skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Succeeding in the startup world reminds me of the funfair analogy:

The rich kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and miss. But, because they're a rich kid, they just take out their wallet (or parents' wallet), get more stubs, and try again (and again) until they hit the balloon.

The middle class kid will have a go at throwing the dart at the balloon, and also miss. Then they will walk away, saying that was fun, and go hang out with their mates. But maybe the 10th or the 100th middle class kid will hit the balloon.

And the working class kids? They work at the funfair. They never get to throw darts.

Here's the kicker: those kids who hit the balloons? One or two of them might go off and start a blog/podcast, or write a book titled

- Zero To Plushy

- The Dart Thing About Dart Things: Plushy Hunting When There Are No Easy Answers

- Dart Throwers at Work: Stories of Plushy Hunters' Early Days

- You Are a Badass at Hunting Plushies: Master the Mindset of Throwing Darts

- The Lean Plushy Hunter

- &c

Hell, if it's the middle class kid writing the book, they might even throw a couple of anecdotes in there about how they didn't have an easy start (compared to the rich kid), and it might even be true for them.

That book is the catnip that folks like you and me base our life decisions on.

I had a go at 3 startups, only one of them quasi-full-time, as I self-funded with freelancing. (I spent years building a "turn PDFs into data" product, had a few paying customers, and then one day got made totally redundant by Google Vision.)

Needless to say, I got completely burned out on startup number 3.

I shuttered the business just as Covid hit. I spend more time with the family (wife, two daughters, 9 and 6), and we moved to the countryside to be closer to ageing parents and siblings with kids.

It's healing time, baby

I wish you all the best
No, a popup is not required, it can be part of the privacy policy.

https://termly.io/faq/do-i-need-a-cookie-policy-on-my-websit...
Just Eat was founded in Denmark.
Not so much lately. There are a ton of success stories in the making. I was at Smartly and we didn't settle for 10M.
Then you have the likes of Supermetrics, Yousician, Aiven, Eficode, Oura, Iceye, Varjo, Wolt, Supercell, Rovio, NextGame, Enfuce, Ultimate, Swappie, Singa, Sievo, Framery and many more...
Not many people are motivated to take optimization this far in the Java world.

On the .NET side, the language is more suitable because you can define your own value types (coming soon in Java AFAIK), and there is a lot of people using C# for game dev which is a big use case for GC optimization.

Unity has been integrating unmanaged allocators in their engine, which lets developers skip the GC much more easily (without having to manually preallocate and reuse memory, which isn’t anyone’s favorite workflow, and doesn’t save you much compared to a fast native allocator). I’ve also seen a couple of roughly equivalent projects, eg. Smmalloc-CSharp, github.com/alaisi/nalloc.
Non-Disruptive, Interruptible Transitions
> please offer a paid subscription for ChatGPT

people won't pay for it at the level for it to be sustainable.
I should really do the same.
Totally agree. My previous comment was sarcastic, of course.
Anyone knows why Audible's pay is that low? Is it because of the cost to them to produce the audio?
Imagine being arrogant and stupid enough to target lawyers.

For the first time in basically ever, I'm rooting for the lawyers lol.
This might sound a bit assholish, but I'm writing this to hopefully help others spot a crucial mistake:

Did you have anyone on your team with actual skill in sales or marketing?

Because from your post it seems you tried the same channels that everyone else does (writing blog, engaging on Twitter, setting up ProductHunt launch) without any specific strategy for how to succeed.

And this stuff is hard! There's a reason why good salespeople and marketers are paid so well!

You definitely can learn that, it's a skillset like any other. But treating it like a secondary concern is a death trap for your business.

If you are a tech founder, it's absolutely crucial you figure out a strategy for customer acquisition – find a sales co-founder, hire some good salespeople, get someone who can teach you how to do it – just do not treat it as something less important than tech, because then you are just counting on being lucky. And if you decide to sell yourself, expect that to be a difficult, time consuming job – don't be surprised if you spend more time chasing business rather than coding.
For me it’s second nature in desktop applications and file management, but I never assume that the any specific web dev has added it. (And tbh: I have less and less confidence in web code in general.)
I couldn't care less about a minor charging rate increase that is so minimal that they don't even give any details about how much its increased.

I'd rather a manufacturer that actually tests and releases fully engineered products rather than winging it with constant OTA upgrades.

Tesla track record of OTA for faulty ABS calibration leading to terrible braking distances and a kludge to try and avoid a recall for faults in their HVAC implementation doesn't sell it as a benefit.
Huh. It never ceases to amaze me when another demonstration is presented to me that “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose“ in this industry. I suppose it is only to be expected that some of the old anti-piracy techniques found in 8-bit floppy- and cassette-distributed software might eventually find new philosophically-similar implementations in malware in the future.

Some of that self-modifying and anti-defeat code back then were truly works of art, and squeezed into mind-bogglingly small memory and cpu foot prints, and the malware authors will have a field day re-implementing their future cousins in spirit, and some of the greybeards amongst the white hats will get to relive their 8-bit glory days hunting and defeating them.

The article gave a description of a really super primitive technique compared to the last generation of those anti-piracy techniques, but I still see a family resemblance.
This is the stuff I love. Sanderson doesn't _have_ to take a stand against Audible , and yet he does. Of course he is in a position of privilege to be able to do it, but so many other people are too and act very differently.

Audible giving creators only a 25% cut (or 40% if they sign an exclusive deal) is absolutely exploitative. For a DIGITAL product! That's insane.

Props to Sanderson, and props to all the other people with integrity.
It's interest rates. They're coming back to something more ordinary now.

Keep in mind most investors are agents. They want to be able to tell their customers "look you're paying for a service I'm providing you". When rates are zero, customers are gonna think "hmm that Bob guy is giving me nothing, plus I'm paying him". So what does Bob do? Take some risk. A tiny amount of risk is actually enough that the customer is not net paying Bob, because fees aren't that high in relation to market moves. What does Bob do? Sticks his investors' money in stuff that has a good story: growth stocks. All the Bobs do this, and TSLA and META go up.

Now the story behind such firms is often the same under the hood: they're making some revenues now, but next year it will be more and the year after it will be a lot more, and maybe profits will rocket and it will be great if you got in early.

Which is fine when interest rates are zero, you're basically just backing a maybe-success that others are also backing. Those companies are often also earning money from other growth firms, so it feeds itself.

But when rates go to say 5%? Then in 5 years time, you could have just sat on your butt, not cared at all about what some CEO is writing on Twitter, and just collect a compounded dozens of percent. And it starts to bother you that the story could unwind the other way: those firms will lose money because their customers are in the same game, and the Bob guy certainly does not want to lose money, so he's going to be wise and sells a bit.
What about the First Amendment?
Thanks for sharing. Always encouraging to hear stories of someone grinding for years and finally making it.

Is your 40 person team for a venture of your own, or are you working with a larger org now?
I get bored and lonely sometimes and I don’t always have the energy for intelligent discussion, I usually save that for work. Tbh I probably suffer from ASPD.
Those are all good points that I hadn't considered.

The idea behind microservices is separation of concerns with horizontal scalability. The microservices should be independent enough that it's possible to test the integration in stages without bringing the whole system down.

My team relies on services offered by cloud providers, we are just composing them together, which means that we don't have to create userpools for example.
Here’s a corollary that has worked for me and that I want to share - if, in general your startup feels like freedom - even if it has required you to work long hours for many years -(as all startups do for at least a while) - long hours that most people equate with chains - then it’s not only ok to keep doing the startup but it’s perhaps advisable - that at those inevitable moments when you do feel like a failure you don’t give up - that you give yourself enough time to try all the things you’d want to. It is ok to fail at a startup and not give up because the mindbendingly frustrating thing about startups is that even when you are succeeding you experience a lot of failure, and success rarely seems to precede at least one period that feels like utter failure.

I realize the tone of this advice may seem contradictory to my comment above, but it’s not. If a particular set of responsibilities that feel like chains to many / most people in the world feel like freedom to you - then by all means - keep enjoying the freedom, don’t let the world define it for you, and don’t give up when the roller coaster hits a low.
If you use a few-shot technique (i.e. your prompt contains a couple of example questions and answers) you can mitigate this behavior by adding a question with the answer "I don't know".

More generally, if you teach the model to reject nonsense questions and admit if it doesn't know something it's more likely to do that
Thank you for posting more articles that show how regulation is making nuclear expensive.
While sucky I don't see how any of this is illegal. To me it looks constitutionally correct and I don't want the government legislating this. If the company can refuse to bake a cake, it should be able to refuse any kind of service. Pretty sure this should be covered by the 1st amendment.
Here's a more plausible and less cynical take:

Most people, whether in government or in business, can't give a flying fsck about GDPR or whatever. They just want to get their primary job done, and to them stuff like GDPR is just legal red tape that's imposed on them and that serves no value whatsoever, merely serving as roadblocks slowing them down from doing their real job. They don't want to understand the intricacies of GDPR, they just want to get it over with as quickly as possible, which means slapping a cookie banner on the site, checking the "I am now compliant" checkbox that the GDPR officer nagged them with, and calling it a day. They don't want to go through the trouble of researching a couple of weeks what the best user-friendly way is of being GDPR compliant when they can just install a cookie banner in 5 minutes.

Sounds familiar? If you're a developer in a large corporation then I'm sure you have also been annoyed by the tons of security and firewall rules, and most of you would rather work around them than trying to understand why they exist and how to best comply to them both in mechanics and in spirit. Just like you're not deliberately trying to be evil and breaking the company's security, they're not deliberately being evil and trying to violate privacy.
Tokens aren't shares (if they wanted to issue shares they would have just done an IPO) and if you follow my rule you're extremely unlikely to get scammed.

I don't know what to tell you if you're going to assume the other side isn't arguing in good faith although I feel the same way about most of the anti-crypto people here.
OOff i dunno if that's the compliment you meant it to be :)

Gene Spafford, maybe?
Class mobility is generally regarded as a good thing for economies. It increases competition.

What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations.

If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.
Apply to a bunch of contract jobs. Some of them will be recruiters posting fake jobs to attract the kinds of candidates that are easy to place.

Then the best of those recruiters will call up people at employers that they have relationships with and try to get you in. Often a company will be trying to hire perm, but open to a contractor. Or a companies HR dept might be completely useless and the recruiter will call up an exec who is trying to get something done and needs your skills.

Once you've done a good job at a company and built a relationship with a good recruiter they'll keep finding you new contract work.

Being a recruiter is a real skill. I have tried to find contracts on my own and failed every single time.
Check out this free resource: https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_handbook-for-writers/
They are mostly suggesting simpler, more common words, or words that have direct meaning rather than meaning by analogy. E.g. "focus on" is used to mean "look at in detail" by analogy with the focusing mechanism of eyes and cameras.

Some of them are definitely debatable but that's the general trend.
To u/helloooooooo whose comment has been flagged:

> Why should the government water down documents and treat people like morons? It’s insulting.

Governments have the sometimes formal (e.g. ADA), sometimes informal requirement that its public-facing communication should be accessible to all citizens. Historically, that has been mostly seen in websites that were accessible to people with various disabilities, e.g. proper alt tags on images, subtitles in video / audio, ensuring legibility with high contrast and avoiding various forms of colors that have common color blindnesses associated, but given that over half of the US is barely able to comprehend a 6th grade text [1] and in the UK anything from 12 to almost 27% (depending on the state) has "very poor literacy skills", it makes sense to use simplified language.

Additionally, given that low literacy rates are usually closely related to socio-economic disadvantages and/or migration history, it is very important for those people to have information about basic government aid programs available in an even clearer, more simplified subset of English (and, if possible, also in the dominant languages of immigrants).

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2020/09/09/low-...

[2] https://literacytrust.org.uk/parents-and-families/adult-lite...
This is ridiculous. If anything, California tends to be liberal - nothing to do with Socialism (let alone Communism). What does being a "woke" State (whatever that means) have to do with Socialism?

California has very little in common with Nordic social-democracy. Even when looked at relatively to the rest of the US. And this is particularly true when one looks at the subject at hand, which is social safety nets. The "relative" approach has its limits.
VC-backed is mutually exclusive with being a lifestyle business. I could see if they just generically said rich, because yeah it's easier to be rich than poor in this world, but that's not what they said.
Where Have All the Adults in Children’s Books Gone?
Certainly Musk has been selling a lot of his Tesla shares.
I'm curious if other languages have similar issues. Does French suffer from too many metaphors, or Russian from euphemisms? The relationship between party slogans and Chinese always seems interesting and seems to often be an attempt to lean into such a phenomenon. Phrases like "let 100 flowers bloom," "the people's democratic dictatorship," "the Chinese dream," "the five pests," "socialism with Chinese characteristics," suggests to me that indirect use of language and euphemisms are rampant, though that seemed common in the USSR as well. I wonder if it's a byproduct of the political system, the language, or just the way these phrases are translated.
Avoid words with multiple meanings, particularly where you intend to use the non-primary meaning.

For example, 'dialogue' to many people means a dialogue box on a computer screen. So that word is ambiguous. But a discussion has a primary meaning that is what the writer desires to use.

Particularly for non-native speakers, using secondary meanings of words can be confusing.
This is absolutely wonderful. Thank you for posting it.
The EU is a large market too but startup founders aren't going there.
The interesting thing to me about this is it's a very recent phenomenon. English from 1900 has much more in common with 1600s English than 2020s English. There's been a massive shrinking in vocabulary, a reduction in the sense of individual words, and average sentence complexity has gone way, way down.

You read something from the 1600s, 1800s, or early 1900s, and it's not uncommon for a single sentence to cover half a page. Nowadays, that is practically unfathomable.

I read a lot of old books, so this is a little depressing to me. I'm not sure what the solution is, other than to encourage children to read lots of old books.
Thanks for this. It seems to be clear enough: if you get in touch with your specific niche customer that matches your product the best, your conversion is sure to increase.

Perhaps since many broader (less niche) bases are covered by the innumerable products out there today, maybe this is a good way to go for solo people.
Let's say I have a video door bell and there's a pesky company making door-to-door sales and all the salespeople wear a uniform. Would it be fine for me to train a ML model to recognize when people who are wearing that uniform are ringing me so the button press gets ignored and I don't get startled during the day?

If someone is not wanted in a privately owned place then I don't see why using a model to automatically alert security or deny access is a bad thing.
For Tesla in particular, an explanation for the incredible rise in stock price post-2019 is needed, to inform any explanation for the recent slide.

In the last 2 years, Meta touched twice its end-of-2019 price; Tesla peaked at over 13 times its end-of-2019 price, and is still 5 times higher now! That seems like a far more striking and unlikely phenomenon than the recent slide.
If your startups kept failing for 12 years, where did you get money for food and rent?
Chaos can cause happy accidents, as well as unhappy ones.

I sometimes throw out comments i know will catch flamewars, because (a) I think i can say something funny, at the least, and (b) if I catch a flamewar, then the rest of the thread will hopefully be less polluted with char, smut and smoke.
Yesterdays Forbes story on the same thing:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34098132
Long time lurker, seldom poster, thanks Dan G! As a mod for one of the bigger tech subreddits, I take queues from your moderating style. Peace! And happy holidays!
Because interest rates and Net Present Value. "Growth" by definition is future revenues and profit. You discount that to get that future profit's current value. If interest rates are 0% - which they practically were since about 2015, every $ in the future is equal to a $ in the present, there's no discount.

That's what made businesses with tenous present-day profits but notionally profitable futures fundable. Eg: TSLA, Netflix. Even internal projects like Disney+ operated on this same math.

VW on the other hand has 50+ years of actual sales. They can't suddenly claim to sell 20% more cars; no one will buy that claim. Or for eg. that ESPN satellite subs will increase by 5M.

With interest rates at 6%, all those future earnings discounted to present day don't look so good anymore. Present day money has lower risk alternatives to earn return. Hence the selloff.

As an aside low interest rates encouraged companies to invest in high risk, capital projects in lieu of hiring low/medium skilled labor. Eg - self driving cars, or burger flipping robots. That's had some interesting consequences for certainly US society in terms of who labor votes for.
Occasionally I peruse dang's comments just for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
OpenAI GPT-3 fine-tuned models as per their documentation
Crouch down and lick the hands of the mafia organization that rules over you. May your chains sit lightly upon you. Enjoy your $90k terminal-career salary, geographic lock-in, and annual dues! At least you’re grateful for the right to call yourself the title that you already earned as an undergraduate! May this affliction never effect the software ENGINEERING industry!
Was amused to see in the first review the comment that it was 'a bit disorganized'.

This reminded me of the 'door stop' books of the 90s, those great thick things that weighed about 3 lbs. In the early days they tended to be worth every penny, but toward the end of the decade the publishers seemed to have gotten some kind of gold-rush mentality, because while there was a sudden proliferation of these hefty tomes, the quality definitely became hit or miss, and it became work to find the gems.
I think we need more Elon Musks, yes.

Although, obviously, we don’t want more people who got rich by being politicians.
It’s really hard to be successful with something new. With new products.

That’s why most companies do something very traditional. Plumbing, baking bread, hosting servers, building „boring“ websites, …

If you want to invent something new, you need to be exceptionally creative and exceptionally lucky. It’s okay if you aren’t.
You also have the problem that metaphors and euphemisms are less pre use than plain language, leading to misunderstandings.
Exactly. If TikTok can’t do it, Facebook shouldn’t either.
Yes, VW does have about $200B in current assets and about $85B in financial services receivables, but that still leaves them with a massive chunk of "real debt" larger than their market cap.

Unfortunately the standard ratios only subtract cash from debt when doing this calculation so this calculation is one you have to do manually if you want to fairly compare car companies.
> Building a startup is hard work and it takes time. It's not as easy as they make it seem and it's not for everyone.

And, as others have mentioned, it takes a lot of luck. I mention this specifically, because your words seem like you still believe it's you. It's not. Your fine. It's circumstances, almost entirely.
While reading this thread, I had the illusion that this was posted by me.
Personally i've never really seen the advantages any of these tools over having a requirements.txt, or slightly fancier and more modern, using a pyproject.toml file.

e.g. in a recent project the entire package configuration is this pyproject.toml file:

[project]
name = "vera"
version = "0.0.0"
requires-python = ">=3.10"
authors = [
{ name = "Doxin" }
]
dependencies = ["moderngl==5.7.3", "pysdl2==0.9.14", etc etc]

[project.optional-dependencies]
dev = ["pre-commit==2.20.0"]

[tool.setuptools]
packages = ["vera"]

Getting started with development is as easy as

python3.10 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -e vera[dev]

Updating packages is just rerunning the pip install command.
Instead of making dang's life harder and making HN a worse place, have you tried therapy? It might cost money, but it at least has a chance at treating the underlying cause or of teaching you better coping mechanisms.