skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How much sells/traffic you need to attract investors?
Not sure this is the right forum. I'll remove if the question is out of place.

Our startup we are trying to found has about 10K unique visitors per month and average 500 unit sells. According to our estimate we need 30% more sells to breakeven (founders do not take salary yet - only employees get money and that fixed cost can not be eliminated). We tried to do a lot of tricks (blogs, seo etc.) that do not cost money. But that 30% seems very hard. It is becoming hard to manage the money we are losing every month - we never tried for outside funding to keep things simple. We never thought we would need that. But not a single thing worked out as we planned when we started :(.

Now, we have decided we need a little funding to get to the point when we wont need outside money to survive. We are actually looking very small amount to cover the 30% for a year or a little more than that.

Whom and how should we approach? Or should we try to manage the money ourselves by some other means (consulting?)?

I'll not post details about the business since I do not want some other people who track us and try to guess our every step may identify us and our situation.

Thank you for any suggestion.
Yeah, ML-family languages generally aren’t designed for rapid development, but rather for building reliable software. I haven’t used ML or OCaml extensively, but do use Haskell at work. Granted, it does take longer to write code than in a language with a more relaxed type system. But I don’t really mind, because the end product is invariably constructed well and with great care. More time developing, less time debugging.

And really, type errors are supposed to be helpful. In fact they usually are, unless somebody decided to get overclever. With typeclasses, for example, you can do a lot of neat things you probably shouldn’t in real code! But if the error messages are unhelpful, that is a failing on the part of the implementation as well.
I think working at home doesn't mean you work while babysitting your kids. It should be like working at office, minus the commute and seeing your colleagues. If you need to babysit the kids for a while, do that as it is then make up for the development time later on.

I found org-mode to be great in tracking todo items, general note taking, and organizing thought.
The description you have for datomic is pretty much spot on for how graph databases work, with schema and data both stored as data, subject verb object tuples, etc.

It's sad that this is a new concept for so many people in the software industry, considering that graphs are one of the core data structures taught about in CS.
There's a nasty illogic to this sequence, but I see it all the time.

A. "The world isn't all gold stars" (a.k.a. "it's a dog-eat-dog world out there", or "there are a lot of hardasses out there", etc.), THEREFORE

B. I'm personally not going to pull any punches for this naive/hopeful/idealistic/etc. young person.

This isn't logic; it's a weak rationalization for being an asshole, because there's a certain pleasure to being an asshole and cutting others down to size.

Is there really just a black/white choice between "crass criticism" and "mindless praise"?

Of course not. What about this: filter whatever critique you have to offer down to what's useful to a 14 year old (or whatever they are), and present it with kindness.
Why on Earth would I ever think of searching for that? I didn't even know the terminal screen was an Emacs terminal because guess what, I don't use Emacs. No need to be an asshole buddy.
I get great battery life with my iPhone 4S and Galaxy Nexus when I don't use them for 3 or 4 days...
Lucky :) Even if I don't use my phone at all, it'll be below 80% by this time, and Maps & co seem to be a major culprit, since Now keeps on chugging even when the phone hasn't woken in a long time.

Interestingly, GSam battery monitor (which I just got last week, and is really neat!) shows the number of times each app woke the device. I've been on for 4.5 hours, and Maps is at 441, with the next Android System at 85 and Google Search (which is Now) at 53.

Android System has also shown up more in usage % since I started having Now.

I think there's definitely a significant drain with Now. I've had it enabled since the Verizon release, somewhere around 12/20, but I think I will disable it at the start of next month and keep an eye on how it behaves. I certainly feel that my battery life has gone down since the upgrade.
List comprehensions don't really handle performing a list of actions for their side effects alone.
Ask HN: Resume guidance for UX
I have not updated my resume since 2011 and my brief bit of research on updating it showed that mine is a bit out of date. For example, I use an Objective statement, its 2 pages...

I have a Masters degree in UX and all the typical experience a Senior UX person would have. I also do alot of UX research. Experience working with Agile strategies. Just curious if you had any ideas on what I should or should NOT include these days?
I had to laugh at this :)
"Those studies found mammal diversity and abundance equal to
that of a protected nature reserve, with rare species
including bears, lynx, river otter, and badger as well as
introduced herds of European bison and Przewalski’s horses.
Bird diversity is even richer and includes 61 rare species.
Whooper swans—never before reported in the region—now appear
regularly."

I love how the best conclusion you can get from this research is that even nuclear fallout is better for the environment than the presence of humans in the area.
I worked hard in 2011 to pull my wife back from suicide while I tried to carry on running my business. She came close more than once. I've supported her closely through the patchy public mental health system, private therapy and so on. [And she's in a better place now, but I don't stop watching]

It's interesting that you and someone else here don't recognise those symptoms. But when I deconstruct my wife's experience of suicidal ideation, the article's summary match what I observed pretty closely, in terms of the escalation. She left her job due to latent anxiety, had mental health issues, blamed herself strongly, this turned out to stem from a teenage trauma I'd known nothing about. There more anxiety, drinking, an overdose and a very scary amount of "disinhibition". In the end a 3-day stay in a secure ward and lots of drugs was the start of a slow recovery.

It doesn't describe her mental state. I don't think I knew it well enough, and I'm not sure she'd be able to tell it to you, as your own pain is clearly hard enough to put into words.

But from the outside, I know what I saw, and that article covers. If you know or support someone with mental health problems, you'd do well to think about their behaviour in terms of those categories.

[an HN regular with a throwaway account]
That's fascinating, thanks for sharing that!
iPhone5 requires charging at home, work and in the car.
I maintain on average about 80% battery.

With my usage patterns the battery would probably last an entire work day on a single charge, but I have heard this is not the best way to run the battery.
Yeah, that's kind of subjective by person I agree. I have a Galaxy Nexus and think it's kind of awkward versus the previous 4.3" phone I had before that. I'm 6'4" as well and still think it's kind of large for one hand.
Nice roundup of some bio-medical open-source projects.

As someone who works at an academic lab, though, I think you are being a bit pessimistic regarding the pay scale.
Of course, the USPS is tanking anyway...
I think a lot of creators will need PC's for the foreseeable future. Could you imagine a motion designer editing and colour grading 5tb of raw video footage on a tablet? The problem with tablets is storage. There's no doubt tablets will be as powerful as an i7 PC, but because of their small form factor and current storage technology there is no way to cram 3tb of storage into a tablet without the size of it being blown way out of proportion. The perception of tablets is they have to be smaller than laptops, lighter and fast. With current storage technology a tablet would be indistinguishable from a laptop because of weight, cooling and size factors.
If you haven't already, try the remix album. I love them both, but the remixes are amazing.
I'll ignore your more ridiculing arguments.

You continue to try to locate the problem in middle school while removing any means, direct or indirect, of addressing it. As you observe, speaking at a conference is beneficial to one's career; fostering female participation in conferences advances the careers (and visibility) of females in the field generally. You don't need to bus in a bunch of twelve year old girls and point at the female speakers. You just need the field itself not to look so totally male. In medicine, rising female participation outside of nursing has demonstrably accelerated the rate of female participation since the 1970s. The same can happen in the rest of the STEM field. It's obviously not a turnkey solution, but is valuable as part of a general attempt to diversify the field.
It's clear you don't seem to understand investments, given your assertion:

the IM team did not "pivot" while in YC

Like with any other venture capital or private equity placement, YC starts from the moment the team accepted the investment and ends when the legal entity behind Y Combinator fully divests its financial interests. YC can choose to sell its equity, and their refusal to do so is a tacit approval of the company and its actions.

You are trying to claim that YC has divested its interest. Clearly that didn't happen -- if it already did, then PG wouldn't have had to respond. Stop trying to change the subject by focusing on the application -- the problem you are trying to avoid explaining is on the fact that somehow they went from state A to state B, a massive shift, without anyone at YC noticing (ironically, this is exactly the storyline in the News of the World scandal that you find criminal in one case and plausable in another). YC is a significant investor in most of these companies and (based on their claims) has a sufficiently frequent engagement with the companies that it would be hard to pivot without them noticing.

"I'm not sure where people are getting the notion that YC funds things on some moral basis."

I don't think they are, but PG is in a state of cognitive dissonance: he is trying to claim that he is being "moral" by not sponsoring spam yet is profiting from the practice. That's the part that rubs me wrong (and, incidentally, another aspect of the phone hacking scandal that rubbed me wrong) Defending cognitive dissonance is not just silly -- it's deceptive and does a disservice to silicon valley.
I agree with this if you get rid of any references to morality. Can you explain how a vulnerability scan would be considered morally equivalent to a full scale attack?
At 40, I use girlfriend. Partner is a much more deliberately ambiguous word. Someone who I introduce as my partner might not even be romantically linked with me.
If acceptance decisions were made based on gender, that would be discrimination.

The article doesn't say that.

"To keep the selection process fair, Courtney chose applicants based on their pitches only, without looking at the speaker’s identity or gender. The result was a 50/50 split between male and female speakers, which she counted as a success."

It baffles me how you can consider men an "excluded demographic" in this scenario.
Now "hack" means "disconnect"?
In all fairness, he did call out Apple on the 4" screen being less-than-ideal:

http://dcurt.is/4-inches/
I think a 14 year old should be given different privilege over a 40 year old. The 40 year old already has a life and a lifestyle, probably has kids, a job, and is fairly set in his ways (generalizing here). The 14 year old? - he's in high school and has the option of studying anything and becoming anything.

That 14 year old might go to a hackathon next week, meet lots of kids/young adults like him, hack even more, study comp sci (or not), and become a terrific engineer who builds awesome stuff. Or maybe his hobby dies out and he becomes a doctor or a psychologist or something. Doesn't matter. The point is that the 14 year old is far more malleable than the 40 year old, and we can make a much bigger positive impact on younger kids than we can on 40 year olds.

To the 14 year old, "First App" is probably synonymous with "I am 14." Give these kids a break.
Study proves classroom design really does matter
I was just about to comment the same thing. Being in the first few employees at my last few companies, I often vetoed solo founders. Most of the time for the betterment of the company.
A switch would be good for some people I agree.

But, have you think of the fact that when you load images on various sites they can only track your IP and similar information. But when you open an email and if the image is from internet location it can be used to personally (through your email address)identify you and know that you opened the email.
A "View All" option would be awesome!
Might be used as an excused but they're indeed not authorized to disclose a student's mischiefs to the public, or any other info as it stands.
Party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_and_Justice

Leader: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaros%C5%82aw_Kaczy%C5%84ski

Cases mentioned:

1. Doctor: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawa_Miros%C5%82awa_G%2E . Police action cryptonim was "Mengele".

2. Politician suicide: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Blida

There were many more such cases. Recently other parties want Kaczyński to be brought before State Tribunal.
You Are Going to Die
Thanks for your reply. But Lamernews does not seem to have search. I also found lobste.rs to be good. It is also based on rails and seems like a good choice if someone wants to set up a hackernews style board. Guess I'll try coding up something similar in Django for this month..or does something already exist?
If you do want to read classics from HN checkout my http://waybackletter.com project. :-)
A demographic gets targeted just because it's under-represented. Women are under-represented in STEM for historical reasons that amount to widespread sexism.

You suggest gender-blindness is the solution. I don't disagree that such blindness is a worthwhile goal, but to simply say "let's all be gender blind now" without addressing an existing under-representation just cements the imbalance. Demographics realities have inertia. Women don't go into STEM just because that's not something 'that women do'. It's only appropriate to be blind once the imbalance is wiped out.

That's not to say that affirmative action as previously imagined is the right way to address the imbalance--it's been shown not to be for a variety of reasons. But as this shows, and as GoGaRuCo shows, when you eliminate gender advantages for men, women are selected equally in blind judging, so there's no essential difference between men and women, just an historical artifact worth eliminating.
>think of it as an over-budgeted Daft Punk music video instead of a movie

Check out the Disney cartoon Tron Uprising -- it has a similar but different visual style, a dash of Aeon Flux, and gorgoeus sound deisgn that builds directly off the Daft Punk soundtrack. The story is okay too especially as it gets much darker towards the end of the season.

The show is 5 seconds from being cancelled but the first episode is still free on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjbwVzJR8w4

Rest on iTunes/Amazon/Xbox/whatever
Marco got lost in diagnosis wonderland here. Anti-platform anger is like anything else in the adversarial world of online commenting. People from Michigan hate on Ohio State. People from Alabama hate on Obama. People with PCs hate on Macs. People with Xbox 360s hate on Playstations. People with Android hate on Apple.

If he doesn't see people with Apple hating on Android he isn't looking hard enough. True there are more people that hate on Apple but they are the biggest target now and that's to be expected just as there were more people hating on MS when they were the biggest target.
They probably correlate letter writing with voting, or we imagine they do. Writing a letter takes effort, so does voting. Old people write letters more and vote more. Etc.
It's been so long that paypal has had their reputation, I can't imagine using their services based on a statement from paypal.

paypal and godaddy -- I mean, come on, why would you if you didn't have to?
But relevant to Intel: do you upgrade your PC or get an external drive? Even if everyone still has a PC, longer upgrade cycles mean less revenue.
Aaron Swartz Used this
French talk of taxing Internet public user profiles
This is interesting, maybe it is not the right final answer, but it is the first taxation method that is not transactional or traffic based.

Given the tax avoidance nature of all companies, and the wild success at it that web service companies enjoy, I am always entertained by governance catching up.

Is this rent seeking on truly new revenue, or is this a legitimate taxation of economic activity for the betterment of a society?
I also recommend to read "The Kolyma tales" by Varlam Shalamov:

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

http://www.amazon.com/Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics-ebo...
When did being a professional mean giving feedback from a critical slant? In my professional career I've found advice is taken best when it is:
a. asked for
b. fully encompassing both good and bad aspects

If one can only see the bad in something then I'm not sure how much of a professional they are. There's a difference between coddling and giving balanced feedback.
It's different, though in both cases their being new matters to the feedback you can give.

A 50-year-old just starting out as a developer has already established to themselves that they can survive in the world as an adult; they have a history of successes (and failures, put into perspective over time...) that provide a base to their ego when they're criticized.

A teenager has no context, yet -- no way to assess their own value; a minor success may make them feel like they've conquered the world, but it's fragile. If you tell them it's shit, and they haven't actually done anything worthwhile, they'll may well also accept that completely and be devastated.

I run across teenagers who are surprisingly grounded now & again, but I know I certainly didn't feel like I had solid footing (and could navigate unkind criticism without being seriously hurt) until after I was out of college... and learned I could actually cut it in the real world.
I think Gmail's IMAP implementation is a rather usable and clever hack, actually.

By the way, everything is under one folder, both on IMAP and in the web interface. It's called "All Mail" (Archive)
I'm a 19 year old and when I got into college I remember thinking that I would love to interview prospective students after I graduated.

Maybe you don't care about mentoring young people, but there are certainly many, many people who care a lot about that.
Ashton Kutcher to show up at Macworld as Steve Jobs
You might enjoy Tron Uprising, the Disney cartoon, as a modern take on Tron. Brilliant sound and art design and the story makes more sense since taking place only in universe.
My point wasn't about the power dynamic but rather the perception of effort/thought/care. Even though the message is the same, whether it's "Will you marry me?" or "Will you consider this political stance?", the perception around the delivery of the message is still taken into account.

Writing a physical letter introduces a barrier of effort which separates a two minute slap-out-an-email rant from a carefully composed and considered letter. Imagine if commenting on YouTube required writing a letter? The quality of comments would increase by many orders of magnitude.
and ultimately paid for by the tax payer.. bailout after bailout after bailout.
Odd, my comment did not show,

This is interesting, maybe it is not the right final answer, but it is the first taxation method that is not transactional or traffic based.

Given the tax avoidance nature of all companies, and the wild success at it that web service companies enjoy, I am always entertained by governance catching up.

Is this rent seeking on truly new revenue, or is this a legitimate taxation of economic activity for the betterment of a society?
Recognizing that you're probably just shilling for your own product ...

We use http://sphinx-doc.org/ and author in ReStructuredText with some extensions. From that, we output HTML, PDF and ePub.

There are some issues with the ePub (they display fine, but don't validate), so it looks like sometime soon, I'll be hacking on Sphinx to fix some of the bugs in the epub generation.

I couldn't really be happier with this system.
Most misleading title ever
Boolean true / TRUE wasn't defined in any standard way before C99. Back in the "olden days", most programmers #defined it as 1, but not always. I ran into one of those "not always" cases in some inherited code.
MinoMonsters (YC W11) is looking for engineers
We’re looking for skilled and passionate engineers to join us at Minomonsters.

Minomonsters is a highly profitable iPhone game hell-bent on becoming the next huge family brand. You’ll get to be part of our journey as we expand the game with new features and start to create toys, books, movies and more this year.

We're a tiny, well-funded team backed by some of the best investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Capital and SV Angel.

========

Technical requirements:

* Experience with iOS +OpenGLES

* Experience with Sys Admin & architecting game backends (Ruby & SQL)

* Experience architecting game clients

* Experience creating high performance products on iOS

* Passion for design patterns and high quality, maintainable code

========

Other requirements:

* Ability to thrive in a fast paced startup environment

* A love for the social & mobile games industry

* Meticulous attention to detail in code and user experience

* Experience with analytics and product management

* Able to connect and empathize with our players

* Undying passion for games

========

Responsibilities:

* Front & back end development on exciting new features

* Contribute to the design and direction of the product.

* Really bring features to life by paying close attention to user experience

* Work closely with artists and designers

========

Bonus points:

* Experience managing an engineering team

* A history of building games

========

We offer generous equity and a highly competitive compensation package with great perks.

Interested? jobs@minomonsters.com

Make sure you include something you’ve built that you’re proud of.
Oh for sure. I probably should write a blog post that lists all of those tricks aimed at selective news sourcing VS constant watching in fear that you miss something.
"It hypothesizes a benefit to a group, but no benefit to the individual who commits suicide"

If you know you can't pass on your own genes, then the next best thing is to pass on the genes of your family or close relatives. Committing suicide may (or may not) make that more likely.

I don't think there is necessarily an evolutionary reason for suicide, but it certainly seems to fit within an evolutionary framework.
Great post, but... Power Rangers and Nerf guns? At 14? You might be off by 4 or 5 years. ;)

I'm not sure what about the programming/tech community fosters this culture of wanting to one-up someone who comes along with their work. It's even sadder when they try to one-up a child.
China blocks Github
This is the epitome of a bike shed discussion. You surpassed the parent post length to demolish a throwaway hyperbole. Stay on topic.