skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your investors are unresponsive to your questions? Then they've probably already mentally moved on : They're not hanging on your every word; They're not dependent on you; and you're not letting them down as badly as you feel you are.

If it's any consolation, they may be watching to see whether you just give up, or stick with it to the end. You may be surprised that they would back you again with a different idea, since you're so obviously sweating over every dollar of their money...
Will the deals already bought still be valid if they go under?
Great article, I am close to doing something similar myself, except with Hakyll and a Linode node instead of Github Pages. Pandoc (what Hakyll uses on the backend) gives the Markdown input a bit more flexibility than normal, I think.
Actually, I sometimes make a Old Fashioned with my cask-strength single barrel Four Roses, brown sugar, orange bitters. Remarkably good, very sharp.
I think doing something that eats away 90% of a merchant's revenue is not sustainable in the long run and arguably something illogical if you just run it once too.
OOC, Have either of you built and lost others money from investors as well as lost your own?
> Chris Lamprecht, aka MinorThreat, is regarded as the first person to be banned from the Internet.

That's some serious street, err hacker, cred. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lamprecht

Edit: Looks like the ban was not permanent.
You know, technical arguments why some customer should not be transmitting willy-nilly on these spectrums aside, I always end up at the same conclusion: the customer is fucked. That seems indicative of missing regulation. Picture the scenario.

FCC auctions spectrum to BigBadMobile. Customer enters into contract with BigBadMobile, whose mobile network is completely overloaded and barely reachable for customer, but there are no other providers. Customer installs signal booster at his own cost to enhance the signal to the only provider. FCC turns around and tells customer they can't do that.

Now maybe the FCC should connect frequency allocation with requirements to provide adequate power and coverage to customers, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Thats how state sanctioned monopolies work, right? You get a monopoly on X but you have to provide service to those that would not normally be profitable to service.
Maybe it's not that, at our worst, we're capable of being so much worse than animals, but that we can just do it so well. Or the disappointment that many could do better with a little thought, but don't think much. And there are probably comparative examples of each thing in the "animal kingdom" too.

Resorting quickly to violence to get our way (schoolyard thugs) or to get revenge or to intimidate (posturing gangs). Setting up cultish situations to dominate women and reap rewards of power, money and more (creepy sects). Online bullying (all over the place), gossip, etc.
Btw, I'm not discounting Stripe's awesomeness, but their underlying business model is interesting to begin with, on top of their very-nice culture.
Daily Deals aren't doomed, it's just that businesses AND the people providing the platforms don't really understand how to take maximum advantage of price discrimination. Larger companies have already figured this stuff out and the way they structure their own deals, sales, and price matching should be looked to a a model.
Tesla results renew worries about its long-term viability
> I'd still say The Terror and Great Terror during the French Revolution were far more barbaric while masquerading in the name of enlightenment though

Totally agree with you, and I certainly despise the national celebration of that hideous genocide (and there is no other word for it) called "the revolution" although I am French myself.

By the way, Robespierre was not the only one responsible (Marat, St-Just and others come to mind), and even Danton who was considered as a more moderate representative certainly did not do anything to stop the ongoing massacers and also used the "comite de salut public" to arrest and guillotine political opponents as well.

Yet, you still find streets, avenues, boulevards, schools wearing the name of such butchers all over France.
I'm using Chrome not Chromium, and there's no save icon. Are you sure you aren't viewing this in a proprietary viewer? Typically you should be able to right click and get a save as option.
>the traditional Christian view

There is no such thing as 'the traditional christian view.' There are many 'traditional christian views' and many times they contain mutually exclusive things. Even in the earliest records of the different churches, there are arguments and discussions about what is and isn't "christian." There sprung up groups that mostly agreed on things, and some of those tried to forcefully make others believe the same things, but they never succeeded.
I agree. Here are some CS stats
http://logos.cs.uic.edu/recruit/csstatistics.htm
I've always felt that companies like Groupon, LivingSocial, and Zynga do way more harm than good.

Early on I was impressed by how well these startups were able to capture mainstream attention and change the way so many people live and behave.

But at the end of the day, what value does Groupon and Zynga actually add to society? I'm of the opinion that most daily deals and social gaming companies bring out our most primitive and animalistic tendencies (addiction and impulsiveness), and are antithetical to human progress.

If this is the beginning of the end of LivingSocial and daily deals then good riddance I say.
Generally I'd imagine carriers being very unlikely to object, unless the boosters end up causing worse reception for some of their customers in certain places.
Feel free to reach out and drop a line, you aren't alone and shouldn't feel like it. It's only failure if we fail to learn positive lessons from an experience.

It seems old fashioned, but the business model part of a startup is often the trickiest and the most unknown -- and worth figuring out, because ultimately the go hard or go home mentality.. goes home when they're cut off, or run out of cash. Faking it till you make it saying things are "great" like everyone leaves you where everyone ends up -- going home. Having real people around, not full of phony killing/crushing-it-isms is worth more than funding in a lot of ways, a good group of peers helps pick you up and keep you going.

To the poster, thank you, you're brave in being open and honest so those disillusioned by this kind of thing can't look away and flinch. Take your lessons forward and build something to take care of a problem that others want solved as well, not focused on the goals of investors.
Understanding others, showing sympathy and compassion, being capable of working with other people with a common goal without conflict certainly require wits as well. Don't you think? It was even supposed not so long ago that dog brains grew larger over time because of their constant social contact with humans.
Scientists Working on Creating Their Own Ghosts
If this person has a very good way of explaining to potential employers about the logistics of what went down, it shouldn't be a liability in getting a job and powering up the skills before trying again, if that's their life goal to be self-employed. Most of the startups I've seen fail isn't for lack of technical ability but for completely over-estimating there being a market for their product - either wrong time or wrong market or wrong product.
I was in their Seattle office and they seemed to be spending money on things needlessly. They had events where they spend hundreds yet only brought in 20 people at maybe $10 a piece. Can't say I am surprised.
ugh

Maybe...maybe not. Sometimes capitalization is what your business really needs. Sometimes it isn't. I can provide a whole list of "web businesses" that bootstrapped to profitability, but I can come up with an equally impressive list of companies took really significant capital. I can certainly find businesses that would have not succeeded without the capital to sustain them through their early years (I experienced that first hand) ahead of their ultimate success.

Smart entrepreneurs know how to be strategic with their fundraising. They know when to take money, and (just as importantly) when not to. They know that at key moments a capital infusion can propel a company to big growth. They know that at the wrong moment money can be the distraction that keeps them from executing.

I have a huge issue with your post. You're wrong. Experience has shown me that funding can be a huge asset, except when it's not. It's what makes entrepreneurship so incredibly difficult. Funding, and the way you pursue it, are really tough to choices you have to make. After which you have to live with the consequences. To reduce it to "In life there is a right way to do things..." shows a real lack of understanding of that challenge.
That was a good one, but arguably the simplest "hack" was the Beige Box.

For the uninitiated, a "beige box" was just a piece of phone wire with a RJ11 jack on one end (the kind that plugs into the base of a phone) and alligator clips on the red and green wires at the other end. You used it by opening up the "demarc box" on the side of a building and clipping onto the corresponding terminals in the box, and using the line like normal.

What made this moderately useful was the emergence of COCOT (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones) phones. With a phone company payphone, the "magic" that made it a payphone was stored in the switch at the exchange, and so beige boxing one of those didn't do you any good. But the "magic" that made a COCOT a payphone was in the phone itself, so the line it was hanging off of was usually a plain jane phone line with full long-distance and everything available. So you'd find a COCOT at a strip mall or something, then drive around back to where the demarc boxes were, find the one for the payphone (usually by trial and error) and take it over. Now you could do all the war dialing or calling long distance you wanted. And hiding out behind a strip mall late at night, hidden behind a dumpster or whatever, you were fairly safe from being found by cops. In fact, of all the times we did this stuff back in the day, we never got caught by a cop in the act of using this setup.

Even better, some of the demarc boxes were rigged up internally to use an RJ11 connector, so you didn't even need the alligator clips. You could just open up the box, unplug the wire inside, and plug a regular phone in and have your way with it. :-)
Daily deals like Groupon are fundamentally flawed in certain markets.

The problem is that it rarely generates repeat customers and/or customer loyalty - they tend to generate customers that come once, when they have a coupon, and never come again.

So unless your business is high margin, you're almost guaranteed to lose money from daily deals.

Thus, it's very good for things like paintball and skydiving and very bad for restaurants.
>are antithetical to human progress.

This can be said of many startups, and this fact is causing a reactionary feeling toward the Valley in many tech/neckbeard circles.
I really, really want to write my application as a Chrome packaged app--I love all the advantages that come from developing for the web, and I love appearing like a native app to my users--but most of my users don't use Chrome, and I can't really force them to switch. They want to keep using what they're using. What should I do about this?

I think this feature might be a good start, but it would be great if you could install the App Launcher without installing Chrome. That is to say: Chrome team, have you ever considered converting Chrome into a platform runtime ala the JVM, and then making your browser just one of the "packaged apps" that runs atop it? :)
I don't think thermal or dot matrix printers have ever been cheap, have they? When they were surpassed by ink jets in the 90s maybe they became a specialist item.
A Plan for Startups to Get the Most from New Sales Hires
I listen to podcasts so I can do other things while absorbing information or entertainment, such as driving, doing the dishes, or grocery shopping. In other words, it is efficient!
I am extremely skeptical of this . . .

Of course, there are plenty of job openings that ask for PhDs, but most of the work does not truly require a PhD. Those jobs are filtering out the vast majority of capable candidates while targeting people who have already shown that they would prefer a different sort of work by doing the PhD in the first place. Is it a surprise that they can't fill the position?

Does that mean that CS PhDs can easily get jobs? Perhaps.

Does it mean they can easily get interesting jobs? I am more doubtful.

Does it mean that producing more PhDs is necessary or even useful? I doubt it.
Yet history shows that the greatest "techies" (Kepler, Newton, Galileo, and others) did not work alone and were certainly depending on others to establish their theories and measurements - and many were very much "humanists" and universal thinkers who cared very little about politics and frontiers. Even Einstein who was a key player in developing nuclear power was against any use of it in military conflict. So, I would like to see your list of brilliant and yet cruel techies.
Deploy Wordpress on Heroku
Off topic- dude, your startup is awesome. Automated bar crawls :) And in my cities first! Are you from Richmond/went to UVa?
Very sad. I have some good friends who work there.
When Culture Turns Into Policy
You failing is part of your investors business model. They've moved on, they no longer care.

This sounds like a negative statement, but it actually has extremely positive repercussion: you no longer have to worry about them AND you have a few months to do whatever you want. Anything. Have fun and enjoy it. Maybe build something cool, completely new, something that you want to see exist in the world. And you never know, just letting go of the burden, accepting that what's done is done, and enjoying creating something for fun may actually lead to something.

See: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html
It's not that they are flawed, it's more about the businesses that provide the services aren't in a great position to understand how to leverage the deal.

These can bring in a short term influx of customers but unless the small business has some sense about how to convert those "daily deal" people, it's just blowing money.

In the end, daily deal sites are just another marketing channel. It helps to bring people in but if you can't convert, your ROI will ultimately be negative. This isn't something that small businesses can't understand, it is just not how they view these sites... they only see dozens and dozens of people coming in the door.
This is remarkably similar to what you described: https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
Life Pro Tip: Always have a "plan B".
My problem with Adobe is that whenever I install any of their products I get the feeling I've just made my system more vulnerable to malware and the like. They've got an atrocious record when it comes to security bugs.

E.g. look at the size of this page:
https://www.adobe.com/support/security/
Browser APIs must be built on native APIs. How can they ever overtake them?
Bizarre because the 360 OS just reserves a core for background tasks, including downloads.
If I could add a paragraph to the end:
Yet, sometimes with failure there comes new beginnings. While my pain is real, I do understand that investing is a profession with high risks involved. As much as I hate to admit it, this time I was the risk that didn't turn out as well as hoped. So I have to take this to note and head out to start something new. Endings are too easy. It's the ones who keep the story going, no matter how well it ends up turning out, that get remembered.
You ever hear of Horn from Horn & Johnson fame (Matrix Analysis)? Guy had a 9-5 for years and researched at nights in his home office. That would be my ideal setup, I think.
"Daily Deals" are just one format for solving the physical businesses initial distribution problem. It's a one-size-fits-all solution that actually only works for high margin businesses.

For us, we solved this problem for bars, who have this really specific opportunity/problem where when they really need to fill up their bars at very specific times, when they're empty but didn't expect to be. The reasons are too numerous to mention, but it's something every single bar owner will tell you if they've thought about it at all.

However, other industries have other problems, and DAILY Deals solve so few of them. From our analysis, massage therapists and similar businesses (luxury, high margin, service based companies) were the only ones who benefitted across the board.
"I suggest that you have never actually discussed a domain with a data scientist if you think it's 'basic statistics'."

Utter rubbish, perhaps. But since I've actually done the job, I do happen to know something about the subject. It's a marketing term, not a term of art.

The vast majority of "data science" performed at web companies boils down to knowledge of summary statistics and probability theory, a smattering of basic statistical models, and (most importantly) the ability to write code. There's not much that would challenge an advanced undergraduate, let alone a doctoral-level statistician.
Yes and yes. Wish we were doing more with it, but we are doing a re-launch soon and are launching native apps.
The bookstores are asking the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the publishers and Amazon from “selling e-books with device and app specific DRMs,” while also requiring the big six publishers to allow independent bookstores to directly sell open-source DRM e-books.

It sounds like they are asking the courts to order some kind of "open source DRM" that they can use. If they don't want to use DRM, Kindle and iBooks work great today. If they don't want anyone to use DRM, then the article is misrepresenting them.
I think that's basically what SC1/BW did. There was a professional game last year[1] where one player (Jaedong, probably the best Zerg at the end of BW) had one unit blocking a ramp in his base, and something like 30 hydralisks stacked up behind it. He was attacking the enemy so he didn't notice at first and I think he probably lost his main army but then found a huge second army that had been stuck and just rolled the poor guy.

[1] http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=306999
I'm talking about the internships offered by many tech companies to college students, which are always paid (often very competitively). I'm a student, and have benefited from these myself, but I'd imagine that from an employer's perspective hosting interns is a relatively low-risk way to get to know some potential full-time candidates pretty well.
Before You Go For The Moon Shots, Get People To Click On Ads
No. As you said port speed doesn't matter for data at rest. What matters is ingest/exfil of data due to "exceptional" conditions. Prime cases are cluster/mirror failure. Remirroring existing data to another pod is port limited, as is ingest for pods that are remirror targets.
> If you consider the sheer number of hours I tend to spend on my dissertation work compared to the stipend I get, I'm paid criminally less than minimum wage.

That may be so. Are you familiar with the concept of a wage being equivalent to the marginal product of labor (or value of last hour worked)? :).

I'm with you. I'm working on my dissertation at the moment.
If you restrict yourself to only doing things the "proper way", then you are going to be competing with people doing it other ways, including what you consider to not be the proper way - taking investment to go for hyper growth before profitability. Can your bootstrap startup compete with a startup that has outside funds to hire more than you, market more than you, release more often than you, and learn more than you? I've noticed even the rich people with 1 or more big exits behind them here in SV often still take investments for their next startups. They don't lose all their money if things go wrong, and their investors pull a strings to help them, since they have money in the game. You lose a lot of advantages when you reject investment, and you can end up risking a lot more.
The only, repeat the ONLY thing that matters, is cost to acquire a customer and the value of that customer to you in the term for which you can afford to measure. Daily Deals RARELY put you in the positive for that metric unless your conversions and retention numbers in the amount of time you can afford to measure are fantastic.
Instead of just enabling 2ch PCM from the optical audio port and recording perfect output from there.
You know you can buy the exact same games on PC cheaper, and play with a pad on it with much better resolution and Framerate?

Purchasing a console to play only non-exclusive titles... I have never understood that.
Latest version of Firefox (32 bit) on Windows 7 x64 (fully updated).

The PDF shows up as blank other than the image on the very first page.

I figured. I use the following color settings in Firefox.

- Use system colors (checked)
- Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selections above (unchecked)

The problem goes away if the last item is checked.

Firefox by itself, nearly all websites, as well as my native PDF application, all work right with these and such settings. Firefox's new PDF functionality does not.

In any case, I reiterate my point. It was not a good decision to add this functionality to Firefox and right away switch the defaults.
Too many of our deals are out of date, but soon that's fixed on the re-launch.
Definition of a list comprehension in Python 3.0 is not equivalent to list()
"This year more than 3,400 of Stanford's 6,700 undergraduates [more than half] are receiving needs-based financial aid. Another 20 percent receive other types of financial aid from internal or external sources.

Stanford students from families with income below $60,000 pay no tuition, room or board. Those from families with incomes between $60,000 and $100,000 pay no tuition."
When I was 25 I lost more than $20,000 of my own and FFF money investing in my own project only to have it fail. At the time I was obviously, really upset.

Fast forward to today -- looking back it was one of the greatest investments in my life so far as all the stuff I learned both emotionally, psychologically and professionally has really helped with current work and life.

I used to think losing money was a big deal, but now I realize it isn't. Investors are in a sense "buying" your time. Can you really put a value on your time? Your own life?

Sure, the memories were disappointing and frustrating, but I wouldn't have had it any other way. And yes, I plan to save and try it again.

EDIT: Just to be clear I'm not saying throw VC money around... of course you still need to be responsible.
Try a startup weekend. Thats all you can find there..
The women and children first thing on the titanic was an EXCEPTION: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/07/31/3554854.ht...
I agree with the idea of not being sure about MM's stance on quality. If they literally thought we wouldn't be able to taste the difference - that's a bit disappointing.
You could say the same about the PS4 though, it has a stereo-optical camera, for example. Ultimately all modern consoles are going to be a bit like a "PC", whether the processor is a Power architecture or an x86 or ARM or whatever.
An Introduction to GCC Compiler Intrinsics in Vector Processing (2012)
I've been there too. The first time is the worst.

It was hard, but I still do startups and wouldn't change that for anything.

It'll get better. Don't give up on yourself. :)
Yes, because web browsers themselves are native apps, and so cannot do anything a native app cannot do.
A mix of HTML5 and Native will emerge. Check out 'Native Client (NaCl)' and 'Portable Native Client (PNaCl)'