skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This experience relates to a startup in 2005 that folded during the credit crunch (2008). I am now working on a new product suite whilst continuing to consult.

The Mortgage Portal was an online marketplace for mortgage brokers to find appropriate products for their customers. It started with an idea that I spent a month building in my spare time. I worked with a colleague (both of us consulting in the mortgage technology arena) to bring it to market.

I started with a flexible mortgage that I drew salary against - so £0 capital. We then went around hawking the idea to the marketplace. We met a lot of resistance from established players (owned by the big banks, so no way we could disrupt the marketplace), and in the end pivoted into a platform for new lenders to get to market quickly. We helped a handful of banks launch new channels in a few months, which was a great selling point. Then came the downturn.

Our sales model was monthly fee + per transaction fee. It was never profitable.

We didn't look at grants/loans. There are some around, but my opinion is they are probably a distraction at this stage. If you're interested look at http://www.j4bgrants.co.uk/ - they have a wealth of information.

The most valuable thing we did was pivot. We didn't pivot fast enough which made things untenable.
We never scaled (started with two, ended with just me), and we failed for various reasons. I could blame the market - all our remaining customers either went bankrupt or closed within the space of a few days - but the reality was that the idea was just a starting point and we didn't move from that.

In my view, if you have an idea, your first step is to go out there and find a customer. Don't build anything (that is the easy bit) before you have someone willing to give you money. We should've done that - taken the idea and then asked what our customers wanted to do with it - rather than impose our views on them.

As for resources, there are many available and it will depend on what your trying to achieve and where you're located. If in London, I'd recommend the Google Campus (http://www.campuslondon.com/) as a good starting point. Then look for Meetups in your area.

Good luck.
it's rarely taught in school. Most people know that you round .5 up, but that is a slightly uneven distribution and rounding to the even number however produce a perfectly even distribution. It's also the way you round in the financial sector.
I want to quickly chime in as well. I don't want to defend Square, but they are simply using a service and are relying on its information. It sucks that your account didn't get approved, but I do not agree with your final statement: "Design is how it works, not how it looks.". Square uses a third party service, and I actually know which one it is. They regularly update their information, yet there are still issues with identities, as it is not a perfect "science". Square definitely did the best to their ability, but due to the fact that they rely on someone else, it won't be perfect. I have worked with the provider in question myself, and I know of the pitfalls. I believe Square definitely solved the issue as best as they could considering the limitations.
Hey guys,

My name is Joe, I'm the author of the post. While I didn't personally post the article on HN (nor am I affiliated with it being posted here), It's still good to see It here.

However the list is just a bunch of tools that I use, and things I found helpful in my front-end dev work. So I wanted to share them.

That being said, as someone stated in the comments, It's not really targeted at the HN community (with super high levels of proficiency.) So I apologize if some of it is too fundamental.

Thanks for all the constructive feedback. I've considered a lot of the comments and will take them on-board. Also It's good to see the community here aren't a bunch of over-opinionated jerks, particularly when things are subjective.

Thanks again to all for your feedback. It's really helpful to hear all your different opinions.
Using Trello for Candidate Tracking
I was recently told by someone who works for an IT recruitment agency that I would find it very hard to get a job unless I already worked in software development. Employers want people with experience.

I think Jeff Atwood has written about prospective employees not passing fizzbuzz. He also mentioned people who claimed to have 15 years experience in software development taking 15 minutes to make a solution.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#1390894695.273252
#07:38:15 28/01/2014
#fizzbuzz.pl
use warnings;
use strict;
my $i=1;
for( ; $i<=100; ++$i) {
if(!($i%3)) {
print "fizz";
}
if(!($i%5)) {
print "buzz";
}
if($i%3 and $i%5) {
print "$i";
}
print "\n";
}

I started learning perl a couple of days ago.
that's what is bothering me. could never figure it out from a UX perspective, but that is definitely it.
There are two kinds of attitudes one can take:

1. It's a complicated problem. I will explain to you why it is complicated. Now it is your problem.

2. It's a complicated problem. I will own the problem. I will insulate you from the problem as much as possible.

It's not pyduan's fault, and I'm not asking him to own the problem. But explaining why the problem is complicated or excusing bad behavior because it stems from a complicated problem is an active barrier to actually fixing the problem. How many indignities do we suffer daily simply because complicated problems have entered the status quo and become our problems?

Hard problems should be challenges, not excuses.
If you have enjoyed your ride on the sirius cybernetics corporation happy vertical people transporter....
Time to build a bridge over vinod's property!
This is just Godwin's Law played out.
Show HN: Snapshibe – Anonymously send "wows" to doges around the world
This was a quick hack thrown together to play with Firebase. Source is over at https://github.com/zachlatta/snapshibe.
Actually, 2^53 different mantissas, plus a few different exponents, depending on the function under test. Also, there's a huge number of NaNs, all of which are equivalent. For ceil/floor, it wouldn't make sense to test exponents larger than 54.
This seems like a nifty idea. I have definitely been plagued with coders block in the past.
The End Of Anonymity
Move Away From Internet Explorer 6 [2004]
Your comment makes me feel sad. It just reflects a whole mindset that makes me feel like an oppressed minority somehow.

It sucks that most people don't really care about performance any more. It sucks when people causally dismiss people who do care about performance with arguments like "premature optimization" and so on.

It kind of sucks that the web is taking over because it gives an excuse to use slow languages. It almost makes me feel sick to think that Javascript stores all numbers as doubles.

So you know what? It makes me feel happy to use the most efficient type that will work. I like my single precision floats.

I can die happy knowing that I didn't waste everyone's collective network, disks and CPUs with needless processing. Can't it be good to save just for the sake of saving?

So you want a practical reason do you?

I shaved over 2 gigabytes off the size off the download size of our product simply by using more efficient data types. Using half size floats is good enough for some data (16 bits).

And let me tell you about a data type that we used to use called a char. 8 bits would you believe! Turns out those x86 CPUs that are sitting there a few VMs deep still support those things.
but these are all fixed point!

When doing arithmetics you can lose as much as 1 bit of precision per floating point operation. So, it pays off to do use more precision for calculations even when the storage format doesn't persist it.

Besides I remember reading somewhere that 32-bit floats instructions aren't actually any faster than 64-bit (except of course the cache...). They even might be slower because the FPU has to extend them to 64-bit before performing the operation
You shouldn't use fixed integers. What happens when you need to represent a fraction smaller than what your largest integer can?

For financial calculation you use a dynamic integer type that expand as needed.
This.

It's been a week now and my select boxes don't scroll, breaking a good percentage of websites. And that annoying as hell removal of the scroll widgets.

I shudder to think if you're using Google Chrome in the enterprise.
Well, did you read the article? It describes manual memory management, which is probably the most obvious reason C is lower level. It also talks about how strings are stored directly as arrays of characters as opposed to objects wrapping character arrays. Finally, C pointers are closer to how the computer operates (they're basically memory addresses) than anything in Python or Java.

What constitutes a "low level language" is a matter of perspective, however. From the perspective of writing binary instructions by hand, all three languages are "high level." ;)
Getting 2 degrees sounds like way too much work. How about reading a plenty of books and research papers?

What do you mean by symbolic or sub-symbolic?
Recently I had to write a program for an embedded Linux router which ran on a MIPS architecture and had a 2MB flash. I only had about 40kb of space to fit the application on. I was able to get a binary that was compiling to more than 1.5mb down to 20kb through using a combination of gcc tricks like separating data and code sections, eliminating unused sections, statically linking some libraries and dynamically linking against others. It once again gave me immense appreciation for having a language and toolchain that can give you this power for those 1% of problems your career might depend on.

For amusement, the relevant section of the Makefile I ended up with:

LIB_NL_MIPS_STATIC=libs/libnl_mips_static

CFLAGS=-Os -I$(LIB_NL_BASE)/include -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wall -Wextra -MD

LDFLAGS=-Wl,--gc-sections -L$(LIB_NL_MIPS_STATIC) -Lbuild -Wl,-Bstatic -lmon -lnl-3 -lnl-route-3 -Wl,-Bdynamic -lpthread -lm -lc

I'm unsure how many other languages/toolchains give you that sort of flexibility down to the linking level. Also it's self contained and doesn't require some kind of "virtual machine" or interpreter to run it.
In engineering applications, it's perfectly sensible to use float for world modelling, which give you precision of about 1 in 10 million. Then you can use double for intermediate results and lose less precision in a long calculation, producing a more accurate result (rounded to float) in the end.

Also, if the dynamic range of your data allows it [and for physical application it usually does], you can first rescale it to [0,1] in order to further increase precision. [It's the interval where floats are most dense.]

Having worked for a few years now in computational geometry, i'm more and more convinced that "float by default" is the way to go. Doubles should be used for intermediate computations.
That isn't my experience. I know several serial entrepreneurs who are much nicer than most people (probably the majority of >2 successful company people I know are "nice"). Most of the genuine assholes I know are unsuccessful, outside of a few horrible industries.

Being an asshole isn't required to be successful. It's a nice think to think the world is "fair" like that, that anyone who is successful has to be an asshole (or that smart people are ugly, or that successful people are unhappy, or whatever), but it isn't true from experience.

There are certain industries which are win/lose, corrupt, and generally horrible, but I don't think tech, especially startup venture-funded tech, is one of them. Would you want to join a startup for below-market-rate pay with high risk of failure and spend 100h/wk for a few months around people who are horrible?
This kind of informed comment is why I love HN. Thanks.
I agree for the most part. There are a few exceptions, however, and no-one seems to have noted/listed them. Most notably, when a process is 'kill -9'ed, some shared system resources stay open. Most notably of those are the named semaphores. This will sometimes cause the process to fail when it is reopened. You can use ipcs and ipcrm to remove those.
The Firefox graph [1] also looks strikingly similar after introducing Silent Updates since Apr. The trend of 'Move Fast And Break Things' seems to be coming from the web applications world into the world of installed applications.

Users seem to be more adaptable to change that previously thought. This is of course thanks to better testing tools which ensures that essential functionality is not compromised by such changes.

With the introduction of OS-level App stores, expect to see 'silent updates' in a lot more consumer applications.

[1]: http://clicky.com/marketshare/global/web-browsers/firefox/
My car was parked at the grocery store during an electrical storm. Lighting hit nearby and my "keyless entry system" unlocked the doors. After that my key fob no longer opened the doors. In the next few weeks I noticed more odd behavior: My dad's key fob opened my doors, my sister's key fob opened my doors, and a couple of random stranger's key fobs opened my doors. I've had the dealership reset my security system three times now at $40 a pop, and it still don't work right. Great technology! I long for the days before keyless entry technology, when you had to use a key to open the doors.
The government banned people from wearing any form of headgear (eg masks/blalaclavas) during protests. Some protestors have been wearing silly things in their heads as a form of humorous defiance.
> There is a reason why silent updates/auto-updates aren't popular in the server/enterprise world because it could sometimes break things.

Thankfully we're seeing a shift where people will accept this if it means serious security issues are fixed promptly.

I frankly couldn't care less if my scrollbar acts a little strange if it means two remote code execution holes were fixed.
A Ring Of Scammy App Development Websites Uncovered – Meet Salsoft
There is also a touch of irony. Buffet has always been about rational investment. Nothing explains his approach better, than "Always take advantage of market folly". If you don't know who the mark is, then it is you. Its a good way of making a point, possibly for the last time as he is 83 and will retire or die soon.
Manual memory management, mostly. Also, since C is a simpler language, its building blocks map more closely with what actually happens on hardware level (or they used to... back in the 1970's).

Then, there's the fact that you do not have direct access to native OS primitives from Java (i.e. system call vs stdlib function), but it has to do more with the run-time environment than the language itself.
Won't it try to rotate about one's hand when one swipes up or down?
Can the revenue-rich National Football League really be tax-exempt? IRS says yes
It's not even about performance. It's about actively thinking about what data you'd be processing. Why use doubles when singles are okay? I'd sure not be using 64 bit ints just because "it's bigger" when a normal 32 bit would be just fine.
I don't know the details of your benchmark methodology or setup (server / client), so not sure I can offer a meaningful response... short of: let's not confuse "my benchmark failed" with "the future doesn't work". Anything from a poorly implemented server (broken multiplexing, flow control, prioritization, etc), to bugs in past versions of Chrome...

Jetty guys had a couple of nice demos they showed off at various conferences. Here's one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ai_rrhM8gA
Nup, iOS is far more secure than android
Man climbs tree with a Motorcycle
Yes, ok, my bad.
Cost will continue to be a factor for many years. A panel of switches may cost $25, While an integrated LCD touchscreen networked back to a control unit may cost factors more. Construction being the low-margin business it often is, I would be surprised if too many LCD panels and voice activation is common in the near future.

What I think is more likely are smarter motion/heat sensors combined with a scheduling system. During different times, certain banks of lights will turn on and off depending on the detection of people there. For conference rooms that may still need manual control lights for presentations, switches are fine because there's only one or two of them. No brainer.
It should also be noted that my specific example doesn't even use or need newtype. It's a sum type that derives a bunch of standard typeclasses.
I'm sorry but I'm just sick of the fat fks who need to drive to a beach then trespass across someone else land because they are so lazy any attempt at adventure doesn't satisfy their need for instant gratification.

Why not leave the beach as it is, a secluded beach you need to kayak to, or take a motor boat if you really must be lazy.

Things earned have value, this constant need to have a road to everything I find so sad.
I wonder what the future is of the homes on Martins Beach.

A few years ago, I was considering buying a home near Half Moon Bay, and at the time a few different "houses" on Martins Beach were available...for incredibly low prices. Forget that the homes are basically one bedroom cottages, they're on the beach!

I inquired about it and learned that the homes are on leased land, and the leases were guaranteed only for another 12 years. No idea what happens when they expire, and if this deal is something Khosola is interested in continuing.
I hear you, it's always good to stir things up a bit. Personally on my campaigns I like to bring in the Iron Heroes reserve hp system. Basically heroes get a pool of double their max hp as "reserve" when they rest they can transfer hp from this pool to their hp. It eliminates the whole 5 minutes of battle 8 hours of resting problem for adventurers.

As for WOTC I'm really unsure how I feel about what they've done. I read that with 4th edition they also fast forwarded Forgotten Realms 100 years and switched it to the new magic system. I don't really read that much fantasy anymore but it still bothers me a little that the Realms I knew and loved are now gone. Kind of reminds me of that old Dragonlance 5th age thing. Oh well I guess I'm just getting old, I'm sure there's lots of people who enjoy having a fresh start. In other news I'm really excited that Shadowrun seems to be making a huge comeback! There's also seems to be some action on the Darksun front, it's really nice to see some of those old favorites that I felt never got a fair shake rise from the dead.
> It's probably not exceedingly difficult to slap an acoustic keylogger near you, then steal all your passwords.

Umm did the accuracy of this technique improve markedly over the last few years, or did I miss something?

Last I heard they got an ~80% per-character accuracy, given it can be calibrated with a keyboard of the same make, as well as the room it'll be in.

Which is enough that it can technically be done, but it's not really a "just slap it on there" procedure.
>[INSIDE.COM]

>Join us

This has to be one of the worst ways to ask for my email address.
What are they using Firebase for?

Great read anyway. I always feel inferior when I see other companies' tech stacks but this makes me realize you can learn along the way and still be successful.
I'm flattered!
If you want a true long tail street picture app, there is a new one - Mapillary - with only phones and HTML5 no cars etc involved, e.g. http://www.mapillary.com/map/im/jvEX_s9fM7SwTDoMdeYDOw - works everywhere where you can have a smartphone and GPS fix.
Well, this explains why my build has been broken for a few days with rustpkg errors. I spent about 30 minutes yesterday looking at it, and I couldn't figure out the problem.
It sounds like you are posting things for the wrong reason
Not sure why you have been downvoted. Chrome 32 was a very disappointing release and has undermined silent updates for me. Many users are experiencing crashes and difficulties with general scrolling and select boxes. These are faults introduced without any must-have feature. If you do silent updates you have to be incredibly disciplined about quality and scope.

My bug-bear is also select boxes. Why do we now have this ridiculous ease in animation? They have crossed the line adding styling that can't be removed with css. I use a site with a dozen select boxes and the effect of each click causing a zoom-in animation is nausea inducing and unfixable.
Hi, I work at Phusion, the idea of these images is not to run both your app and your database in the same container. We agree that the Docker philosophy would be to run those in separate containers, and link them.

The idea is to make sure your app runs in an environment that's actually a fully functioning valid operating system. This means besides your apps process there's also the supporting processes of the operating system (ubuntu in this case).

This enables for example in-container build scripts and monitoring.
most of you are still owned, although your own texts are protected, if the reciepients of your texts dont disable this feature somehow facebook can still see both sides of the conversation
The last Chrome update seems to have dropped support for NPAPI which broke the very useful 'Tab Scrolling' feature from 'Chrome Toolbox' addon.

I have switched to Firefox for now, but I do miss Chrome : especially the awesome Stylebot user-styles for Hacker News, Reddit etc.
You could test corner cases very quickly. Just define important bites, and run permutation on those.
Being an asshole isn't required to be successful. It's a nice think to think the world is "fair" like that, that anyone who is successful has to be an asshole (or that smart people are ugly, or that successful people are unhappy, or whatever), but it isn't true from experience.

[I am only taking issue with this portion of your response and not the entire narrative]

Would you care to elaborate on this? Would you list some striking success stories - besides the Hastings' and the Hoffmans' of the startup world - that have prominently animated our collective imagination and have generally informed us of what special kind of a person it takes to truly strike it big, in the big leagues of startup triumph?

I ask genuinely and without a heightened degree of cynicism.
issue 1: when victims visits attacker's page, I relogin them in my facebook and load /fb/connect URL, which boils down to attaching my facebook to victim's website account = hijacking.
Customers have been demanding books about the WWW, so book stores have been flooded with titles on whichever garbage-collected language is hot for web development at the moment.

Since the dot-com boom, your average novice trying to put food on the table has been unlikely to pick the C title off the shelf when the Java or Ruby book is far more likely to fetch a job in six months. Until recently, the perceived cost of C/C++ tools for mainstream platforms also made the simple Java downloads far more attractive.

Just getting started learning to program myself in 2000, I remember Perl and Java were the things, and PHP a year later. I had to go out of my way later on on to learn C.
The way I see it, this is the same as trying to check into a hotel without a valid ID or credit card. If they can't verify to a reasonable extent who you are, the hotel will just refuse doing business with you. Is that discrimination? No, they would be certain to lose money overall if they didn't do that, even if you in particular are a nice person and intended to pay cash on checkout.

As long as Stripe made clear what their position was, as to not waste this person's time or money, I don't see a problem here. It can be a business decision to flip a coin and permanently turn away all the customers that get the wrong side, if doing that magically increases profits. You can't even call it bad customer service since they are not a customer and will never be one.
Some time ago, I did some Free Pascal programming and was surprised that it was much nicer than C. But C won the war because of Unix OSs, not because it's such a good language.
Yeah, it's breached on the website but it's fb who's in charge.