skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Be my mentor or startup advisor at Salebox.co
You are passionate about startup entrepreneurs. You have successfully managed to start a business or work with startups. You have a passion for eCommerce. Please I need your help!!!

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Basically, I need your help because I have tried to do business since 2011 but lamentably failed. I have tried starting different businesses but i have always ended on the losing side (to an extent that I found myself in terrible debt). Recently, a friend who happens to be a distributor gave me about $15,000 worth of goods to start a wholesale business. While doing the wholesale business, I have discovered that many consumers are exploited because of the complex system surrounding the distribution channel. Goods and services often pass to consumers through multiple channels. While increasing the number of ways in which a consumer can find a good has the potential to increase sales, it also creates a complex system that can also make distribution management difficult. Consumers usually pay high prices for goods purchased because of the middlemen between the manufacturer and the retailer. At SaleBox, our goal is to create a platform that will allow small scale retailers to buy products direct from manufacturers just like supermarkets do and hence enable consumers to buy goods at low prices.

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Help me make this a reality.
My code doesn't work under race conditions. You're right the increment should be done before and the decrement after to avoid races. I just banged out the logic without giving it too much thought.

On removing redundant incref/decref pairs - this is nice, but it seems mostly a benefit because of the "automatic" part, not the refcounting part. Developers dealing with manual refcounting would probably recognize places where refcount manipulation is redundant and just elide them. A naive automation ends up inserting them everywhere, and this helps bring that back to what a "smart developer" would have written anyway.

On your second point, I've heard about this trick - in particular in smalltalk implementations. It's something I haven't fully looked into. It seems like the in-pointer refcount would only be valid if the pointer never escaped the function frame. More generally, you'd have to be able to guarantee that a particular pointer is the only reference to an object before the refcount could be stored in the pointer bits itself.

If you have more insight into the implementation of this, I'd be interested in hearing it. This "small refcount pointer tagging" thing is something I've been meaning to understand better but haven't gotten around to.
Apple changes policy, allows Bitcoin apps
With 5 upvotes in a short time and no presence on the front page, you likely set off the voting ring detector. (Retweeting direct links to the HN posts with all 3 of your Twitter accounts doesn't help)
There's already permissions that are only usable by Google's own extensions, so they could do something like that.
"At Y Combinator, we advise most startups to begin by seeking out some core group of early adopters and then engaging with individual users to convince them to sign up." Sounds like marketing and user acquisition to me...
Indeed, as far as I can tell an atheist/agnostic (the latter would be me and my father) who's minimally respectful of the religious will have a much easier time of it here than a conservative (that would also be me and my father) in those various enlightened big cities and industries. As long as you can tolerate the occasional born again Christian who wants to save you (again, politeness goes a long way).

As for LGBT issues, if I just restrict it to "gay bashing", the lists here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_a... and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significant_acts_of_violence_a... show that big cities are not even vaguely immune to the problem.

(Although I'd caveat those lists of incidents based on the ones I actually know something about: Harvey Milk and George Moscone weren't killed because the former was gay, but because of SF city politics and their murderer's personal problems (that the conviction was for manslaughter with a short sentence, well, the Twinkie defense is another reason SF is infamous). The 1999 Fort Campbell incident was not as generally portrayed, although my information is not citable, comes from the son of a good friend who was there, collected evidence, etc. And lately the beautification of Matthew Shepard has come under serious reexamination.)

Perhaps because so many of these cities were and still are very anti-effective self-defense, there's this partial answer to the problem which is much more applicable in "small town America": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Pistols
50 Cent Is The First Rapper To Accept Bitcoin As Payment For An Album
Off topic: Have you used this at all? If so what's your take on it? I've heard about it and that's pretty much it, but got the gist that it's more of a "toy" development environment than anything else.

--No offense meant by "toy"--
It's a wonderful way to get people to leave your site immediately. It showed up before I was even a paragraph into the article. First off, I have no idea if I even care to get updates from you guys at that point, because I haven't read anything yet. Secondly, I ended up not reading anything, because as soon as it pops up, I left, as I'm sure the majority of other readers did as well.

I only came to the comments to make sure someone pointed out how awful that dialog is.
The sassafras oil is also used to make a pile of perfume, cologne and aromatherapy products, as well as pesticides like piperonyl butoxide.

Although some sassafras oil for clandestine production of chemicals may come from such unsustainable farming, most probably comes from diversion.

Anyways, if sustainability of the source tree is the biggest issue, I'm sure most consumers would have no issues with a $1/dose sassafras tree sustainability fund contribution.
I had a slightly different reaction to the "high standard" bit. I always thought Prof. Boneh was a high standard. Does anyone know if there were any obvious reasons to exclude SJCL?
Slide: 4 User Onboarding Hacks Using SMS Messages
Something doesn't add up to me: either we lost de definition of Marketing, or Markteers that start-ups get are not doing their job.

Marketing is the way to get sales. We measure the success of Markteting by sales. It's the whole purpous of it. If the focus on Marketing is not being reflected on sales, then their Marketing Plan is not working. I think it's as simple as that.

The broadness of the audience is irrelevant when it's clear what is the target for your product - everything outside the target shouldn't count.

It all comes to the hold saying: if you want to please all, you end up not pleasing anyone.
He instigated a few reasonably influential movements, I think influential people are maladjusted almost by definition. Whether or not he is universally adored is irrelevant to whether or not he has clout.
Yeah, sure buddy. I think you're just kind of a noob and are really not getting the whole picture yet. Google around for the debate, it's been thrown around for ages, or start here maybe.

https://www.npmjs.org/doc/faq.html#Should-I-check-my-node_mo...
Would be great to see how well this works (especially over time). I've used IdeaPaint before, but it always seems to get worse and ghost over time. Also it's quite expensive.
There is good cause to believe that MDMA will be legalized for therapy of ptsd. Veterans from iraq and afghanistan have ptsd in huge numbers, and it's expensive for the government. There are studies indicating it's highly effective in treating ptsd.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/29/5664700/ecstatic-states-md...
Memacs – Quantified self in Emacs
Is it FOSS? Other browsers could use this technology.
> for the same reason the effect works in a mechanical DSLR camera

The sensor on the back of a camera is a flat plane, which is why (with most lenses) you get an image where straight lines appear straight. The sensor on the back of your eye (the retina) is curved.
No, havent tried it, just seen it in the store.
Thankfully, at least someone on the planet tried to rank the relative harms of drugs. He was, of course, not a politician, and the nearest politicians fired him from his scientific-governmental posting.

David Nutt published his rankings here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2010/11/drugs_caus...

Alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine topped the list, in that order.

Ecstasy was near the bottom of the list.
Just when I get the hang of using them in designs, now they're not OK?
Apple Dumps Google Search For Microsoft's Bing
I think they always say that for the Betas.
RationalWiki article: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sanal_Edamaruku
There's Huge Risk in Not Trying
Crime Over Time: Visualizing Crime Data in Chicago
It's awful. I've worked at places that tried it in the past and it didn't erase worth a damn.

I hated them so much that I keep an eye on CL and I wait for the magnetic dry erase boards to come up. They cost so much that the enamel ends up being very high quality. I got a 4x8 one used for about $150 when I needed one vs the $500 or so it would have cost new. It sucks having to wait but having a dry erase board actually ERASE is just so nice.
If there's no illness, the doctors must be really good! :)
I really like visual studio as an IDE, but I find myself really liking some of the things in 14. vNext, removing the cruft from my current stack, Rosyln at it's least simplifying the difference between my intelisense and actual compile.

But as you are on the TFS team I feel you are a good person to ask, are there many improvements from a TFS source control perspective? It still feels 'clunky' if I want to commit and run a specific build it's laborious. Oh and lets not even ask why my visual studio online builds, with their paid azure account haven't built anything in the last 5 hours :(

I do like the ecosystem, I like an IDE that lets me do everything in one place, that is extensible enough to ensure I can od everything I need there. But the current interactions, maybe tonights downtime has made me angry, are rather disappointing.
Yes, however the raycasting is drawing pixel by pixel. That part is not hardware accelerated, and that is the expensive part. That is that part that shaders speedup a lot, by delegating a lot of the work to the GPU.

Just compare with this pure fragment shader demo: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MsS3W3
I actually disagree with your definition of supercomputer, and liken it to any compute system or cluster with more power than an average enterprise server or workstation. After all, they really exist to solve problems which can't be solved by traditional computing.

I think the metric of it being one of the fastest 500 in the world is a little disingenuous to all of the other supercomputers out there.
As a matter of fact, i actually got blocked by the web installer. It denied installing it sire by side
Wrong movie -- you're thinking of The Empire Strikes Back.
You can't overwrite your data and can't delete it either? I am puzzled.
TeXZilla: Unicode JavaScript LaTeX-to-MathML converter
2. In the corporate world at least, leaders are usually very encouraging of generosity or high-performance; it benefits their organization, after all. It's punished by peers because leaders encourage it. The peers are all in competition for a scarce resource - the leader's favor - and so when the leader bestows that on one individual for a particular accomplishment or act, that one individual ends up being resented by all their peers.

Think back to elementary school where the teacher's pet would get hammered down relentlessly by her schoolmates until she stopped speaking up in class. It's the same dynamic: overperformance leads to the lion's share of the teacher's attention, which makes your peers feel shortchanged, which results in social consequences for the overperformer.

This is also behind the conventional wisdom that "You can accomplish a lot in a big company if you don't care who gets the credit." If you overperform but then make everybody else look good, they won't resent you for it, and instead will help you out next time. That results in continued overperformance, as long as you can continue to stomach putting lots of effort in and lots of other folks getting the credit.
You can still make a lot of money off high virality and no retention. You just have to recognize it for what it is: a cash grab rather than a sustainable business.
"I use `var` everywhere and I'm pretty sure I should be using `let` a lot more. I haven't worked with Swift enough to have a strong intuition about when to use either."

I think you should type let everywhere, except when you cannot get away with it.

So, it is var when declaring a loop variable. Elsewhere you almost always can introduce a new name. So, instead of

X += 1

do

let newX = x + 1

Those rules are too strict, but not much so, and you will learn the difference faster if you overcompensate.

If you find yourself creating a newerX, a newestX, etc. you may be better of with a var, but chances also are that you are better of writing your code differently (for example can you iterate over a constant array of values instead of doing x+=1 a few times? If your function needs to create 10+ Local variables, can you factor out a function?)
Is Uber worth $17 billion?
Seconding the awful.

Besides being hard to erase and leaving ghosts behind, this stuff does NOT cut easily. The finish is very thin and will chip like crazy when you try to cut it.
> I guess my gripe with the interviewee is that he has a notion of how society should be, and argues toward forcing economic redistributions to make it happen ... decrying & denying the reality that the economy is what it is, on the whole, because it's the cumulation of free choices. Sure, I could be living a "life of leisure" (and nearly did) enjoying majority time of idleness; instead, I (like most) chose a more frantic life of productivity (and sometimes gap-filling) so I could enjoy relatively luxurious goods & services with the swipe of a card.

This line of argument ignores the obvious collective action issues in play. I think everyone could work 20% less, and make due with 20% fewer luxuries, and 90% of people would be happy with that trade-off. But any given individual can't work 20% less, because then they'd get fired, and their kids would go to shitty schools in places with lots of crime and not be able to afford medical treatment if they got sick. So everyone works more than they want to, and most of that extra production goes to shareholders.

I'm not a "life of leisure" kind of guy. I'm a workaholic without many hobbies and not a lot of patience for relaxation. But I'm almost positive that people like me are in the distinct minority, and can't help but feel that it's us forcing our values on everyone else.
I was at a board game convention, as a venue to launch my site gamerustlers.com, and although we got great reactions, what I really cared about was how many people walked up to the kiosk and actually signed up. The second metric was how many signed up on their phones. While in Beta the site is free so I can't call them "sales", but there is a HUGE difference between someone saying "Hey, great idea" and that person actually signing up, even when it's free to do so.
One sounds evil, the other sounds really evil.
Ah neat, I wasn't aware of this. Every mac I use has the press-and-hold mechanic disabled to support a higher repeat rate. I might have to go back and play with it some more.
Virtru has draft protection in Gmail.
Visible help, yes. But as a programmer, I help to write HTML/CSS and rails and js code that makes a friendlier and more engaging UI that makes every user's shopping experience that much more pleasant; also unlike conventional charities that offer sometimes intangible emotional support, I can quantify "the net happiness add" by Google Analytics, the higher the conversion rate means, higher the user's "engagement" and contribution to my company and shareholder value.

I'm also contribute back to the tech community by sharing my code that I experiment on my own during hackathons and weekends on Github. Unlike other professions where things are not as transparent, I love that our field is always on the cutting edge, experimenting with the latest frameworks and technology and sharing the results (be as it may that sometimes it's not as well-documented but I make up for it by writing an enthusiastic blog post about it).
Terrafugia plans to have first flying cars ready in two years
>"I believe you're still misunderstanding the issue. A good fraction of engineers count among those whose lives build something and help people. Engineers who build user-facing products are still vastly underpaid relative to rent-seekers, like hedge fund managers and CFOs."

The alternative explanation for this phenomenon is that we all choose different blends of monetary and non-monetary remuneration, according to our skills and desires. Some may derive great joy from helping others, and accept lower pay for this; others may eschew the socially rewarding jobs in favor of occupations which provide financial security for their families.
> Reset the Net
> Your SSL purchase helps fund the fight for online privacy

WTF kind of joke is this? I don't even...
I was trying to crack exactly the same problem a decade ago - I was very frustrated by "classical" perspective distortions (such as looking up and down at a very tall pole, you notice in 3D projection the projected width at a given height changes depending on the pitch angle, which is counter-intuitive as your eye doesn't do that).
I searched for answers, read Denis Zorin's disertation from Caltech, various different camera models etc.
After one talk with a neurosurgeon he mentioned that those "perspective distortions" are perceived often by patients after a brain surgery and as the brain heals the normal undistorted picture begins to emerge.
I am still curious if there is a more realistic mathematic formula that would allow us to have exactly the same perspective projection in 3D graphics as we have with our eyes. Anyone knows any recent research on this subject?
Thanks. No worries. It will be great if you can show the site to women known to you.
They also sell whiteboard material, whatever that is. It cuts good, erases as well as the real thing. I recommend it.
Three.js and d3 force layout
Would it not be because the retina is curved?
I think the article's message is same as "Do things that don't scale". Marketing is something used to get users in large volumes (certain groups) vs sales is more of a one-on-one approach. Once you have figured out what works in these one-on-one sessions, you take that message and scale it up as your marketing message.
He addresses this explicitly in the interview: he's not telling anyone that their job is worthless, he's saying that if you think your job is worthless, you're probably right. You, after all, have much better information than either your employer or a random anthropologist. And he said he received numerous heartfelt letters after his first article on the subject from people who had always thought that their jobs were pointless but never had the courage to say so explicitly.
> It makes me wonder, why is it that our eye in real life sees straight lines as straight, the way this demo renders the image?

Your eye doesn't see it as straight, your brain does. Your eye doesn't actually gather a single coherent image, in fact. It's constantly moving[1], bringing the higher-precision fovea at the center of your retina to bear on interesting parts of the scene.

Your brain then accumulates all of that data into a single coherent "image" which is what you consciously perceive. This is why, for example, you are unaware of the blind spot caused by your optic nerve obstructing your retina[2].

A straight line in the world isn't projected onto a straight line on your eye: after all, the back of your eye is curved. (Even if it was, so what, it's not like your rods and cones are aligned in a nice neat grid.) It's just that you've learned that a line of stimulus curved just so across your visual field corresponds to a straight line in 3D space.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_spot_(vision)
What a super nice idea! I love it how you've thrown all these elements into one pot, lit the stove and let the 'market' solve the harder problems. Elegance!
i think everyone. Plz visit here - exclusively.in , indianroots.com and there are many more
When we really needed dry erase boards at one place I worked we laminated white cardboard. That was fairly cheap and it actually erased. We had inherited a 60-ish inch (maybe 65) roll laminator. You can buy some big cardboard sheets to fit in those things.
On the other hand, the synthesis of LSD is usually considered difficult and the molecule itself is quite unstable. So, there are already practical low-level constraints against some psychopath producing any doses (much less a billion) at once and transporting it easily.
YES, these panels are awesome and I've put them on 2 full walls of my office.

The price for the 8' x 4' whiteboards: $13. Great value. You can have them cut the panels at the store into 2 x 4 foot sections if you don't have a way to transport the full panel.

I also just use an alcohol/water mix rather than real whiteboard cleaner.

I use normal drywall screws with a countersunk washer which helps the looks. https://www.google.com/search?q=countersunk+washers&tbm=isch
Free Product Database/API
Yes, we're working on putting in an email-only signup option very soon. We're also investigating the best way to provide an anonymous option as well.
The main reason is because human desires are inexhaustible. As our society gets wealthier, more people will be hired to perform tasks that make people's lives easier, though those tasks are ancillary to an organization's main mission. For example, the university's main mission is to educate students, but more and more administrators and staff will be hired to turn the university into a luxury resort to satisfy students' desires (big gym, mental health services, remedial education, sports, expensive food, transportation systems). And the university will also use more of its wealth to satisfy its employees' desires and problems (by hiring human resources officers and lawyers and hedge fund managers). That happens to every organization as it grows wealthier, I suspect. And those jobs, being ancillary, being divorced from directly helping people, are miserable. So, paradoxically, inexhaustible human desire for what is "better" and easier ends up creating jobs that, while comfortable, feel wretched and meaningless.

You see this in a society, too. Yes, our individual desires for "food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on" are never sated. It's partly because we're trying to keep up with our peers, but much more importantly, it's the hedonic treadmill. That is, the satisfaction we feel after buying a BMW or becoming CEO or getting a new house will fade quickly - and be replaced with the desire for something else. No doubt even the world's wealthiest people are dissatisfied with some aspect of their daily lives. Perhaps they wish for faster travel than is possible with current airplanes or for a longer lasting house or less crime or more love or whatever. That's a microcosm of what happens to the world's wealthiest societies, which, after all, are composed of people. It's why we've moved from Bell phones to iPhones, but it's also why we have so many more ennui-creating jobs.