skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: How we bootstrapped to the #1 rated mattress on Amazon.com
About 12 months ago we founded a bed company called Tuft & Needle. The HN community has been a great source of inspiration/education and we're proud to share our progress. We recently reached the #1 "Top Rated" rank in Mattresses and #2 in Furniture on Amazon.com.

Website: https://www.tuftandneedle.com/
Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/gp/top-rated/home-garden/3732961/

Problem: Painful shopping experience and extremely high margins in the mattress industry.

Solution: We make a good bed without any gimmicks. It is comfortable, safe and attractive without falsely advertised features or fraudulent discounts.

Business: We launched with a MVP and a simple landing page to test our ideas. Then about 4 months ago, we listed on Amazon and it's caught up to be a significant sales channel on its own. In the last quarter we've had 100% month-over-month growth. We don't spend on advertising, and more than half our sales are from word-of-mouth referrals and social media.

Technical: We take a pragmatic approach with everything including the storefront, sales tools, inventory tracking and fulfillment processes. We use 3rd-party services for payments (Stripe), bitcoin (Coinbase), shipping labels (EasyPost), CRM (Intercom), etc. Stack: Rails+AngularJS+Heroku.

Lesson Learned: Our primary success factor was starting with a rough draft. We didn't like our v1 much—an all cotton tufted mattress—but that didn't keep us from launching with it. This gave us a chance to experiment with problem/solution and to start collecting feedback right away. We had to do quite a few returns at first but we iterated constantly until our customer satisfaction was high enough for us to start getting referrals.

We would really value the community's opinion. We want to get as much feedback as possible to make sure we're going in the right direction.

JT & Daehee at T&N
Bots now running the Internet with 61 percent of Web traffic
| But the goal is really long-term, more long-term than work that is currently taking place at Facebook.

I know a lot of discussion takes place that it's a shame that so much work goes into increasing page views, click through rates, etc. But maybe in this case we can think of facebook as more of a "patron" of this technology, where it will benefit directly but also move the field forward.
If you're on HN there stands a very good chance that you're in a mobility category that most aren't. Highly skilled labor has always had lots of options. The options for unskilled or moderately skilled labor are far slimmer if they've bought a house.
I think the predictive framework is a fairly universal one. You could always as a thought experiment feed a predictor all sensory experience humans ever had, and provided this predictor works in a manner in some sense optimal it could answer whatever question at least as well as any person.

Likewise we can already simulate fairly large biochemically accurate neural networks, and it seems a scaling in power would lead to an AGI.

The problem with the previous models is their inefficiency. It does seem to indicate a lack of understanding of fundamentals -- i.e. you can brute force essentially every well defined problem in CS, yet we don't declare them solved modulo some time for computing power progress.
Eh. Different strokes for different folks, I guess. Most of those built-in features are anti-features IMO, and none of them make up for having to maintain long-ass PL/SQL functions as opposed to a reasonable programming language. And as far as performance goes, SSDs are cheaper than Oracle licenses, by a lot.

Oracle doesn't have any magic pixie dust that changes your underlying hardware. If you want raw performance, BerkeleyDB will wipe the floor with Oracle, because it's that much simpler. You've just got a much smaller feature-set as a result.

You probably see things differently than me, though. Related question since you're a DBA -- what are the best practices for testing PL/SQL, you have a link or anything? Every place I've seen it done was a nightmare and involved a lot of crossed fingers during releases.
I did the compo once (solo entry), and I failed miserably :)

I've finished a couple of PyWeeks* , and having only 48 hours changes everything: it's about being focused and effective, and definitely more about game design than actually programming/art.

* Python game programming challenge that happens during one week, that to me translates into ~36 hours of development (because of job, real life, etc).
This month it's 10 years since the last update.
I normally associate DBA with efficiency and performance of data storage. However, you comment describes a blend between that, and a security administrator who's job include the creation and maintenance of high availability plans, disaster recovery plans (like backups), and monitoring.

Do you think the overlapping speaks for the decrement of either profession specialization?
It's not a matter of regulation. It's a matter of liability. As long as the company running the database-as-a-service won't accept full liability against breach of privacy for the information stored there by clients, clients can't store confidential information there.

And who wants to do that?
> So, why is it still conventional wisdom that we get our theories by induction?

I thought the other conventional wisdom is that we get our theories by building mental models. I throw a ball, and I can either remember how it flew in the past and use that to predict, I can also build a mental model from first principles to find out what will happen. Maybe run a short 5 second idealized simulation in my head and I can predict what might happen. Well then I might realize that there was wind that my original model was too idealized.

Another example someone on HN (or an article posted to HN) talked about how would they be able to predict what happens to a pen dropped on the moon. And why did Astronauts stood firmly planted on the moon's surface. It was interesting how many people got that wrong. And the difference was that some seemed to have been reasoning by analogy or have encoded faulty facts (gravity happens on earth), some by past experiences (they have heavy boots), some that have the correct understanding of first principles can so to speak simulate and understand what would happen -- the pen would drop to the moon. Moon has some gravity. So do other planets. And so on.

Now most of these are still based on some principles that we hold true and are "like the past". Gravity is like yesterday, the fact that winds affects objects in flight is like yesterday, speed of light is like yesterdays. There needs to be wide set of known and predictable rules about the world and then deriving or simulating the future can be done.

There can be something in between, maybe if I built a mental model just recently it gets memoized and instead of re-running it I just remember that it is like the "past one" but with a small tweak.

Another mechanism is the "seeker of inconsistencies". Something that understands that these facts together don't make sense. So if I first thought the pencil would float away on the moon and then thought but Astronauts are planted firmly on its surface. This would, so to speak, raise an exception and say "aha, something is not consistent, pay more attention to this one".

But, that is how my brain works. Others brains might work differently. I can inspect to some degree my own thought process but I cannot get into the head of someone else and "see" how they think about things. Do they visualize, to the see words and formulas instead and plug values is. Are some completely unaware of how they think and lack much self reflexive.

I am papering over and being too simplistic here and don't necessarily disagree with the article, that just that reaction when read that paragraph.
News feed for Cryptocurrency community
If they define DBA as a guy who sit in a room 9-to-5 for a $100k+ salary, then, yes, there is a recession, you know. But usually (or rather unusually) DBA is an engineer, who could do much more than looking at EXPLAIN output and tune some variables once in a week.

I have been Informix DBA for years and I could tell that we were the strongest guys in a team, because in order to do our job we had to understand (abstract out of running system) the data-flows, access pattern (and especially locking issues), actual server's topology (disk controllers, channels, hard-drivers) data partitioning (where this or that table-space lives, what's else on this volume, this channel, this controller) what are the access patterns for each table, how indexes are utilized, etc.

We also have patched, compiled and installed all the required software (have you ever tried to compile Informix support into PHP4? you definitely should.)) and to teach coders how to use it, and then deal with access patterns of silly scripts, etc.

The claims that some crap like MongoDB (of all things!) service could replace skilled, productive, (but, yes, quite expensive) professionals is, of course, utter nonsense (what else we could expect from MongoDB?).

DBAs and Sysadmins (real ones, not these clowns who use nothing but chef or puppet and doesn't know how ./configure && make works) are becoming extinct purely from economical reasons, and all these cloud services, ironically, require even more knowledge to deal with, because all that virtualization crap messes everything up even more (google for redis on EC2 for a change).

Sadly, idiots are taking over the world slowly but steadily,)
Show HN: Automated tests, coverages and code quality for Go packages
It's bad science, but I don't think it's bad conversationally. If I say that I think the hardest part of a good streaming media service is getting the data science right, we both kind of know what I mean. It might be useful that I might mean the choice of database or I might mean algorithm. Even though the things encompassed by the term aren't necessarily related, they usually are. Google was obsessed with big data before it was cool and they were/are the best on most fronts: collecting the most data, getting between the user and the data (query->result) fastest, and getting the most correct answers.

The "cloud" buzzword really pissed people off. I thought that was an overreaction too. If you say that enterprise software companies need to deal with these new cloud competitors, you mean a whole cluster of things. Web software, SaaS pricing models and sales cycles, smaller companies that don't run their own infrastructure, etc.
Guy juggles three axes inside on Friday 13th
> For what it's worth, this delay was already removed for sites that had user-scalable=no set. Most mobile "apps" used this.

Is this true for mobile Safari as well?
That precludes removing the delay, since that very delay is necessary to know whether it's a double tap.
Bjoern, fast Python WSGI server written in C, ported to python3
Often the act of throwing "bigger kit" at the problem requires specialized tuning of the DB to be able to take advantage of it.

More memory? Increase the buffer pool size.

Faster HDD? Tweak the settings that determine how many disk operations are attempted every second.

Bigger CPU? Figure out the point of diminishing returns on the number of CPU cores for your DB, and start sharding onto multiple DBs to make sure you can use all of the cores.

SAN? But I thought you wanted performance. ;)

Plus, what gives you the best DB kit for the buck? I could probably tell you that (I am a DBA, and get paid to answer those questions), but do you know? Do you know where to find out?
Yes you can, and a whole lot more.
I spent some time writing Asteroids in netwire - a functional reactive programming library in Haskell - in my free time over a few evenings. I blogged about this at http://ocharles.org.uk/blog/posts/2013-08-18-asteroids-in-ne... - and I don't think it pretends to be OO. It was a radically different style, and I left feeling fairly convinced that FRP is a fantastic model for realtime interactions
I absolutely agree with this. It was very shortsighted that apps weren't, from day one, warned that certain permission types are optional. And it's a mistake with every version of the SDK that they don't add the ability for apps to set permissions as such. Instead it continues that apps work on the notion that if they are running, they must have the permission, when just a few null/error checks would save the day.
Unix and Object-Oriented Languages
I can't speak well for Solr, but with elasticsearch the answer depends on what you exactly mean with "search across multiple columns", but it's probably yes.
DMARC's forensic reports can be used to disclose mailing list memberships
In my experience (as a student of philosophy at a strong university program), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the go-to reference resource for such articles. Here's their version:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externa...
Oh, how sensitive! I had to correctly guess then ;-) No ladies in your life? :-)
Unless you're reading a dense novel, that shouldn't really be much of a problem. Line length is only an issue when returning to the beginning of the next line, and only very long paragraphs will be problematic in this case. Text online usually varies a lot more than a novel - lists, quotes, images, etc. - and the page in question is no exception: it's just a list of captioned images for the most part.

Hacker News, even with its tiny font, is still perfectly readable at a width of 1680 because few comments have paragraphs that are more than 2 or 3 lines long.
I have always understood that setting up a corporation (LLC or S Corp or C Corp) was the first thing one should do, not the last. Perhaps there are tax/revenue/productivity disadvantages to corporations that I'm unaware of?

Just as a trivial example of what the lack of incorporation can cause, my neighbor decided to open a dance studio, foolishly signed a 5-year lease for a space that was unrealistically expensive, and proceeded to fail. She was threatened with a lawsuit to collect the rent. Rather than declare personal bankruptcy which would drag her husband down as well, she negotiated a deal to keep paying some portion of the rent, and had to find a part-time job to raise the money. No more business, and now indentured to some sleazy landlord, all because she didn't think to form an LLC at the outset.
Everything has predecessors. Business analysts didn't previously have so much data to analyze. Now they do, and the job is a lot different to what it was.
Amen. Recent Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition (on iPad) was enjoyable trip down the memory lane.
Ask HN: do you use an app for browsing HN? If yes which one?
Do’s and Don’ts of traveling to North Korea
OOP is not fundamentally about mapping your code to physical real-world objects, but about mapping it to natural, intuitive concepts. Those concepts can, and in many cases should, be as abstract as you like: eg, an "Algorithm" object.

Something like "RectangleCollectionColorPickerFactory" is obviously a confusing and ridiculous concept, and exemplifies a failed application of OOP, not a failure of OOP itself. One could invent equally absurd demonstrations of functional programming, or indeed of any other paradigm.
Double-tap precludes the click event. But touch/pointer events can preclude the double-tap.
Double tap to zoom is native support.
Procedurally generated fractal backgrounds with random seed, that might work?

Anyway, I think it would be perfectly fine if Google matched up emails with similar content and where there was one image that was unique for everybody just remove it, maybe with a note to the user in that case.

Do NOT have a "click to load images" button. If users can't ever see them then it completely destroys spammers' ability to use them even for a rough sampling.

I would love to see spam as an advertising method be completely destroyed. It won't be, because even without tracking it is still easy and useful to spam out lots of ads, but this would help.
Thanks for the info. I haven't previously come across Elastisearch or Solr. Will definitely check these out.
No, see the "Will other browsers do the same?" section of the article.
That's a naive view of both DBAs and sysadmins these days. They both do much more than just keep things running. Sysadmin has mostly turned into opsdev. Same with DBA.
>What are you arguing against? He didn't say that fiction is always better than non-fiction for learning about the world.

And what is the OP arguing about? Mr. Gates didn't say that non-fiction is always better for learning about the world.

>Non-fiction gives you more information about the world by default

Sorry, but it does. Easily testable hypothesis; go to the NY Times Bestsellers lists and compare, book-for-book, what can be "learned" from each (as most of us understand "learning"). In fact, it's hard to believe anyone is actually arguing this point.

Then again, with this community's penchant for nitpicking and distaste for Microsoft, I shouldn't be surprised. As someone who reads 40-50 books a year, I'm always grateful for these lists.
The BS on HN is much worse than anything I've read from Gladwell. Where's your FAQ for that?
What do you mean is unfounded? My suggestion for what creativity might be as be? I guess I was unclear, I don't mean to say I know what creativity is. What I do mean to ask, is whether creativity is something more than just solving optimization problems? To me that way of thinking about it explains many of my own experiences (a-ha moments, unknown time to completion of thinking process, thinking going on in the background etc.) using a formulation that I understand. It is free for anyone to prove it wrong.
> He needs someone to figure out how to make the cartesian product queries he's written into efficient queries.

I wish our DBAs were like that. I am a developer with Sublime Text. I have to make the queries fast. I have to design good indexes.

They can complain if a query is slow, but they never actually help to fix it. They only have to make and restore backups when disks die.
No - DB software is highly dependent on the system it's on. So much of a DB's underlying performance is going to depend on matching the settings you create for your DB to the hardware you're on (and optimizing the system to run a DB).

In other words, efficiency and performance both depend heavily on the machine your DB is running on.

As such, a good DBA needs to be able to do sysadmin tasks. The business won't care that it was the sysadmin's fault for not realizing that a battery had gone dead on the raid controller, and a DBA shouldn't care either. Their purvue is the database, and everything that it entails.
Yup. Though I suspect my university's alumni newsletter also has tracking images in it. I haven't checked, but if I were them I'd use a tracking image.
> 1) Return items that match some search terms I give. I'm
> interested in news items about mental health, even if it's
> poor coverage of a news item that mention MH in a
> stigmatising way.

I have set this up for myself for other topics with a wide range of rss feeds plus some filtering through yahoo pipes. It's pretty simple to do. IIRC there are also some commercial services that offer rss feed filtering.
What is the author trying to say, i didn't get it.
From what they've said publicly they're pushing OpenGL and SDL, I don't see why they would make up another sound framework.
That's the nicest compliment I've seen on HN. Good on you!
There's a page or two on Wikipedia about it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argo_(2012_film)

The basic idea (making a sci-fi film as a cover for getting people out of Iran) is true, after that it's fairly heavily dramatised and pro-Americanised.

Worth saying that Affleck has always been relatively upfront about the dramatisation when asked about it in interviews, though I've not seen him asked about his depiction of the actions of the Canadian, British and New Zealand governments.
The question of whether you are living in a simulation is not merely up for grabs. There is a fascinating argument here[0] that approaches the problem probabilistically; the conclusion is that you probably are.

[0]http://people.uncw.edu/guinnc/courses/Spring11/517/Simulatio...
I simply cannot read any other point into this article. If you want to "create entanglements" in a language, that sound perfectly reasonable, but there's no reason to use the concept of a "feminist programming language".

By spliting languages in feminist, imperative, functional, object-oriented, and logic, you're telling me that the four traditional types of programming is somehow not suitable for a feminin mindset. Why else seperate them like that?

These seems like a project that has feminism tacked on to it's label for no good reason.
Indeed. That's how most desktop browsers handle double-click -- it only happens when the first click wasn't handled (preventDefault-ed). I guess they made this decision for usability reasons (double-tap-to-zoom should always work) but ended up creating a different problem instead.
Whoa, was not expecting to see my company on here. Nice! Where do they get their information?

http://publicapis.com/api/iactionable-api
You're assuming that the only possible horizontal layout of a website is a single column of text. That's not the case.
Awesome. Very heart-warming to learn your story of success. Shows real businesses which solves a definite pain point (that has deep conviction) can be built without external capital.

All the best for your future.
"Working hard" is confusing the tool for the objective.

Are they working effectively?

That last word is the important one. It implies a connection between the work and reality.

Otherwise, people gladly work hard... on irrelevant bullshit that makes them look good but doesn't advance the company.
Databases definitely require knowledgeable tuning. But so do most other complicated moving parts in a modern infrastructure - web servers, app servers, kernels, cache servers, etc. Sysadmins manage those quite successfully. In my experience, they also manage databases quite successfully. The idea that a database is a special beast that requires special keepers is a holdover from a dark age.
Have the pharmaceutical companies been informed of this???
It's snowing in Cairo for the first time in 112 years
There are apps to "fake" your location so maybe you can find a suitable one. I never used one but my external Bluetooth GNSS device feeds its accurate location into Android the same way. Please share if you do find a good one!
How is the performance relative to Heroku though? I have a lot of terrible, inexplicable problems with Heroku (random huge amounts of request queue-ing even at times when our site is below normal load).

I think these are all "noisy neighbor" issues and I would gladly leapfrog up from one host to another so long as the process isn't much more complicated and the performance is more reliable.
For performance you're better of with Unity. For distribution you're better off with HTML5. You can get in the app stores & have distribution on the mobile web, have the game instantly playable in webviews, etc...
Those solutions assume text is tokenizable, and suck at regex. I think they are the wrong tool for anything having to do with domain search. Furthermore, they don't play nice with continuous cron indexing.
MS SQL Server has always been good at managing itself. I can only guess it is getting better.

But Oracle needs the finetuning, and I can't see that changing anytime soon, with Oracle some queries basically require that you use a IOT, other some are better with partitioned storage, and so on.

So your premise is extremely dependent on what DB you use.
Arizona salaries are lower than the Bay Area but not that low, at least in my experience (from living there 2007-2010). Mid-to-senior Java J2EE or .NET programming positions are offering $80K to $100K. There are lots of VB.NET or ASP.NET types of programming jobs for around $30/hour W2 contracting or $50-$60K full time, sometimes more.