skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I met Nikki while I lived at a Hacker House in Mountain View for a few weeks in January 2012, having recently moved to the Bay Area. I remember being impressed at the time by her intensity, and by the fact that she actually had a real product with real users that solved a real problem.

An audible "oh no" came out of my lips when I clicked this link and realized I was reading about someone I had shared a few dinners with.

It's important for little pieces of history such as this one to be recorded. For the founders, to whom it gives a sense of closure, and for the community. So that we don't forget our comrades who didn't make it to the other side, but still have insightful lessons to share.

The press likes to glorify the AirBnBs, the Googles, the Facebooks - but as founders, I think it's important for us to be realize that this is only a tiny visible part of the iceberg, and that at the end of the day, there are so many factors at play that it would be foolish for us to focus solely on the "how many millions did they make". Human stories are never boring, and experience is one of the most precious thing others can share.

Thanks for taking the time and effort to write this, Nikki. We're with you.

---

"Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves."(http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2012/03/eight-years-today.h...)
Is this what HN has become? A fail-blog? :(
It's a pain, but it isn't the end of the world or a disaster. I distribut some CLI tools with a NodeJS app I wrote. Here's the docs: https://github.com/lookfirst/convert/wiki/Compile
Hear, hear. None of this needs to be a standard to show a web page so I'm personally happy to let developers hack on what lets them be more productive, and let browsers continue to innovate. It's way too early to get a committee process involved, and innovation will happen faster this way.
It's useful in the same way cruise control is.
Thanks, that explaines it!
e.g., does 20 minutes before a heart attack have a reliable signature?

No.

It depends on what causes the heart attack, but it's generally either a clot that dislodges from somewhere else and lodges in a coronary artery, or a new clot that forms suddenly. Neither of those events could be predicted (other than the general prediction of risk factors). For that matter, it also depends on what event you consider the 'heart attack'. Is it the occlusion of blood flow, or the resulting ischemia? There will be a time lag between those as well.

Detecting a heart attack shortly _after_ it occurred would also be useful, and likely much easier to do (detect cardiac enzymes, etc).
KIM-1
Let's acquire them, just not for too much money. Otherwise we tell people that anything on the internets is worth billions. :)
In Kanban the kanban is not the kanban – What??
No. The dude sitting his ass in his comfy car is the one who should come to a full stop at every intersection. Don't like it, ride a bike. No sarcasm here.
This is why its not exactly a free market.
My TL;DR: a founder ran into some painful but survivable bumps along the road, plus one killer.

The latter being there are people in the US government who would rather burn down the whole economy than share any of it with a dirty immigrant. Even a white, English-speaking one!
Many social situations and small restaurants/cafes exclude calories. And many calorie labels have awkward 'amount of servings' that make it hard to calculate for the average American to calculate actual calories. Someone who may have a daily muffin from some no-name cafe may think it's only 250 calories from their previous label experience and then are surprised to find out it's actually 700 calories for example.

Another example is a bottle of ice tea might say '4 servings per bottle' and say 30 calories/serving. Missing those small numbers is easy to do and I know of people thinking they're only consuming 30 calories vs. 120 calories.

The cheapest food is also very unhealthy, while in other countries it is opposite. That along with a car and sit in an office culture leads to part of the obesity epidemic today.

A magic automatic calorie counter would decrease the effort to diet significantly and would still be a great educational tool for many people.
MonkeyParking: on-street parking on demand
Configuration-free P2P Skype replacement
31 years ago, almost to the day (it was the last day of school), my father brought home an Apple IIe with two disk drives, a monochrome monitor, and 128 kilobytes of RAM. It came with two floppy disks, "System Master" and "Sample Programs", and several spiral-bound books: Applesoft Tutorial, the DOS Manual, Reference Manual. I was eleven years old.

I plugged the computer in, put a disk in the drive, turned it on. It beeped, whirred for a while, and a flashing cursor appeared. "Now what?" I wondered. I typed a few words and pushed Return. "?SYNTAX ERROR", it said.

I cracked open the "Applesoft Tutorial", which was in English -- not my mother tongue -- , and proceeded to type in the first program I saw. And then:

]RUN
HELLO. WHAT'S YOUR NAME? APRICOT
NICE TO MEET YOU, APRICOT.
YOUR NAME REVERSED IS TOCIRPA.
]

I was hooked. I spend the following weeks teaching myself enough English to be able to understand the manual, and learned BASIC by typing stuff it and seeing what it did. Then my parents gave me a subscription to Nibble, a magazine that had an interesting mix of technical articles, product reviews, and many programs to type in. I learned a lot from reading those programs. When summer ended and I went to junior high, I met with older kids who had a better command of programming and eventually graduated to 6502 assembly language, and even did a bit of hardware hacking, thanks to a wonderful book called "The Apple II Circuit Description".
Is reselling Google Apps allowed by their terms of service?
It seems you are right, my apologies, I clearly hadn't read deep enough. Still, Sequel is just an SQL abstraction. DataMapper is exactly what Lotus::Model is, a full model abstraction over databases, regardless of the querying language.

Some years ago I even implemented an XQuery querying backend for DataMapper, it was not much work at all, at a time where AR still had SQL code all through the base and Sequel was just in low profile development.
Oh what the hell, fine, let's acquire them for billions.
What is an Entrepreneur in Residence and does your company need one
Lets not take ourselves so seriously. Lets not let YO be representative of what investors, entrepreneurs, developers and technologists are doing as a whole, despite its outsize media coverage. Lets remember that quirky, weird, seemingly useless things like YO can still put a smile on someones face, even if it didnt solve any of society's problems. What a dry place the world would be if we didnt have things like YO.

Variety is the spice of life. Some will make YO, some will build Tesla, and most of us will fall somewhere in between. Not every startup needs to be a world changer, and thats OK. Thats life.

The author insists that he's not being pretentious, but evaluating what is a good and poor use of someone elses time and smarts seems like just that.
"Aussie Nikki joins Silicon Valley millionaire factory"

Y-C = Millionaire factory? Who knew!
Google knows exactly what you are doing at work
So you can do this google an events to create targeted lists ? Not sure I understand how this is different - site looks nice though.
I'm a bit unclear what they mean by 'true multi-master'. The overview and FAQ lead me to believe this is a perl script with it's own _singular_ db sitting between multiple databases. Specifically what are the CAP guarantees for this system? At a surface level it almost seems like it's split brained by design.
How can you compare number of stores to number of museums and libraries? This is so strange. Store is where people buy stuff. A store can be very small. Museums and libraries are usually much bigger than stores.

Also, how did you define museums and libraries? did you include one-room-sized museums and libraries in your counting?

Also, when you count museums and libraries, did you exclude museums and libraries which involve guns and other weapons? How did you handle a firearm museum?

A more reasonable comparison would be comparing number of firearm museums to other museums. Anyway, it's still silly.
managing one's speed so as not to get pulled over for speeding?
I think its the other way. Taking the plunge to 100% self driving is going to take a very long time. Google's systems seems to require elaborate 3d mapping of the entire road. In the poor states like where I live and where many people live on dirt roads that streetview has never seen (and some that don't even show up on Google maps), it is going to be a long time before fully automated driving is a proper 50 state solution.

This on the other hand is something that could show up in cars in 5 years, and provide meaningful benefits far before Google is ready.
Looks pretty nice. I'm still startled at how lousy the options are for new (smaller) businesses wanting to get online (ie, Wix and Weebly).

Google Apps is now $50/year?
850 miles (closest point is in North Carolina) isn't necessarily far.
YC already knows the dangers of "co-founders" who don't have a working history beyond getting together for this startup. Technically, it should have filtered her out of the application process.
They have a whole reseller program https://www.google.com/intx/en/enterprise/apps/business/land...
I'd suggest looking at AWS OpsWorks, which is probably closest to what you're used to.

http://www.stefanwrobel.com/heroku-to-opsworks

http://artsy.github.io/blog/2013/08/27/introduction-to-aws-o...
You're not the target market for these things. They are motivational items for people who don't exercise every day, but want to.
No there's just decisions that you can't make well.
Google Apps for Business offers a Reseller program complete with APIs.
The idea that maintenance should not be done during the day is a bit antiquarian. Scheduled maintenance should take place during their company's workday when they have as many people as possible available, feeling awake, well-rested and not distracted by the things they might prefer to do with their evenings and weekends off work.

Of course, scheduled downtime should be done in off-hours, but modern services like Heroku don't have scheduled downtime.
> “I just knew I wanted to solve a problem I personally experienced: having a closet full of clothes but still nothing to wear.”

These are the kinds problems we are gunning for. These are the kinds of things investors are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into. This is the scope of problem our industry is solving right now. This is why I'm often embarrassed to work in tech.
I think we need a good, solid list of the big problems. Then we need to break them down into smaller problems.
Sure, Postini. They basically transferred everyone over to Google Apps. I'm not entirely sure how that worked, though.
Being that this is marketed as a sort of cruise control++, I would suspect the same party who is liable when an accident happens while cruise control is engaged.
Is it not plausible that an AI modeled after humans is also likely to have human-like flaws such as the desire to conquer? The better we get at creating complex, human-like AI, the bigger the likelihood of unintended side-effects (leaving aside whether this is feasible in the first place, of course).
My wife is an accounting professor and teaches Theory of Accounting at the graduate level. That's where things get really interesting, because they tackle all the assumptions underlying our accounting systems. How do you account for fixed goods, costs in different sorts of manufacturing and sales models, various forms of compensation, ownership, subsidiaries, taxes, and how do you reconcile reporting requirements for each country, region, and municipality in which you do business, which all may have different rules, along with reporting rules for taxes, which are generally different still, and with your own internal reporting and analysis needs? Do you specify rules down to the letter (and allow tons of loopholes) or do you try to enforce the spirit of the regulations (and leave lots of wiggle room)? How does all this fit in with other legal requirements? How do you match it up to your business processes and IT systems? etc etc

There are tons of really interesting questions, problems, tradeoffs, and philosophy underlying the various accounting systems used throughout the world, and I'm always interested to hear the various topics she's working up lessons for at any given time. So this book sounds very fascinating along the same lines.
The Future of News: Without Humans
If you're doing business somewhere, as ParkingMonkey is in SF, then there's sufficient nexus for them to come under the jurisdiction of that place.

So what if it's a small team offering this service remotely? What stops them deploying this in their home town of Rome? And what makes you so sure that claims against them would be laughed out of court? True, any judgment against them would take a long time to enforce, hence the city exploring the more practical route of asking Apple to cease enabling their activity. But cross-border litigation happens all the time.
Similarly, I find myself wandering lost and confused in the valley between "app" and "document". I've been doing front-end "app" stuff a few years now, mostly because I wanted to write JS and thought that servers were scary and complex. But now that I've mostly gotten over that, I look at requirements and user stories and ask: could this just be done with HTML forms? (Sure, so maybe we want some animation and fine-grained interactivity, but most of the time these could just be frosting on the HTTP cake.)

I guess some things are really "documents" (Wikipedia articles) and some things are really "apps" (HTML5 games), but it seems like there's a huge swath of uncritical groupthink that's saying you're web thing needs to be an "app" because iPhone.
It is not so much money as it is power. San Francisco has a reverse-Tea Party problem.

When all viable candidates for a position are already left of center, the only way to shine is to seem more-progressive and out liberal the other guy.

As evidenced by the problems on the right currently - the biggest danger is that as we keep creeping to the extreme left, the "far out nutjobs" are only a tiny step away and seem almost reasonable by comparison.
You're correct on the pricing. For a single seat license with Google Apps, you'll spend $5/mo or $50/yr depending on your payment plan. We offer the same pricing model which includes the domain, an email address, DNS, a Starter Page, and our simplified interface.
> monthly fee for an actual human driver.

I can find someone to drive me around for a month for way less than 10K
> This does seem entirely like a whimsical side project for Google. If you want a reliable domain registrar, find one that doesn't do anything else.

Seems pretty logical to me considering they have a very popular email and cloud business that requires you to have a domain.
Are DDL statements replicated yet?
In my experience, the main disadvantage to developers writing documentation is the potential for poor writing. The main disadvantage to a dedicated technical writer authoring documentation is inadequate understanding of the software, including what it does and why.

Some developers enjoy writing, and would do well at writing documentation for their own software. I suspect at least most developers could be good writers if they practiced at it, but if writing is a task they are being forced to do against their will and desires, that will likely reflect in the writing.

If nobody on the project enjoys writing and does it well, then it may be worth bringing in (at least part-time, or on a per-project basis) a dedicated technical writer. But at least one of the developers should be prepared to explain things to and answer questions of the technical writer.
I agree. Though Yo should not have a 1.3 million funding. However, any sane person would quickly recognize that investors put in that 1.3 MM to fund the founders. They don't care about Yo. It may be a situation of "give some smart people who get the internets a bunch of money and hope it sticks". Which is a bit of a bubble IMO.
Greenhouse: Browser plugin that shows politicians' funders
I would recommend http://clever-cloud.com/

I use it for Node deployment, but they also host ruby, php, go and java apps.
Given the state of South Africa is a former dutch colony, that seems to align with the article's historical facts.
Multi-master means exactly what you'd expect: N (where N >= 2) masters, each of which can accept writes, which will be propagated to all the other nodes Bucardo knows of.

The "_singular_" db is Bucardo's configuration store, and is otherwise uninvolved in replication.
Your reasoning suggests that if the people who built Yo were not building Yo, that they might be out there curing the world's diseases. See the flaw there?
OK, if we define one interval as a ball possession (one of the Ci's above), then what factors from C(i) influence C(i+1), and how strong is that influence?

The question is not "does it have state", it's "how much does it have relative to other sports mentioned".

Incidentally, I notice you're digging at NFL ("a few adverts, ..."). This is off the mark for two reasons. First, this is not about whether NFL or soccer is better. But also, pauses in the game don't affect the argument. It's typically very hard to move the ball way downfield in NFL, but (seems) pretty easy in soccer. This gives rise to a state variable that persists across drives in NFL gameplay. Basically, every NFL yard is a pseudo-point, and they add up in a fine-grained way.
Google is not just a registrar, but a registry, with 19 TLDs that they will operate: https://www.google.com/registry/

They're in the domain business now, and I don't think they're going to drop out any time soon.
A few thoughts on this:
(1) The City's attitude toward these mobile apps, which facilitate a market for public parking spaces, is that they are creating a "predatory private market for public parking spaces" by "hold[ing] hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit." But there's another way of looking at what is happening here. These apps aren't allowing drivers to "rent" public parking spaces--something which they do not own; rather, they are enabling drivers to sell their legal right to occupy the space. Perhaps this is just a semantic difference, but I find it irritating that they liken it to a predatory market for property they don't own.

(2)Regardless, it is clear that apps offering financial rewards for leaving a spot would violate the SF city code prohibition on contracts concerning the use of a parking space. I think these companies could easily avoid this legal snafu by adapting their model to provide other incentives for users to provide updated information about parking spots. Rather than offering to pay users each time they give a parking spot to another user, these apps should offer these users points--or "Parking Karma"--for each trade. Users with high Parking Karma could receive special benefits--like being the first ones to receive updated information on parking spots that become available in their area. They could also be given the option to message with other drivers in the area to discuss when they plan to leave a desired spot (and each successful trade would result in more karma points to both drivers who participate). There are many ways this could be executed, and I hope these apps pivot and adapt rather than shutting down. They provide such an important service by aiming to reduce the frustration associated with public parking and achieve a more efficient distribution of public resources.
I'd believe that, but your MBA also has an SSD, which partially masks the effect of swapping out pages. True, SSD is an option for the new iMac, but it's not included in the base price.
Request Invite:

https://domains.google.com/registrar
No. Unfortunately, that's a limitation in postgres, itself. It's being worked on — or at least discussed; see "Event Triggers" for more info on that.
Compare the code you wrote with what I wrote.

Lazy evaluation gets you all that, with no extra code, all the time.

Imagine writing that iterator stuff for every single applicable thing in the entire program. There are also other places where lazy evaluation is useful and you can't use iterators, like a function that will only use a portion of its arguments depending on some condition.
The triviality of Yo is obvious, it's not an amazing feat of engineering, but it is an important app. It shows that millions of people would much rather use an app that takes two "touches" to let someone know they would like to have their attention when they are available.
It's a data point on what people are looking for. Many tiny data points can lead to big conclusions and inform design decisions far down that road. Finding out that users still want things that reduce the friction of communication was worth having built Yo.
I started re-thinking dropbox when I realized I could get 1TB from GDrive for essentially the same price I'm paying for 100GB from Dropbox.

I'm moving at the end of the year when my subscription period ends.
One thing Nikki has going for her is that she's young. At 22 and already having the experience she's had, she has a great opportunity to learn from those lessons, tap into the network she's built, and ultimately do something great.

I love the aggressiveness and the spunk she clearly has. Looking back on my own life (I'm one of the "older crowd" in HN terms), I wish I'd been that ambitious at that age. Or, maybe ambitious isn't the word, maybe "focused" would be better. In either case, I wound up waiting until my late 30's to found a startup and now I'll be 41 in about a month, and we're still looking for the mystical, mythical "traction". :-)

The downside is, being this old, I feel a certain sense of "this is my last shot". If I fail with Fogbeam Labs, I doubt I'll have the energy, passion, drive, and mojo to try again. So if there's a lesson in my experience, that I'd try to share with the younger crowd, it would be "Be more like Nikki, and less like Phil". :-)
I appreciate your comment and what you're trying to do. I guess I still can't picture how Cruise will achieve the balance between convenience and awareness.

Let's say you're a teenager using Cruise to keep your car within the white lines on a 5-hour, highway road trip. The device is capable of steering the car this way on your behalf.

In that situation, do you stare at the white lines for 5 hours without touching the steering wheel? Or do you text and talk to your friends? What compels you to be just as vigilant about steering and being aware of your surroundings?
Will be interesting to see how this fares - perhaps Google can use positive results from here to improve their customer support image (despite Larry Page's voiced opinions saying Google call centers "are ridiculous").
If you're referring to Google Remarketing, it gives you the same capabilities, except it's a terrible pain to set up analytics, track events, make them into a list, move the list to AdWords, and optimize from there. We spent a lot of time doing this ourselves and figured, a unified, nice-looking (thanks for noticing :D) interface was the way to go.

Also, we let you target the same people on Facebook too, and Google Remarketing doesn't let you do that, so there's that too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

Disclaimer: I thought the aftermath of Yo was absolutely stupid, as well.
That's the optimist's outlook.

I could just as easily envision an army of cheap, self-taught "programmers" making applications held together with spit and glue and causing a race to the bottom in the industry (see the residential construction industry for an example of this).