skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Resources for starting semi-technical business
I'm looking to launch a business in the health insurance industry. I would describe the business as semi-technical in that although coding will need to be done, there are other things that need to be done that I view as more difficult and more important. Particularly, establishing relationships with insurers and major healthcare providers.

My background is in finance. My brother works as an IT consultant to the health insurance industry and is very excited about the project. He also has mentioned the idea to some of his coworkers and they also are very excited.

Right now the business is just an idea. My next step is to finish writing a brief business plan describing the idea, market, and team.

But after this I don't know what to do. I need concrete advice on what next steps should be. Books and other resources would be helpful too.

Some of my many questions:

When and how should I seek funding? I would expect that the idea would take a fair amount of start up capital to produce revenue, but I have no idea about how to begin putting a budget together.

When should entity formation documents be drafted? When to discuss questions of ownership? I don't necessarily want to give equity to my brother's coworkers.

Ideally the company would hire a business development person from a major health insurer. I would expect this to make getting meetings much easier. How do I find the right person?

There are a million other questions that aren't coming to mind right now, but you get the idea. I'm sure that most entrepreneurs have dealt with similar questions. Any help is appreciated.

Chris
> There are CS majors that learn foundational skills but don't learn practical frameworks that companies are looking for.

How many CS majors at more prestigious schools learn iOS or Ruby on Rails through their classes? I think they usually learn on their own or through internships.
I grew up in Maine. The area in green is rather rugged terrain. It's the end of the appalachian mountains with lots of sharp features cut by receding glaciers, then to top it off, it's very dense forest. Topo map (http://www.geomart.com/images/raisedrelief/me.jpg)

Large portions of that area are also owned by paper companies. They obviously use it for harvesting trees but also open it up for public use. That makes it sort of a quasi national park type area except that it's privately owned. There are also a lot of privately owned 'outdoors' cabins up there where hunters/campers go in the summer, and snowmobilers in the winter. Not many people 'live' there, but during some periods of the year there are a fair number of people around, particularly near the larger lakes.

It is a beautiful and relaxing area, I head up there once a year to go camping and 'unplug' from Boston for a week. It is somewhat refreshing to be 80 miles from the nearest paved road and 5 miles of canoe paddling from your vehicle.
Not sure if you meant a book on the web but I liked Venture Deals - http://www.amazon.com/Venture-Deals-Smarter-Lawyer-Capitalis...
It works with aluminium, if you're careful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJlRnCed0bY
I think he mean one single big ass executable is way easier to maintain than pip install & virtualenv everywhere.

Yes we can also make a single big ass executable out of any python code but it's slower and not supported out of the box.
First I'll note that the remaining problems seems to be engineering more than plasma physics -- and most of the show stoppers seems to be solved. If that don't make you go "wow", well...

>>what distinguishes a power plant from other sorts of nuclear reactors?

Again: I argued the main difference here is connecting a heat exchanger, you had nothing to say?

>>What I'm missing are numbers: how much power do they expect to generate from fusion

Again: The target is 6X the used energy for the pistons, according to the presentation. (It is a private company, details for investors.)

(You know the number of pistons, their size/speed. That should be enough to make a good guess on the target energy from fusion. You can also guess quite well the volume of the lead and hence wuite a bit of the pumping needs.)

There are other GF sources on the internet over the last few years, but since you ignore what I write please check them yourself.
I initially posted to refute this claim:

> Given the huge security holes already known to be present in the median auto electronics system, my guess is "absolutely not".

Which is provably false. There is a system to slow down attackers, and it results in a 5x increase in attack time. The rest is tangential to the point.

Yes, it could be better, but you're trivializing what isn't trivial. A 100 minute increase is not trivial. Yes, it'd be even better if it took hours. It'd be even better if it took years. If you're concerned about the security of your vehicle, why have this system at all? It's a trade-off in convenience for security, which many people can afford. All of these are tangents, but they do not qualify a response of "absolutely not" in response to the original inquiry.

Nothing else you've said is wrong, but it seem like you're grasping at other points in order to justify your cynicism, which was proven unfounded. I won't be baited in to an argument that the safeguards could be improved.
The problem of pages like HN and SO is the artificial interaction, which the voting generates.

Yes, they probably can't find out that the 10k-karma-guy is Jack Miller, but all readers of his posts will be influenced by the 10k-karma.

HN hides the karma mostly. But SO shoves it right in your face, that some gold-20k-guy wrote an answer.

Also people will vote stuff up because they like it. This may be because it's high quality, but it doesn't have to.
I don't doubt that you're right about this, but I'm using the (lowball) estimate of the cost of a single developer as a benchmark for the amount of money we're talking about. Also: I'm not sure what you call someone who takes half salary in exchange for equity. It's probably not "cofounder", but "employee" doesn't fully capture it either.
Yeah, fair enough. A bunch of the questionnaires are available publically (see the footer of the site) because it shows off the product and has some SEO value - they all have download links to get Office files with the data.

The value of the product is as a CRM tool for people setting up small to medium size projects (vs $X0 million projects where would have you fill out an RFI for the customer, which is essentially the opposite of this)
Generally, they don't prepare nearly as much as they should, but you're supposed to save money in retirement accounts such as a 401k or IRA.
This is exciting - I think the fact that it has cooling built in easily puts it apart from crock pots for convenience - allowing you to go from the fridge to the stove is really cool.

Now I just have to resist getting a peltier module and making one of these before 2015...
Colleges Want Students with Character, But Can’t Measure It
I think the rule of thumb is that articles containing statistics are guilty until proven innocent. There are just so many ways to get a wrong answer that fits a convenient narrative, and so few right answers.
I understand what you are saying. Its more of a claim that C/C++ does not need this project, as macros are not a necessity of the language.

I think the one thing that this project could provide (though due to the lack of function call access inside of macros that IS provided in Lisp macros maybe not) is to take that 10% of functionality that C/C++ does not provide and make it much more easily accessible. Of course this is always the difficult situation to discuss when first learning about Lisp macros because so much "standard" functionality already exists but I assume the old trusty could be applied here.

In many tutorials for learning Lisp macros the idea of "Lets say you wanted a statement (when <test> <expression>)." Its something that doesn't exist and the developer can add it in during development. You do not have to wait for someone else to implement this into your compiler.

This is a case where Lisp _needs_ macros to implement and where C/C++...can't do anything. Yes you can make a function that is similar to the format required but that is kind of the point. Its a hack to get the functionality and not something that looks natural.
this is what i am looking for.
They do not punch a hole/heart out of the middle of these decks anymore? When I was younger my grandfather would always bring me decks of cards and they all had holes punched out of the middle.
> 1) Strong Preference for Immutable Data: Javascript's object model isn't particularly confusing: If it's not a primitive, it's a reference.

No, everything is ALWAYS a reference.

This is, in fact, enshrined in the ECMAScript standard. Everything is a reference, and gets passed to GetValue() when required.

Now, some of the JIT's do a phenomenal job of backing this out, but it's always a hazard.

There is a reason that the newer versions of ECMAScript are trying to specify constant type variables and immutability in globals.
And I see no reason for you to assume that my concern for another human being is somehow projection.

You like being alone. Congratulations. So does he. That's great, and I never said it wasn't OK. I tried to make suggestions that people for some reason didn't appreciate; that doesn't mean I was condemning him or his lifestyle (or your lifestyle).

Anyway, this is past the point of productivity. I tried, no one appreciated it, and I'm not going to apologize for other people's uncharitable misinterpretations.
The fact that you're trying to stick with strong typing as much as possible is very appealing to me, and now I'm convinced to try to port my new project from Martini to Goji.

I think this is a good point to differentiate yourself on, and perhaps it should be included in your elevator pitch.
Oh good, a witch hunt! Let me get my pitchfork sharpened and fiery.
Because if NIST waited much longer we couldn't even trust them on the length of a meter.
Seconded if there isn't any complexity, e.g., depreciation of equipment.
Much of China eats out at least once daily, often twice or three times, has cars or at least motorbikes/electric scooters, and doesn't pay any tax at all.
Check some of the books and links in this list.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429222
Also worth mentioning:

CodeNow (DC and San Francisco)
http://codenow.com/ (currently appears down)

CodeCamp (East Palo Alto)
http://www.epacoding.com/

For people in the tech industry, helping out programs like these is an awesome way to give back. Fun, engaging, direct, and makes good use of the skills you already have (i.e. in a volunteering teaching position).
How so? Do you just mean fewer people knew PPC? I'm not sure I follow this.
While the article mentions a bunch of different explanations for this phenomena, most of them are from the point of view of the well-off. The most telling explanation (in my opinion) is stuck at the bottom of the article.

The author mentions that, with the decreasing costs of leisure, "low-earners do not need to work as long to enjoy a reasonably satisfying leisure." This is the biggest difference when comparing current state of work to the Downton Abbey era mentioned at the beginning of the article.
CrunchBase gets a redesign
I took an AI class and also a computer graphics class at a CUNY school in the fall of 2013.

Among CS-major seniors who are in the top half of the class, none that I talked to knew what software version control was, what git or Perforce or cvs etc. were.

The faculty is good. Almost all of them knew their stuff, and a few were very good at explaining things clearly.

The kids just didn't seem to have much interest in doing computer stuff outside of class. You'd think at least once in four years they'd browse Github bug reports, do a patch and send a pull request. They don't though. The ACM computer club on campus was always a little derelict and is now pretty much inactive.

A lot of kids have vague ideas about building video games, but then take a graphics course which uses matrix math to calculate transformations, formulas to calculate Phong shading and so forth. After doing that they lose interest.

They do get training - the theoretical stuff is taught beautifully. We also did a lot of Java and C++, as well as some Python, Common Lisp, Prolog etc. As well as learning about DBMSs and the various normal forms, or how the fetch/execute cycle works etc. and all of that.

I don't know how to explain the problem other than that students did the work for a grade and that was it. They had no interest in programming outside of class work. One reason I did extra work was just to feel I could apply things. I learned Java, and then fixed some open source Java bugs, and then wrote a 1000+ line program in order to get a grip on what I learned. Otherwise it would be free floating theory about inheritance, polymorphism, objects etc. The same with graphics - I did some OpenGL work to ground what I learned in class.

Some kids did not even really seem to care about learning what was needed for class or getting a decent grade. I don't know why they're even bothering. I can see slogging through required general classes, but slogging through your major?
I cleaned out all the junk, repaired the window shutters, hung some plastic to catch water drips, put a new sheet of plywood on a table, built a new "coffee" table, re-hung the door on it's hinges and generally tidied up.

Remember, the daylight up here is already 6am-10pm, so there is tons of daylight for activities, and lots of the cabin work can be done in the evening, when the sun is setting but it's not yet dark enough for Northern Lights photos.
Unconditionally – Unbounded Official Accoustic Cover
No, these days on the cards they sell in the gift shops they shave 2 of the edges off. They still stick out if put in with other, non-shaved cards in live play at the tables, but are more useful than cards with holes in them :).
For the purpose of assessing how densely populated places are, this map is extremely misleading. A rural area with one farmer in each block will look just the same as a city, and both will look more populated than part of a busy highway or waterway with no permanent residents. It's mixing up information about the discretization with information about the population. It reminds me of those global statistics maps that always show Alaska as having the highest GDP in the world, or most of your website visitors, or whatever just because it's lumped in with the rest of the USA.

This 3D population density map is pretty nice although it seems to have larger blocks.
http://undertheraedar.blogspot.com/2011/07/united-states-cen...
IMO, the earlier design was much better on the eyes and a lot easier to browse.
The Coin Market API
Scientists create graphene in kitchen blender
And they have a name-brand degree going for them.
While going through YC for no money and 7% would probably be worthwhile for many startups, simply for the exposure and advice, I know for a fact the ostensibly terrible terms have deterred many good applicants. I tried for years to apply to YC with a partner who insisted on not taking such terms. While I think he was wrong (and perhaps that signaled some other problems with the partnership,) I'm happy to see the issue go away. A valuation of $1.5-$2M is quite fair for an early stage startup, particularly with the value-add of YC.
Thanks dude, but in fact I got the invite from an hidden link in the Google analytics documentation...(did not pay anything) I don't think it has any value tbh. That's said
i am happy to talk about it - And might be happy to give it for a good dev (FREAKY DEV) for a reasonable price.
Anyone?
I'm under the impression that entry-level CS jobs pay well enough now that there are people who enter the field because of the money, or because their helicopter parents told them they'd get a good, stable (ha, ha) job in it, and not just because they love the field.

I personally think that's a shame, but on the other hand, I'd rather it be CS than, say, Actuarial Science. If you love food, for example, I bet there are jobs that tie CS and food together. Same for finance, etc.

I recently read Marilla D. Svinicki's Learning and Motivation in the Postsecondary Classroom; I'd recommend you borrow a copy from your local university library if they have one. I think there's a lot that instructors can do to make class more interesting for students and also have them learn more in the end. Though juggling that and research is a challenge in and of itself.
True, but they would simply assign them different two letter TLDs. For example, compare Montenegro (.me), Macao (.mo), Mongolia (.mn), Malta (.mt), Madagascar (.mg), Mauritania (.mr), etc.

I can understand how it would be frustrating, though. For a long time, the TLD for my last name (two letter last name) wouldn't allow second level registration.
Ultimately, didn't popcorn time get removed by its own maintainers?
FenOS to support all binary formats and hardware
Deserves a ton of credit for record length sentences. A lot of those paragraphs are two 50+ word sentences.
The title is misleading. Differences in the _mean_ time available for leisure can be the result of (i) shorter hours worked by those who are fully employed, or (ii) more people who are underemployed (working less than they/society would like).

If all middle class people were to work 50 hours per week, and 50% of poor people were to work 2 jobs (80 hours per week), whilst the remainder were unable to find work, the mean leisure hours would show the middle class working longer hours.

The median leisure hours of the two groups would be more useful.
Autotools all the way.
That's true. The latest OSX releases won't install on some of the early Intel Macs. I've heard it's possible, with a certain amount of hacking, to get an early Intel MacPro for example to run 10.8 or maybe even 10.9 but it's unsupported.
Yea, he's wrong on that. The point of tailoring languages to a string still -- weakly -- stands, though: but he could also do that for a finite number of strings. Weakly also because he completely misses the point of Kolmogorov complexity. It's not meant to be practical in any way. It's a mathematical tool to uncover some facts about the complexity of things (mostly mathematical objects) and a more solid framework for data compression and randomness, which he glanced at the beginning of the article. In a sense it's like other non-computable constructions, it provides truths without specific instances, because their existence would be too powerful.

Some of the interesting theorems are found in a chapter of the following book:

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Information-Theory-Thomas-Cov...

It gives a good grasp that Kolmogorov complexity answers meaningful questions not well defined in regular information theory: questions of optimality in finite lengths.
If you didn't take them out of circulation, what would you do with them? Stores, banks, and people would be stuck with their piles of pennies. You'd end up with a situation like US dollar coins: Half-hearted attempts means nobody really bothers to switch. If every cash register in the country, and every person's pocket still has pennies in it, would people really start doing the five cent rounding?

It would be a pretty poor currency user experience.
They don't need to get it right. Its probably as realistic as Entourage is/was to Hollywood. Hollywood actors thought Entourage was far-fetched during season one but they still tuned-in for each episode and it ultimately turned into its own reality, as it should. After all, it's entertainment!
history of the food stamp program is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/21/us/50-years-into-the-war-o...

tldr rural us poverty. exactly walmart target market.

you won't find {whole foods} anywhere near there.

but, sombody has to feed the poor... so nbd.
They're there because they heard they'll get a big salary they don't deserve at the end of those 4 years, not because they have any interest in the field or want to contribute anything to the world.

It's probably been like this since the dot-com era and the mediocrity has only snowballed since. The state of the software industry and the educational institutions around it is an embarrassment. If the curriculum was any good, these minimum-effort clowns would not be able to earn a degree in Computer Science.
Back a Howardian fantasy tabletop RPG on Kickstarter
You MUST see/listen and SHARE this Support the Troops
And if you do, I'll write about the character generator I'm writing for it with Ractive.js!
Great looking web site. Perfectly in tune with the product; at least that was my impression. I wish I could eat it.
If anyone is interested in the advantage Phil Ivey had in the Baccarat game, it can be found here (disclosure it's my site): http://www.uspoker.com/blog/putting-iveys-baccarat-session-m...
This is simply incredible. I'm just blown away by it.

I wonder if you could get better performance when running locally by sending the result through a spellchecker and doing some Bayesian magic on the word choice...
Thanks. I was just joking and it seems like a lot of people did not get it :(. My joke was targeted to the people who think if there is one programming language left in the world it should be Java.
I think he is appealing to intuition here, where randomness means you can't predict the next drawn value with accuracy better than uniform.

But you're right, you can draw randomly according to a different distribution. However, if you allow any distribution in your definition of "random" then you get the constant distributions. It's not very intuitively random anymore. So the question becomes, how do you pick which distributions are allowed and which aren't?
7% for 120K???? what kind of goddamned mcdonalds burger flipping founder would accept such a horrible deal?
He didn't say it was like card counting. He said that it exists on a continuum, somewhere that is clearly less legitimate than card counting but not obviously cheating like bringing loaded dice.

Your analogy is actually worse; the cards came pre-marked. So they didn't mark the cards, but they did go out of their way to exploit the existence of marked cards.
Vox is probably the best alternative I've found, particularly with its support for FLAC (I know I can transcode to ALAC).
Again, thanks for the color.

I hate to think that _anyone_ thinks this is 'pithy' (or overly concise to be clear) rhetoric though. It's a simple observation, but I feel it's one that people seem to miss quite often when dissecting events of moral ambiguity concerning companies.

The point is this; we _have_ to get stronger at holding companies accountable for things we feel are suspect. That's all. Otherwise the playing field is more open to nonsense like BFL pulled.
The War of Art
NYPD’s Twitter request for photos backfires
And if you shrink the size of the census block even further you'll find that an amazing 90+% of land isn't actually being occupied!
The timed refrigerator -> cooking -> {refrigerator / warm} cycle alone makes this a really, really nice idea.

The thin clear container and large volume of water is going to be a bit rough on power consumption for that use-case though.
Marvell Technology firing 200 in Israel
I've definitely learned this one the hard way. At first I was excited about having everything at super low ISO. Now, I take a few quick shots to see what the lowest I can get away with and still get quick pictures.

Heck, often times I'm happy to just take videos. Really liking how well they turn out with this camera.
Shipyard if you use docker.
Skylight, cheaper newrelic type solution, for rails apps
> And they have a name-brand degree going for them.

And you can bet your ass they know what "version control" is and can pick up some flavor of the month framework without someone needing to hold their hands.