not surprised by that fact, but what does surprise me is how neither the author of the article or anyone here has mentioned COINTELPRO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

It's a safe assumption that the FBI was monitoring any given Black person with influence, and we might as well assume they still are.
> only some stock exchanges in the world have circuit breakers

Most of the US ones do. Here's a list of recent NYSE and NASDAQ trading halts.[1] The London Stock Exchange has trading halts. Euronext has circuit breakers that trip on 8% - 10% changes. [2] The Tokyo stock exchange has trading halts, but doesn't use them often.[3] China's stock exchanges use trading halts too much.[4].

That covers the major markets. Who doesn't have some system to stop trading during big price swings?

[1] https://www.nyse.com/trade-halt-current

[2] https://www.euronext.com/en/news/trading-safeguards-euronext...

[3] https://www.jpx.co.jp/english/markets/derivatives/suspended/

[4] https://www.scmp.com/business/china-business/article/2174454...
> The FBI is more or less a legalized criminal organization that is funded by U.S. taxpayers,

How is this any different than local law enforcement?

I’m not saying you are implying this. But it’s strange that the same people who “back the blue” locally, want to “defund the FBI”.
I am not claiming that social programs are a flex. The military is a flex.

Post WW2 for the US, post-Victorian era in the UK, post-Napoleon in France, post-Tarism in Russia, post-oil-boom in Scandanavia, etc. Countries with big social programs are still great to live in, but I only mean that the social programs and big government are clearly not part of the reason why those countries became rich. The big government is caused by the wealth, not the other way around.
Exactly. Dumbest idea ever. Apparently Signal thinks they can recruit all of us as their sales force.
That is fine. Ads on an “adless” tier is fraud.
A thing photographers / image-effects people think about a lot: pixels aren't little squares; they're sample points.

If you've ever played around with graphics-rendering — UV coordinate sampling, convolution, etc — then you know that you can think of a (2D) raster image as really being a grid of samples of what color you get when you look at the UV coordinate represented by the center of that grid-point on some underlying hypothetical continuous texture.

Which is to say: if you have a pixel-art image (i.e. one created at pixel scale, pixel by pixel, rather than created with continuous-art techniques and then scaled down), and you want to scale it up "conservatively", without making up any information that doesn't already exist in the image — then the right way to do that isn't to blow up the pixels themselves, nearest-neighbour style (as if the hypothetical underlying texture is a tessellation of infinitely-sharply-bounded little squares); but nor is it to stretch the image with bilinear/cubic/etc. resampling (as if the hypothetical underlying texture is a continuous blend from the color at the center of each sample into its neighbours.)

Really, the conservative approach to enlarging a pixel-art image, is to throw your hands up and give up — because you actually don't have the information for what occupies any UV coordinate of the underlying hypothetical continuous texture, other than the exact center-point of each grid square, where the pixel-art pixel sample is located. A pixel-art image, created from scratch as pixels, only really tells you what's at the exact center point of each grid-square. Every other possible sample-point in each grid-square is left undefined. If you picture an infinitely-small dot in the center of each grid-square, with the rest left "empty", that's the data you have about the "underlying image", from seeing a pixel-art image. Anything beyond that is "compressed sensing" — an inference, not a logical deduction.

But to directly address your point: you see pixels, because that's how the game has to be rendered — as a 2D extrusion — for it to show up on a screen for you to see. But in concept, the game is giving you a one-dimensional array of sample-points — a sampling of an underlying hypothetical one-dimensional continuous texture.
A little-known fact is that the entire preboot environment in Sun's UltraSPARC machines was really just Forth. It was possible to modify that Forth code to do more or different things than what the factory intended, and Sun actually had documentation on how to do that, IIRC.

I really miss having an innovative, open-source friendly hardware manufacturer like Sun around - they were an extraordinary group of people. (I worked for them for a while in the late 90s, and it really was a great company, with by far the best tech-company culture I've ever encountered...)
I’ll just stick with not using JetBrains software like I haven’t for the past two decades. Bloated and slower than Eclipse.
> Edit: Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself that said the FBI reached out to him about limiting the visibility of certain news?

No. The FBI reached out to Facebook to let them know how Russia tended to try to influence US citizens with fake news or by amplifying fake aspects of real news using social networks, including Facebook.

A lot of folks thought this was bad because it led to Facebook not amplifying (not removing, not blocking, just not promoting) the Hunter Biden laptop claims, because the story met the hallmarks of what the FBI pointed out to the team. It still does.
Not all websites got it wrong. They are both a problem but one does not excuse the other in regards to ignoring the way the web spec works.
Is it true or false that the author is heavily biased against Wikipedia? If the claim is true, then no one has an obligation to respond to one-sided accusations made in bad faith with zero intention to report on any details that would paint Wikipedia in a favorable light.

I would be just as uninterested in an article from Wikimedia themselves on how great they are.

I already said what I would be interested in: factual reporting that makes a reasonable and unbiased effort to uncover all the facts and give the full context. Everyone has the right to ignore "reporting" and "sources" that do not fulfill even the bare minimums of journalist integrity.

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This is an awful decision. I've converted some friends and family to Signal over the past years (it took a while) and it is now their default messaging app on their phones. This is going to confuse them and is going to make it difficult for me to keep convincing them that Signal is the route to use.

I learned to stop trying to improve the technical lives of other people after Dropbox's decision to restrict free accounts to three devices resulted in a shitstorm of angry and confused messages from half the people I know.
"why not anything else" is mostly (for me) because they are a non-profit, and unlikely to be bought by or turn into a megacorp, similar to how wikipedia runs, although they're certainly a mega-something at this point, it still feels a lot less evil than a facebook or a google.
I would trade a lot of my privacy in an instant if it meant full fidelity remote human interactions (I already trade a lot of my privacy for much less), but I guess I'm an optimist.
UX elements already exist to tell the user whether they're encrypted or not, removing the ability to send unencrypted shrinks their userbase while ensuring the apps adoption plummets.

There, points addressed. Can we move on?
Not my own story (as I'm a tech co-founder), but I've sent a couple people over to: https://www.generalist.world/

Seems good for connecting to the right kind of people.
I look at this as a halo product. It's like a VR version of a concept car. It is meant to show people what cars will be like in 5-10 years. This is meant to show people what Meta Quest 3 or 4 will be like in 2-4 years. Meta is well aware of that fact that a $1500 VR headset is not a mass consumer product. Thats likely why they have positioned it as a productivity tool for businesses. There is probably 0 market for a headset like this with consumers. The consumer VR market is almost entirely game centric right now and its not clear to me that games can even really benefit from the advances here yet. Almost no one buys a VR headset just for the "metaverse" (whatever that is). This is tech that is meant to give people a glimpse of what is possible. To sell people on the idea that a VR/AR metaverse is inevitable. It'll be judged by how well it does that.
Everything you said is true for local law enforcement also
Easy to corroborate. Here, in the Form 990 tax return:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim...
Google did a security research around ssl and a crazy percentage of people think the lock icon is actually a handbag icon. The rest of the research highlighted how most users aren’t able to make informed choices, most people lack the technical basis to make those choices.