skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Walmart's case was entirely an elaborate tax dodge. They had no inside information (insurance companies know far more about the probable lifespan of Walmart's employees than Walmart does), and the scheme was entirely predicated on avoiding taxes at every level.

Pay $75,000 per employee over the term of the policy to insure them, 100% of that being written off. Get paid out $60,000 per employee, 100% of that payout being tax free. In Walmart's case the insurer even loaned Walmart the entire cost of the policies, allowing Walmart to then write off the interest, never pay a penny until they had to close out the policy and pay out the difference.

Insurance companies are not in the business of losing money (they actually make a tonne of money, and are one of the most reliably profitable businesses operating), and they have a much better edge than Walmart or any other employer does.

Smart companies only do this when they believe they have an edge

And insurance companies only engage in clients or organizations when they know they have an edge -- a large part of the very sophisticated science of underwriting is ensuring that the insurance is highly probable to benefit the insurer, outside of very long odds. Any scheme that assumes otherwise has to involve egregious criminality (such as others are speculating throughout this thread, as if employers are then offing their employees, the dumb insurance companies none the wiser).
Jesus. What a horrible comment.

She crushed it starting this business, got traction, built up a community, and was getting close to scaling what was a real business, with a real business model, and real money.

It's phenomenal how much her team accomplished on that money - which is not very much for a team of 5. Until you've run a business yourself, it's hard to understand just how much overhead truly does walk on two feet.

If this company had gotten to scale, it could have provided food for hundreds of thousands of men and women, selling extra stuff laying around their closets. And that's off a glance at their site and app. If your comment was your first response to an amazing post like this, you should look in the mirror.
On a related note, we have a take home fridge at ATK, there was some discussion about how to tell when new food was added to the fridge. Cameras might have been an option there.
Sometimes people do get stabbed in the back. It is not provocative it is true. We don't know if there's another side of the story, but leaving without warning just right before a round close is really crappy.
GMail was a completely different ballgame. This just looks like your generic domain registrar. There are thousands of them already.
Nikki, thanks for sharing your story. You definitely experienced alot!

It sounds like you hit 2 of the biggest issues startups can face. Co-founder disputes and Product issues.

Re Co-founder disputes - once money gets involved and the cap table is in your favor in the early days, the st will hit the fan. Raising money dilutes everyone and that too has a negative effect of the minority holders and can create some bad energy.

As you found out working with the right people is super super important. What I have found that has worked super well for me is working with people I have worked with before. One, you know they are good (the ones you choose to start a business with them) and the honeymoon period doesn't exist so its all about execution. I don't believe in cofounder dating events.

As you found out having a mobile product is a big deal. People are mobile creates. Even more now then ever. So being able to reach them via the computer in their pocket is an opportunity not to be missed.

Regarding the Visas, E2 Visa would have gotten you into USA. Or you could have setup an entity remotely in USA and through the company setup E3/H1B for yourself and your cofounder. There are some obstacles to jump but possible with the right legal/immigration team.

Finally, I didn't see in your story mention of an advisory board? I have found that getting the right people around you can open doors to investors, industry people, advise on technology, product etc... highly recommended if you can use them wisely.

Overall I believe the experience you have gained at such a young age will only set you up for big success in the future. Don't give up and keep on going! Good luck!
MM.com Sells for $1.2 Million
Go back and read again. He's not saying anything that free markets are an imperfect way of delivering what people want, but they're better than anything else we've come up with. He's saying that free markets tell us what people want, and if you disagree with the "free market" (which is an abstraction, I don't think most things people refer to as free markets actually are the "free markets" of economic textbooks), you're disagreeing with what people actually want. That makes free markets right by tautology; the best is what people want, and what people want is what they buy on free markets. Which is fine if you want to short-circuit debate, but it doesn't actually let us ask the important questions.
At that point, don't you have enough scale, money, and need to actually hire an ops person?
I should also add that the "Things to try" notebook has some simple examples that demo various kinds of functionality: https://programming.wolframcloud.com/objects/7ea9a27a-1ea8-4...
IF you can afford the service interruption, which is true for lots of companies and their internal IT systems, you always follow this policy. All concerned including the users are awake and on their normal sleep and work cycle, if you mess something up you find out immediately from those users, etc. etc.
I'd rather live in a world without art than a world without science and engineering.

Bored, maybe. But bored with sanitation systems, transport and technology rather than entertained and dead of cholera by 25.
I didn't mean consumer service, I meant the product. And that would be pretty much every one out there - search, maps, e-mail, cloud documents...
> 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.

AFAICT from reading the Sequel code (and especially the code for the existing adapters), there's no real hard dependency on SQL (since the adapter both generates and applies the query string), though there is a dependency on being able to map back and forth to SQL-like operations.

It shouldn't be impossible to write a driver for a non-SQL backend for Sequel, though it seems like it would be progressively harder the farther from the assumptions common to SQL its operation was.
I did the same thing. Thought I would read later, saw 99dresses and kept reading.

Sydney is pretty insular and almost everyone knows everyone else if not by reputation then personally.
Also remember most of the work on Rust at the moment is focused on stabilizing the language — performance is only really required to be acceptable for now, provided it is possible to improve.
It's really disturbing how well populated queensland is and how fail the victorian transit providers are :\
It takes a lot of courage to write a post like the one she did. It is much easier to criticize her from a throwaway HN account. Why don't you back up your criticism with a real identity?
This article is asserting that correlation implies causation.
I can see some truth in that if you follow through. Bailing from something with high visibility will hurt your reputation rather than hinder. I assume that the prospective partners of these two people would be able to use google to find out just how substantial their YC foundership was.
None of them. Mine was a 24 bit mainframe (Elliott 4130) in 1967, where my job was debugging them so I had to learn to code. In ASM. On paper tape. In the snow backwards uphill both ways etc etc etc.
Here: http://goo.gl/Cv2rNB

I pulled it from the article sp332 linked
Just a few points:

1. Even though I'd already spent 2 years on the startup, the first co-founder I bought on had the same equity as me. He wanted it, and I wanted someone fully committed.

2. I was off fundraising for 2 months, and my mistake was not communicating that really well with them. I wasn't a great leader at that time. However, I did notice something was off but I just thought it was post-yc depression (which is actually a thing, apparently). I asked them outright if everything was ok, and they said sure, that it would all be fine when we got back to Australia and moved on. I trusted them, and they lied to my face.

3. I think they were very naive, not malicious, in how they left. They thought everything would be fine if they just left, but thats not how startups work.

4. One of them refused to talk to me or give me an explanation after he left. I had to practically force him to meet me for some closure. Its like getting a divorce with no explanation.

I made mistakes too so its not all on them, but at the end of the day a co-founder is supposed to be your partner through thick and thin, and they bailed without talking through the issues at all which equates to stabbing me in the back. And they made sure to tell me this after I'd reimbursed them for thousands of dollars in expenses for their YC adventure.

The purpose of this is NOT to discredit them. I'm not a huge fan of them, but they dont deserve to be villified. I'm just trying to be a bit more transparent about what happened so that its helpful to some readers. I'm sure they've learned from the experience and will treat their next cofounders differently if they do start something else.
> He's saying that free markets tell us what people want, and if you disagree with the "free market" (which is an abstraction, I don't think most things people refer to as free markets actually are the "free markets" of economic textbooks), you're disagreeing with what people actually want.

And while that's a common argument, the obvious problem with it is that free markets weight preferences by existing wealth. $ as a proxy for utils isn't really a valid assumption when people don't have the same quantity of $.
On going uphill both ways - my first 8 bit was one I designed and wrote the assembler for myself. 1973.
>> "They were horribly built; you could hear your neighbor"

Pretty much every single apartment complex in the US I lived in (MA and CA).
I would have loved to meet him.

Like many of the commenters here, I found his "How To Get Rich" inspirational, thought-provoking and endearing. I read a lot of books targeted at entrepreneurs, and they're mostly fluff. But Felix's writing is honest: He literally begins the book by trying to convince you not to make the attempt! But, like any wise uncle, he recognizes that any person reading a book entitled "How To Get Rich" doesn't want to hear that, and proceeds to tell you that mere desire is not enough; you need compulsion. Stamina. He tells you plainly that the getting of wealth builds a sort of armour around your heart - a 'carapace', I think is the word he used. You'll probably lose your family.

But he also tells you the joys of wealth. The jets (rented, of course: "if it flies, floats, or fornicates - rent; don't buy"). The Rolls Royces. First editions of antique books. Chateau d'Yquem.

And then tells you just as plainly that he would give it ALL up, if he could get his youth back. Time.

I've long believed that you should add some books to your calendar, as a recurring reminder, may be once or twice, to re-read them. "How To Get Rich" is one such book for me. As the top review on Amazon says for the book: An honest account from a person who has been there and done that."

Thanks, Uncle Felix.

Edit: Pleasant coincidence: My HN username is the same as the name of his magazine :)
Lead through sacrifice. Throw yourself under the bus
Not the OP, but if you're looking to drop Heroku (because of cost, or reliability?), it's not that hard to host your own on a VPS or dedicated servers.

Set up your own HAProxy instance?

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-...

Setting it up doesn't look too hard, and you're not going to need it until you reach significant scale - so probably 90% of the people reading this without a dedicated ops team aren't ever going to need it. Startups often seem to over-engineer servers at an early stage or assume they'll need a massive cluster when a single server with multiple processes could serve perfectly well till you actually hit some sort of scaling problem (i.e. millions of users a month). As an example, the HN website ran for a long time on one server (not sure what they use now, but it's not heroku :). Very large VPS instances often cost less than scaling with heroku.

Also, other providers like Linode offer load balancers without setup for a low cost.

What do you do when one of your droplets disappears or crashes?

ansible myserverplaybook.yml

to set up another one in a few minutes. But you'll find this just isn't necessary unless the server config changes - uptime will be measured in months on most providers (not sure about DO in particular, haven't hosted anything serious there).

Where do you host your database?

On another DO droplet, with remote backups, or even on the same one if you have a sizeable VPS and low to moderate traffic.
We've been busy building stuff and talking with users. We actually have the new landing page and a couple blog posts coming out this week.
Sounds like you'd be better off purchasing bare metal than on any public cloud.
Plato's "What is real?" explained by a 8-bit Zelda animation
One or two of your five objections are valid and not because you're well-informed.

Let me know if you'd like to know more.
Why? You know foo has the type of "whatever 'it' dereferences to." Why would spelling it out be an improvement? Would your opinion change in a templated function where the type is, itself, a placeholder (e.g., "typename T")?

What if "it" were originally an unsigned int* but a refactoring changed that to a long*? Would you prefer the programmer hunt down all cases where "it" is dereferenced to change the type of the result, or would you prefer the programmer use "auto" to begin with?
I haven't deployed with them yet, but have been seriously considering making the switch to Cloud66 (http://www.cloud66.com/).

It looks like the best of both worlds -- higher level than Dokku, but choices when it comes to the underlying infrastructure provider (Linode, DigitalOcean, AWS, or some combination). Small overhead charge for the management which seems very reasonable, otherwise you're just paying for the (virtual) metal from the IaaS guys.
No joke. I've gotten some of my best guests by commenting on Hacker News. The community here is incredible.

I would usually just leave it at an email, but I imagine her inbox is flooded after this incredible post. Also, I'm hoping her friends will see this and help me connect with her.
Yeah but Mozilla Composer was begat by Netscape Composer, which was part of the push into "enterprise" and being a "collaboration suite" that jwz lists as the #2 cause for sinking of the Netscape ship:

http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html

Anyone who doesn't think the Netscape ship sank is probably too young to remember pre-Firefox (or too close to events to be objective); but the fact that the ship was salvaged from near the bottom of the ocean doesn't change the fact that it did sink.
> I've done, and many of us do, tons of very valuable innovative work that we're not financially compensated for.

Arrangements in which you or others have previously engaged are not relevant, at least without an argument.

> I just don't think the language will thrive as well as it could if the number of users is limited by a financial barrier.

If this is actually your argument you should have lead with it. But it's not like Wolfram is new to the PL business, Mathematica has been pay since it was distributed on floppies and it has a large community. Making it free might make a stronger, larger community, but if you want to convince Wolfram to do that you'll need to propose a way to make up the lost revenue.
I agree with you completely on being bored of posts about "x" that are based on preference, opinion, interpretation that can't see there being more than one equally valid way of solving a problem.

What is interesting is when someone picks up a problem and simply solves it using the tools at hand, be it old, new, preferred, or trying out a new approach. I learn far more from the approaches than the results.
> That is, you don’t, in fact, need to maintain any sort of vacuum at all for what is nominally a miniaturized piece of “vacuum” electronics!
Yes, "grammar" can be a verb. And even if it were in some sense incorrect, the meaning is clear. Confusing "there" and "their", OTOH, is outright misleading, and suggests a lack of understanding.
"C-with-STL-containers" is an incredibly powerful subset of C++.
I had quite a caffeine addiction but I recently kicked it. I was up to 900 mg/day at my peak. I think caffeine counts as an addiction. I had a strong dependency on it and couldn't function physically or mentally without it.
I'm a business analyst that also does some basic IT work. I know some basic HTML/CSS/JS, enough to tweak some web pages that I support, but nothing from scratch.
At the end of the day, I am the CEO of the company. It was my leadership that got us here. Even if something wasn't executed right by one person on the team, that is still my responsibility. Furthermore, we were killed because we ran out of money - also my responsibility. That's the point I'm trying to make.
clang has implemented modules as a replacement for monolithic precompiled headers, but they are marked experimental for C++. They are tracking the C++ modules proposal.

See http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html and http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2006/n207....
I'd prefer to read HN and not get depressed as fuck.
uhhhhhh, I don't know if that's true.

Lotus was never a ruby web application framework. Guess Apple's going to have to change the name of Swift because of that other programming language, amirite?
The scheduled maintenance notice said:

During this time, Heroku command line tools and web interface actions to create and restart dynos can be delayed.

So it was expected to slow the performance of some queues.
I agree, some people see technological development on an almost religious level where people should be doing things. I think it's all silly. Do what you want in life. Other people will do what they want.

Entropy will reduce the universe to nothingness on a long enough timeline, anyways.
Dynadot doesn't support .io, looks like?
That and the lack of listing the "rent related phrases" used.
This cloud service brings real-time collaboration to any Windows app
Mainframe2′s technology may be the future of virtualized software.
I'm very curious about the procedures and paradigms followed to develop the safety critical software inside the system, as well as the engineering pedigree of the developers. I don't mean this in a rude, finger pointing way, just proposing that some background and a slightly deeper technical description of the precautions would make a huge difference in confidence level.

For example, are the redundancy systems space and time separated? What kind of methods were used to ensure that? Are there any overall hardware, software, communications development standards used and audited? Does anyone on the team have demonstrated experience in these areas?

If this system were to be audited, what organization would be responsible?

Thanks guys, great work so far and excellent vision!
Exactly! People fail to factor how yc companies evolve - how fast, and how far. I made this mistake twice in my life. These days I just stfu.

3 years back, I met with the poundpay team. They knew zero about handling fraud, and they said so. They said they'll figure it out over time. The cofounder said he was "reading a bunch of machine learning papers over the weekend" on combating fraud. I found that amateurish & scary.

2 years back, I met with the interviewstreet founder. The founder did not have any technical chops to speak of, and was actually quite misinformed about scalability challenges, algorithms & programming languages. I couldn't see how this guy could take on topcoder.

Today, 3 years hence, Balanced has processed over a half billion in payments, & Hackerrank has signed up a half million developers & both are well on their way towards a billion dollar market cap. Both are great companies to work for - in terms of actual tech & the potential for ipo riches.

What Cruise is right now is a useless datapoint. Think about what it'll be 2 years from now. Use your imagination. There are tons of low hanging features they could iterate on & completely dominate the space. Enough said.
Yes, there are several places where, for example, we generate sub-optimal LLVM IR, but time is better spent getting the interfaces and language spec correct for 1.0 than squeezing out performance.

I should mention that that's different than 'who cares about performance, let's toss this in.' Performance aspects are absolutely taken into account when changing the language. But that's different than the implementation itself.
the concept of a model is not at all tied to a data access pattern unless you subscribe to model = ActiveRecord::Base inheritor in the Rails world.

Model is a well-defined term in the domain-driven design world, as in "Domain Model"
None, Mine was the superboard II
My first thought was that this would be like iOS constraints, which position elements on the screen. This is more of a dynamic templater. I'd be interested to see the performance of this
The value proposition of Rust is unique, at least when compared to the languages that you've brought up (and C++).

And how are Rust and Go "mostly the same"?
It's "a-boat." "Aboot" is a south park joke.
Well, if one is frustrated with the limitations of a particular tool, learning other tools that are like it may in fact help - if the other tools work around some of the frustrations. If not, then it's a waste of time.
Thanks! Will look into it. I want to sell the assets if I can, but I think I'm just ready to move on and take a break.
> Serious question: What happens in three years when Google decides to "sunset" this service like Wave, Labs, Reader, Buzz, Code Search, Knol, etc?

Any company can close a service (or go out of business and close all its service), and if a service fails to make a profit, eventually the company will almost certainly do so, one way or the other.

The only reason Google has a high count of such services is because Google went through a period where it started lots of services (and, also, because its remixed and rebranded a lot of services, so that more service names have gotten retired than actual services.) There's no strong reason to think that the actual risk -- particularly with paid services -- is particularly high with Google.
It's different in the sense that it adds a whole lot of features, which makes it even more complex. It's not just the new features, but how they interact with old one. C++98 is still there, just underneath.
They aren't that smart, some little old ladies in my town made a couple of million dollars by buying multiple life insurance policies on bums, then running them over. They apparently got caught by cops for the hit-and-run, because nobody at the insurance companies even noticed what should have been an improbably suspicious pattern of policies and payouts.
That's not what "cold calling" means ...
> It most certainly won't be a representative sample.

They don't want a representative sample, and they say that (and how they want it to be non-representative) right on the page. So, why is that even an objection?