skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Yardstick (YC W22) – Data-Driven Startup Valuation, KPI Benchmarking
Hello, HN community! We're Ravi and Vijay, data enthusiasts and startup founders who've faced the significant challenge of quantifying startup success. Through our experiences in building and growing companies, we've recognized a glaring need in the market for transparent, accessible benchmarking and valuation metrics—tools that rely on data rather than just intuition or incomplete data. Here is a quick demo - https://app.storylane.io/share/916eqxtsotpo

What Yardstick Offers:
Yardstick delivers comprehensive tools for accurately benchmarking startup performance and estimating valuations. Our platform utilizes an extensive dataset of startup performance metrics, providing growth rate percentiles to precisely position startups against a broad database. Moreover, Yardstick computes valuation estimates through sophisticated models that analyze KPIs in relation to valuation data and qualitative insights from hundreds of startups.

The Problem and Our Journey:
Navigating the vibrant startup ecosystem, we found that evaluating these ventures has traditionally been more art than science. Our experience in assessing hundreds of early-stage startups for equity and debt investments revealed the difficulty of understanding their market standing without resorting to costly market research or external consultants. This challenge inspired the creation of Yardstick.

Our Solution:
Yardstick seamlessly integrates into the workflows of fintechs, investors, and entrepreneurs wanting to underwrite a startup’s performance. Our solution offers not just KPI benchmarking but also insights into current valuations. With both an API and a user-friendly web application, Yardstick serves both technical and non-technical users, ensuring comprehensive accessibility.

Give it a try:
We are thrilled to introduce Yardstick to the HN community and are eager for your feedback. Whether you are a fintech looking to perform KPI benchmarking on potential clients, an investor in need of data-driven tools, or a startup founder trying to understand where your startup stacks up against peers or what should be the latest valuation based on current traction, we invite you to try out Yardstick - https://ventureinsights.ai/yardstick/ (without a need to sign up!) and share your insights. For those interested in integrating our tools directly, check out our API documentation - https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/32615745/2sA35G3MMX

We look forward to your thoughts and discussions!

Thank you,
Ravi and Vijay
The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants [pdf]
Sony might squeeze you out of the market if they get the opportunity
When I started this thread I was being assured that the Biden administration was timid and powerless. One page of comments later and they are shaking down the entirety of congress to get their way.

Did I miss the montage?
> Nix is a software project, not a social movement.

everyone loves to assert that Nix is this or that. whatever label you fight to place it under, it's a product of some thousands of people. whatever it actually is, it's underpinned by something social.
Royal Mail pauses fines for 'fake' stamps after apparent flaw in fraud scanners
Yes, but presumably those people read it and registered knowingly. It's the people who did not want to run for presidency that did not read.
Thanks! It's not Cesium, no - I'm using Globe.GL [0] with custom shaders for the atmosphere effects and day/night transition

Sorry about right-click. It's not disabled intentionally, it might be something in Globe.GL or three js. I'll see if I can enable it

[0] https://globe.gl/
> Or at best we just replace coal with natural gas, and in which case who cares, our CO2 production is still going up?

The rate of change matters: every bit of carbon emitter now makes it worse, so any form of power less polluting than coal buys a little time to deal with the hard problems like heavy industrial processes which take more time to convert.

The big thing you’re leaving out is the growth curve on renewables, especially solar. We’re already seeing major economies (Germany, California) hitting periods of completely running their power grids on renewables, and as the cost goes down it’s going to be even less economically viable to burn coal. One of the big questions is who will figure out how to use peak overproduction effectively since that has the potential to make things like EVs even cheaper than the fossil fuel alternatives.

This is also why we need some kind of tax or an outright ban on proof of waste cryptocurrencies. Everything else will improve as cheap renewables become widespread but the whole point of something like bitcoin is to show that you’re wasting the most power, and that scales with production in a way nothing else does. Given the minimal economic impact, a ban would be most beneficial but a general carbon tax would be effective on a slower scale.
Furthermore you can get used versions of these pretty cheap on ebay. I bought some years back for experimenting with openshift in my homelab and was able to get some pretty insane hardware for $600 USD. Processors are slow, but it will run.
Blog post: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/the-ethics-of-advanced...
I believe they didn't actually use pykrete in the Canadian test model. It was just ice.
It's one of a stockpiles in a small country (out of many) which doesn't even border Ukraine, and the one who had a lot of economic integration going on with Russia. That also predated the axtual war 10 years.

A Russian would say to you that if it's indeed a GRU op, they should do an internal investigation and shoot behind the garden shed the ones who devised / permitted it, after making effort to find out whether they were working for the other side, or just dumb on their own.

Or perhaps the whole GRU is defunct. Many Russians would not reject this idea outright.
I frown on rule 3. Ctrl-D or other Ctrl commands can be
mistakenly be sent to your session and oops. Bad things will happen.
I train my muscle memory on %s global substitutes and other good tid-bits
in the article.

One that I don't use enough:

$vim my_file.c +321 (open vim on line 321)
There are some crazy lightning storms over China in the live video feed at the moment. Very cool.

One thing I would change is to change the yellow dot to an actual image of the ISS. It would also be cool to be able to zoom in a little bit more (and maybe use some higher resolution images of the globe).
Perhaps he could have always been a, how you say, asshole?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7bbd9/billionaire-marc-its-...

Here is another example of this behaviour - its fine as long as it does not affect me.
I got the sense from reading the “Techno-Optimist’s Manifesto” that it was deliberately crafted to troll.
*
Currently, only designated Royal Mail staff have the ability to scan the barcodes. Earlier this month, it told the Guardian that its security system had to be kept in-house to prevent fraudsters exploiting it.
"

Ho ho.
Regarding your point 3, the challenge is that at present, so many incentives are aligned against that.

I'd love to do hard science, rather than my current meaningless consumer webapp job. But it'd mean... giving up 5-6 years of tech salary to go back and get a phD, and then post-phD my job prospects would be geographically limited to a couple locations where all the science/research jobs are, with worse hours, worse flexibility, less stability and drastically less pay.

It's hard to say "I should quit my fully-remote, wfh, $200k, low-stress, unlimited PTO software job to work in a lab in Boston for 50 hours a week for $90k". I don't have any solution here, kinda just venting through my golden handcuffs.
How does one research mathematics in a more inclusive manner?
It is playing on the psychology of the bidders. You want the bidders to be invested, to want to win the auction. To compete to win the prize.

Also, consider this: if the reserve is too high, and no one bids on it, then everyone looking at it is going to wonder what it is really worth. If there are several other bidders, then that gives reassurance to the rest for the price they each are bidding.
I have reservations for the restaurant at the end of the universe.
The heat's going to be leaving the building in liquid-filled pipes, however you architect it. And with 1.7MW of peak power consumption, a nontrivial amount of liquid.

It's just a question of whether you want to add air and refrigerant into the mix.

It seems they're decommissioning it partly due to "faulty quick disconnects causing water spray" though, so an air cooling stage would have had its benefits...
Oh no. That would be trivially easy and thus unworthy of hacker folklore. :-)

It was much more complicated and much more impressive than that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20019399
The outcome of this project is an illustration of a rule of thumb from materials science: many solid materials begin to lose their mechanical properties at about half their absolute melting point. This is why (for example) ordinary steel should not be used above about 550 C; there's too much creep.
This is neat, loading time was very slow for me, though. The Earth didn't appear for 30+ seconds, so most of the page was just a black background.
Lol. Hixie quit. https://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1700627373&count=1
> Be wary of generic buttons. lol
First, I'm not from that "side" which you think I am. Second, I do assume intent and here it's beyond reasonable doubt that this is about pushing your agenda. I do not dispute that some of these people genuinely believe that they are doing good - either they got brainwashed by others, or they've successfully brainwashed themselves. (In fact, many of us, including me, brainwashed ourself with various things on occasions. It's fairly common)

I won't go over the entire document, but it's pretty telling how they've refused to commit to "no politics" as a rule - because they want to promote theirs! The problem wasn't that sidr linked to politics, but that he linked to the wrong type. (I checked it out and I definitely don't agree with most of it. But that doesn't mean I can't defend his right to speak)
What do you do when people who claim to be targeting fascist ideals also use the same tactics as those they're targeting?
You said it: based on context. This is not about what you can make an LLM say when being manipulated in a convoluted way to provide an inaccurate response. It's about what an LLM will say in the context of a prompt requesting personal data related to an individual who is covered by GDPR.

Can the LLM provide personal data of an individual who is covered by GDPR? Then the LLM is subject to GDPR.

Can this individual exercise their rights with regards to the data that the LLM returns about them? Arguably they can indeed exercise the right of access by means of the right prompts, but can the individual rectify errors or erase such data? If not, then the provider of the LLM is violating GDPR.
Actually, its free access to pirated cable channels, so the pirates are being pirated, and what can they really about that except rotate IPs on a daily basis, hence the daily list updates.
I assume you are commenting in good faith. So, regarding "cui prodest", who would benefit from blowing up a munitions factory in the Czech republic where munitions were stored that were supposed to be transported to Ukraine later so that Ukrainians could protect themselves against the Russian invasion?
It's like you can peer into Marc's thought-bubbles where he's imagining himself in the black turtleneck on-stage.
Yet again, false claim, otherwise the US wouldn't need yet another series of laws in order to "enforce the law"

What's funny is the Oracle partnership demonstrated to the world that CIA/NSA had access to these servers for years, "Operation Decoy Tables", so i would say, the current events are quite beneficial for both parties, China and Rest of the World, as for the US, it's sad that all eyes are on TikTok, but that's what you get for only having 2 choice of the same cake for November (hey, that's the month of my birthday, the 5th too!)
Thanks for the reply. It was a good read. And I can agree on the points from experience.

One suggestion/correction: "Your only way to track message flow is with extensive and expressive logging.", you can do distributed tracing. It not a silver bullet, nor does it replace a proper debugger, but it's better than following logs. You can use a number of distributed tracing SaaS's, but you still have to do at least some manual instrumentation in your code to add additional info.
Wow, I hadn't heard of that one. It sounds very unpleasant.

I have the exact opposite rule -- it should always be OK to include a header file on its own. As a corollary, headers must include or forward-declare everything they need.
AMD MI300x is 163.4 TFLOPS in FP64.

33 of them, which would also have 6,336TB of memory.

I'll have way more than that in my next purchase order.

It is really fun to build a super computer.
Where do you place Naval?
Physicists and engineers are a lot like this too. I think software people have more of a chance getting rich very easily based upon some dumb idea that just happens to make them rich when the company sells.
How are they mismanaged other than having incompetent police?
The letter's entire criticism is that Dolstra is clinging to that position through an extended, conflict-of-interest-ridden campaign of toxic behavior and that this toxic behavior is preventing Nix from "delivering useful software and updates quickly to end users."
ECharts is pretty good
Exactly this. When I'm using the terminal or other command line, my hands are nowhere near my mouse. I very much don't want to use the mouse in that situation.

The converse is also true: when I'm using a GUI, I very much want to minimize the use of the keyboard.

The two devices are physically mutually exclusive: I can't use them at the same time, so they represent two natural and distinct "modes" of input.
It's wild that the "Greatest Country in the World" still hasn't managed to figure out this whole healthcare thing.
Every billionaire hoarding untaxable money is a win in my book. The government wastes money, and causes harm in doing so. Much less than Andreessen.
It's amazing to me how an interstellar-sized cloud formation looks very much like a cloud formation in the sky on earth.
Looks like a moderator downweighted it, probably because it's a sensational-indignant article, which is not what HN is supposed to be for.

Angry articles about how awful rich people or celebrities are a sure hit with upvoters, but their appeal does not come from intellectual curiosity, which is the organizing principle of this site (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So it's standard moderation practice to downweight them here; otherwise the front page would consist of little else.

We make exceptions if an article has significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...) that can provide a basis for an intellectually curious conversation, but it doesn't look like that's the case here.

Edit: it's also the case that users heavily flagged it, which has a similar effect. I'm not sure whether the moderation chicken or the user eggs were first in the downranking of this piece, but it doesn't matter much in the sense that both are the system functioning as usual.
Me too, I enjoyed creating a data dashboard static site[1] with Observable Framework[2] + Plot for their line and bar graphs. I did run into an inconvenience when I used d3 components outside of this combo that requires you to "copy-paste the entire function"[3] rather than just importing it

[1] https://aba.amarkota.com

[2] https://observablehq.com/framework/

[3] https://observablehq.com/@d3/treemap-component
I don't really see either of those as factors or at least not major factors. China is entirely comfortable playing a long game they take a long view with nearly everything they do. It is at least plausible that they want to be able to influence a major voting bloc and they're fine if they have to start with kids and wait for them to grown to voters.

Consider how small the effort was in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. How little effort Russia, allegedly, had to put into whatever happened the outsized effect. Even if that didn't change any specific election, and that's debatable, it's clear that a larger more organized effort could.

Why would any country allow any foreign actor have that kind of control over its voters?
You could make the reverse argument - that the conference organizers think what defense contractors are doing is purely bad and could in no way be thought of as being good. Ultimately it’s up to _us_ (proxied through our elected officials) to use software tools for good or bad purposes, the creation of a tool in itself isn’t the problem. I think most defense contractors are keenly aware of the implications of their work.
PROGCRYPTO (programmable crypto) The capabilities of multiparty computations, fully homomorphic encryption and zero knowledge proofs are super interesting and will allow for new ways of using the internet. In the same way it was hard to imagine what the consequences of asymmetric encryption was at the time when it was conceived, it think the same is true for MPC and FHE today. These technologies are only recently getting feasible. Example use-case: Look for relatives (think ancestry) based on your DNA sequence with cryptographic guarantees, that everyone's DNA stays secret.
it's not a vote, it's the possibility for a candidate to participate in the election. imo we have the same process in france (slightly more complexe) this is just a process to pre-eliminate jokes and unserious people then you still need a regular campaign
The other week, I unarchived what remains of 20-25 year old logs of our phreaking channels and started researching what became of old friends. Some were still active (using their same handles, even), but a surprising number were arrested over a short period of time, charged under CFAA or other broad laws for things no one would blink at today, and then... vanished.

For every Mitnick that spun infamy to providence, I wonder if we'll ever count how many buckled under the massive stigma "hacking" carried at the time.
Awesome, thanks.

Yes we are also on the process mining and RPA space and use image reco + ocr + click tracking for part of it. My (poorly worded probably) question was why do knolwdge graphs matter for you, since traditional rpa doesn’t use them for all the cases I’ve seen at least, unless I misunderstood what you’re saying here about trying out graphs. I’ll read the LLM RPA paper you have linked here too, maybe that explains the use of graphs, and I haven’t read this one so thank you.

We basically used the same technique some of the UIPath folks have used which is representing everything as a sequence of actions, which "branching" being represented by different linear sequences that the model can ingest and make decisions over which sequence to follow, which is kind of a graph i guess but not how we represent it.
Crypto is no longer mined commercially with GPU type compute. When ETH switched to PoS, it decimated the entire GPU mining industry. It is no longer profitable. The only people doing it now are hobbyists.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi · the Father of Flow
I do think there’s other life out there. But just considering the other side, the statistical model only applies if the existence of life is actually stochastic.

If a farmer plants a single tree in the middle of a square mile plot and rips up anything else that grows, any Fermi approximations done by the tree are going to be quite misleading.
How is the motive "not there"?

Skripal was seen as a traitor, having acted as a double-agent for British Intelligence. There's a clear pattern of Putin going after "traitors" - Alexander Litvinenko had publicly accused Putin of conducting assassinations and organizing false terrorist attacks before fleeing to the UK and famously being assassinated with Polonium there. Maksim Kuzminov was just assassinated in Spain a few months ago for having defected to Ukraine with a helicopter.

As the article states the arms which were destroyed were likely to end up being received by the Free Syrian Army, in opposition to the Assad regime supported by Putin - or alternatively, to Ukraine, against which Russia had just started a conflict.
I think you missed their point, which was that misinformation isn't about getting you to believe wrong things, but about getting you to believe nothing at all.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
Increasing penalties has much less effect on crime than increasing the likelihood of them getting caught. If there is a slim chance of them getting caught it doesn't matter what the penalty is because they will do it anyway.
California moves to cut medicine prices with novel deal on opioid overdose drugs
I did try applying to MongoDB a few times, even made it relatively far in the interview process both times but eventually get the "We regret to inform you..." emails for it. I also failed a phone-screen for CockroachDB though I'm actually not 100% sure why. ElasticSearch never got back to me. I certainly applied for these kinds of jobs (and many, many more), but there's not much more I can do than wait for the companies to recognize my brilliance.

When I worked at Apple I did an internal interview for a team that worked on a distributed-RAID-style thing, did really well on the interview, almost got to the offer stage, but then they saw the previous year's review where I got a "Needs Improvement" for (I think) purely bureaucratic reasons that I've talked about on HN before, and they decided not to move forward.

It's tough, because I think a lot of those jobs are in pretty high demand, and as such a lot of really qualified people apply to them and they can be picky, and I don't really blame them for that. There's a lot more generic unsexy backend jobs.
> We preprocess the regulation so that when a call contains a reference to “Annex III,” we know which pages to put into the “junior lawyer’s” prompt. This is the LLM-based RAG I mentioned in the introduction.

Is this RAG or just an iteration on more creative prompt engineering?
you miss my point (i.e., i'm on your side). what i've meant to say, like you, is that only a court of competent jurisdiction can make an actual legal determination as to whether or not some challenged legislative act amounts to a so-called and therefore invalid 'bill of attainder' as prohibited by the Attainder Clause, the third of Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution[1].

it's merely my personal opinion that the legislative act at-issue is 'tightly' drafted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_Stat...
:) From what I can recall, it was a java (applet) Ferranti simulator running a typed in copy of the song obtained from a library (Manchester?). It was part of a research/art installation project. I'm not so sure now, but .at, and masswerk seemed to be involved. I'll look into it, or if someone here recognizes it...
I 2nd D3, especially if you have a lot of datapoints.

I've kicked off a rewrite of an old Angular application that uses D3 in Blazor. I did a rather detailed tour of native Blazor charting libraries, and they all choked when given hundreds of datapoints.

I ended to deciding to wrap D3 for Blazor when we're ready to update that part.
I presume no one is building new motherboards for those processors either. While there is old stock laying around, you really need to run those systems close to as-is for them to be useful.