skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it time to give up on my side project?
I have a side project that is managed hosting for non-profits and churches. Since most are very non-technical, the premise is to remove all technical aspects from setting up/having a website. Each site is build on a pre-built WordPress theme and I take care of getting the site to functional stage, content entry, file uploads etc. etc. Basically, the user signs up, sends in their content and I hand over a completed website. The only thing they have to do is add new content if they want to. I am also part of the Microsoft Bizspark program so I am running everything on VMs built in Azure. A CDN, backups etc. etc. are also included with the hosting. In other words, I am not using some $20 reseller hosting plan for host gator.

I could be wrong, but I think my product is pretty good and there is a need of what I am offering. Clearly, I am doing something wrong because I can't get customers. I've talked to local churches/non-profits, made calls, sent emails, bought online ads, wrote guest blog posts et.c etc. Really, the only substantial, feedback I have received is that I was turned down because I don't offer "unlimited" everything like other hosts do...

I'm at the point to where I don't really see the benefit of keeping this thing going. I could be wrong but I feel like most non-profits/churches are distrusting of website companies, don't see the value in paying for quality when something else is cheaper, and the whole concept of using a website to further their vision seems like a waste of time. It seems like the only way I could get customers is to spend 80/hr a week writing content and personally meeting with people.

I want to help churches/non-profits but it seems like helping and making money is off the table. I have several other side projects I would love to dive into but I am hesitant to just give up on everything I have done so far. I highly doubt there is any 1, 2, or 3 things I could do to improve my position but I would love any feedback.
Great series, I highly recommend it. And if the parent poster likes a bit of humor, I recommend Cook's Garrett P.I series. A lot of humor and easy reads.
BBC World Service statement regarding interview with Artem Loskutov
how would you track the user inputs in order to create then rank the results further? via browsers? or...?

while I like your idea, I'm not sure if it is feasible and second, if there is an 'acceptable' method which most people will not object to or try to game.

for example, imagine 1000's of mechanical turks being paid cents to click and browse to a specific link in order to fool the algorithm you've set up
If you are converting large amounts and you are comfortable with purchasing and selling stocks online then a viable option is to use Norbert's gambit. This involves buying stock in companies traded on both Canadian and US exchanges, such as TD. You buy on one exchange (in your case on a US exchange), journal over to the other exchange, and then sell on other exchange. With the right online broker, journaling is automatic, and the entire process takes a few minutes to complete.

The final costs for the exchange are the trading fees (typically $10 per transaction for an online broker), the bid-ask spread, and any fluctuation in price between the buy and sell price (this can be in either direction---gains are taxable). Fluctuations over periods of a few minutes should be small for a highly liquid and stable stock. Always use limit orders to protect against any unusual events such as a flash crash.

There are lots of links found through a web search that describe the process and which Canadian online brokers make this easy to do. Also see http://www.northernraven.ca/financial/NGcalculator.php for a calculator that helps you select which stock to use. You want to select a stock with high liquidity (typically translates in a low bid-ask spread) and also a high unit price (to minimize the relative bid-ask spread cost).

The calculator at the link above shows that using today's prices to convert $10k can save about $80 versus a 1% currency conversion cost by using one of a number of stocks.
If you dive deep into the lore of The Elder Scrolls you can discover that there are outposts on the moons and apparently the Battlespire is some sort of space ship... It's still a scientific static world, mainly due to the abundance of magic.
The cards you linked look more like a cheesy scifi CCG.
Google quietly introduces a 64-bit version of its Canary browser for Mac OS X
I really like the Discworld series (I believe I've read every single book), but I believe they're a different category than the GRRM books.

The later ones start addressing some social issues, and it's great to see Pratchet tackle them (and using fictional species removes some of the ethical issues, one thing where sci-fi and fantasy help with thought experiments)
What makes you think gigantocorps are on their way out?
OT, but may be useful if someone is looking for cheap ways to transfer money within the EU. https://transfergo.com - offers transfers to bank accounts for a fixed fee of 2,5 GBP.

It works by issuing local payments, which are much cheaper. You make a local payment to TransferGo account in your country. In turn they use their foreign bank account to make local payment to your recipient.
I'll be in this situation soon and was hoping to be able to use Norbert's Gambit: http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2013/12/03/norberts-gambit-th...
We also build colliding JPEG files, which can be any two
images, as in the example below (images were chosen at
random): https://malicioussha1.github.io/img/collision.png

Haha. Brilliant. Almost RdRand-om!
More description on how its created, and issues with this use. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-05/ebola-drug-made-fro...

Interesting they used tobacco plants in the process and how this drug is not scheduled for clinical trials until next year
Thanks for testing! ";" is delimiter for function arguments in czech version of Excel (because "," is decimal delimiter). Parser tries to guess if you're using czech or english version and it probably guessed wrong.

Anyway, I wrote the parser by hand so I cannot guarantee it will work on every valid Excel formula. But I'm working on improved version which will use formal grammar.
I'm intrigued by your belief that simply releasing new paid versions of an app leads to more profit. Do you have any evidence that such an approach works?
192 cores is right. It's now Nvidia's smallest 'slab', with the workstation/server class chips having multiples of that.
SpaceX Chief believes AI is more Dangerous than Nuclear Weapons
Congratulations! I've known Francesco on the internet for... a while. Never met him, but he seems like a great guy.
You are linking to a talk by Geoffrey Hinton. A strong advocate for Neural Networks. A single layer perceptron is limited, but a Neural Network with hidden layer(s) is a very powerful tool, and we have now figured out how to deal with multiple hidden layers (given enough data).
I don't think it's about the supporting functionality. The caliber your app must be is a function of competition and commoditization.

Just like in the old desktop-PC software days, if you solve a problem important to your customers, and you're the only one around doing it, your software can be as bad and low quality as you want. You're the only game in town for people who need this particular problem solved.

If you however are providing a commodity product in a market filled with competitors, the "quality" of your app (in all the ways we measure quality: stability, responsiveness, design, aesthetics) matters a great deal.

So yeah, if you can own a niche you can get away with some pretty low-caliber development (see: Grubhub's app), but this tends to be temporary. Profitable niches find competitors quickly (see: Seamless, whose mobile app makes Grubhub's look like a child's crayon drawings, and who in the end won and bought Grubhub).
Funny: Cute cat playing with a hand (Original Video)
I feel exactly the same. Best way to work out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RdRand if anyone wonders :-)
Probably also worth reading Niven's Ringworld since it was part of the inspiration.
I love what Ben Thompson at Stratechery wrote on this.

Pleco: Building a Business, Not an App
http://stratechery.com/2014/pleco-building-business-just-app...
Martin is in a tough spot, and Gaiman points that out.

It's a known quirk that announcing you're going to do something decreases the likelihood that you'll actually get it done.

http://sivers.org/zipit

But if you actually publish a book that's labelled "BOOK ONE OF A SERIES" then you're implicitly saying that you will be working on a sequel. You don't need to say anything to anyone. This is why Gaiman says "Both of these things make me glad that I am not currently writing a series".
Automatically track and Analyze JavaScript Errors
I'm honestly happy with Transferwise.com. You can get a free transfer with an invitation link, here's mine: https://transferwise.com/u/5d78
I mean I didn't need it. Still love Death.
Falcon 9 first stage propulsive landing sneak peak – footage from chase plane
Personally, like your suggestion for Gaiman, I highly recommend anything written by Roger Zelazny.

If you enjoy the Chronicles of Amber, you might also enjoy Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series. Along a similar vein but dissimilar enough that it's worth the read.
Demystifying Inner Shadows in Quartz 2D (iOS, Mac)
I use India specific services which are ICICIDirect and XOOM.
Authors have been missing deadlines pretty much as long as they've been writing books. If you wish to have an expectation that author X or book Y isn't going to fit that pattern then feel free, but I'm not sure you should be terribly surprised or outraged if / when it doesn't happen.

The simple solution would seem to be that if you are someone who likes reading things in a nice predictable pattern the wait for the series to complete before starting. After all, it's not as if there are a lack of things to read in the meantime.
If you don't want the older exception, why are you giving it to the constructor of the new exception?

Just raise SomeErrorType("error message"), and it will not polute your traceback. Raising SomeErrorType(anotherError) is there for when you care about anotherError.
Stellar is a protocol for transacting in whatever currencies you want.

The dollar isn't special; it's just another fiat currency. Everything in the Stellar network (except for the stellar cryptocurrency) is credit--an IOU. Which how all fiat currencies work anyway.

If I owe you $50 and I write you a check for $50, you consider the debt paid, even though all I did was tell my bank to owe you the $50.

When you deposit the check, the money doesn't move; the bank's ledger just gets updated.

If there isn't a currency (fiat or otherwise) we can agree on, we can use STR, the cryptocurrency of the Stellar network. Unlike other currencies, STRs don't require trust or gateways. As the utility of the Stellar network grows, the value of STR increases.
Speed Camera Lottery pays drivers for slowing down (gamification)
The problem with injecting search results is that most of the time, it is going to give users a worse experience, not a better one.
> Come on. You submitted it, and did not want it on the front page?

I never said I didn't want it there; I said I didn't put it there. You can't tell me I have no right to put something on the homepage when it ended up there because of HN's algorithm (which suggests that others did want it there).

> Yes there is. Dart's reflection APIs are more than adequate for you to implememt such a thing

I was told by someone on the Dart Team: "using mirrors just isn't practical for real applications". If that's not actually true, great! However I suspect if it wasn't, then there would be a Dart-Team owned mirror-based implementation?

> Do you really want to use a web service as an ORM?

My data store is on a server; not in your browser. I need to get data (or some form) from the client back to the server, and vice versa. This is nothing to do with using a web service as an ORM, this is how web apps work - code runs in your browser, and needs to communicate with a server where I can retrieve or persist things. How do you think Gmail marks an email as Read when you open it? Fetches your email? etc.

> Web applications come with no obligation to have a direct JSON <-> typesafe class mapping. Such mappings are ill-defined and bug prone if done automatically or with runtime reflection

This is nonsense. Pulling data from a server into a Map is bug-prone, because if you use it as a map, all of your code can be wrong. If it's converted to a type, then only the mapping can be wrong, and the rest of the code can have static analysis. This is one of the selling points of Dart, and it's totally stupid to throw it away.

People are "ok" without the type safety because they have no other option. This is supposed to be one of the advantages of Dart over JS!
I'm sorry but the can't finish this conversation any other way that:

Ron: How was your flight?
Carlos: I’d be more intrigued by an airline where your ticket price was based on your body weight and IQ.
Ron: Go fuck yourself!

Beverly: It’s hot today.
Gino: In this dimension, yes.
Beverly: Go fuck yourself!

Riz: What’s up?
Keil: Washing your chicken just splatters the bacteria everywhere.
...

Yip, go fuck yourself twice, Riz!
For what it's worth, it's also available from newegg at the same price. Would be worth seeing what site offers the best shipping.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813190...
It wasn't even about that. It was about appearing to do something about the oil crisis.

Actually saving fuel would have involved sitting down a dozen auto manufacturers and persuasively asking them to participate in a cartel to improve vehicle fuel efficiency without disproportionately harming any individual participant's competitiveness.

Instead, they ordered 250 million people to slow down. According to the article, only 10% are generally willing to do that consistently, and that just increases the collision rate.

So in the end, the 55 mile per hour speed limit wasn't about anything but ignorant management doing something with a high visibility to appear wise, leaderly, and decisive. But it actually just hurt everyone else. We've seen that story so many times, the details are practically unnecessary.

The sad thing is that the people that really need to learn the lessons of history are too busy trying to crank out more illustrative examples.
Also fascinating to watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw
As I haven't done any Android development, can anyone shed light on how similar the two processes are (iOS dev vs. Android)?

For the typical mobile app, which is really just a few listviews pulling data and images from some kind of web service, Android is significantly easier, IMO. Particularly now that Apple is pushing responsive design and the misery that is auto layout. Java is also easier to deal with than Objective-C. Swift may tip the balance back in Apple's favor but it's not really ready for prime time yet.

However, for anything that really has to push the hardware or interact in an intimate way with the camera or GPU or audio, iOS has much more mature and robust APIs for this and, of course, much less hardware fragmentation.

So essentially it depends a lot on what kind of app you're trying to write.
I just tried this yesterday, but ran into a wall: To transfer USD to GBP, you need to get your bank to initiate an international wire transfer.

If I could remotely trigger a large international wire transfer from my bank, I wouldn't need a 3rd party service.

Living abroad, requests to transfer money are usually met with "just step into a branch and we'll take care of that". But my nearest branch is 2,000 miles away and I'm not planning to step anywhere near there in the next year or so.

The best I've gotten is "then just overnight us a notarized letter", which works, except for the part where Notaries are mostly a US invention so the few existing overseas ones will happily charge you $150 to put their stamp on the document. ... which the bank will then find some tiny flaw with (when the FedEx package trickles through their mailroom a week later) that can be corrected by simply overnighting a new notarized letter.

It's infuriating.
+1 for the First Law books.

The Sandman Slim series by Richard Kadrey are great.

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

The first 6 books in the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan are very enjoyable.

EDIT:

The Bas-Lag books by China Miéville are wonderful.
Or perhaps the AA interlude was very intentionally ironic.
Don't really understand his point. Just because he is a little business and hates big brands doesn't mean users in general don't want big brands preferred in their search results. If someone is searching for a music video, yes, they most often mean the big brand currently at the top of the charts. If they are searching for electronics, yes BestBuy probably gives them better results than a tiny shop. Google does track clicks on results, so they do know which results the users actually prefer.
Some People Are Deserving of Incivility
Tracking users and combatting fraud would definitely be an issue (just as it is for google), and you might have to set up trusted rings of users or some sort of web of trust rather than just trusting any user. It'd be interesting to try - tracking would have to be by browser cookie and actions like returning to results or upvoting/downvoting on the results page and you'd have to be very strict about fraud prevention from the start.

Perhaps more interesting than a specific ranking algorithm though is the idea of injecting random results into the mix. Perhaps Google has tried all these things already, it wouldn't surprise me and I know they look at user reactions like returning to results/time on page etc, but it'd be nice to see some search engine which is not owned and controlled by a massive corporation like MS, Google or Apple though - is anyone doing something interesting with common crawl?
It's possible to write this deserialize() function in Dart, but its simplicity requires many trade offs for anything other than toy uses, which is why it's not a missing part of the core platform.

Having to choose your serialization strategy is not a bad thing. At the very least, Dart's JSON support is very similar to JavaScript already, and there are several packages that do serialization in different ways.
Frankly machine learning is a little bit of a buzz term. Not because it does not have a well defined meaning, but it's a way to make what you are doing sound more interesting.

But I would say that learning is a higher level concept. So you would use an optimization algorithm to learn the solution for an SVM from data.
How to draw the owl...
It's always fun to see Google employees admitting that yes Google only exists to extract as much wealth as possible from the rest of the world and doesn't give a single shit about anybody or anything else. If only you were able to bring the same enlightenment to some of your colleagues who post here.
At the recent show in Asia, Nvidia was keen to promote the video input side of these smaller GPU chips - with particular reference to self-driving cars. In their vision, each car is going to need approx. 8 cameras, and each of these is going to require dedicated 3D-analysis on the video in real time (object localization, identification, etc). (#cars * 8) makes #GamerPCs look small...
They really don't (unless you compare them to PayPal, I guess). They take 2-3% of commission to convert your funds, which would mean that they charge you $200-$300 for currency exchange on a $10,000 payment.

If you want to convert your funds at a "Big" Canadian bank, please do so at Tangerine, which has the best rate I found (they take 1.45%) - otherwise, there are plenty of other suggestions in this thread that could help. The best rate will most certainly be with Interactive Brokers (max(0.01%, $2.50)), but the account set up is a bit tedious and they have a few restrictions.
Well if you compare it to the old OMAP4 based Pandaboard its quite an improvement. And with that graphics horsepower it probably runs Unity fairly well. I agree that the "Internet of Things" mention is a buzzword hit not a feature. Same price point as the Arndale board (with the Samsung Exynos SOC). I would enjoy one of these with as much I/O available as the Beaglebone Black.

[1] http://www.arndaleboard.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
TL;DR: Google is giving users what they want instead of what I want, please change this.

Seriously, what this guy wants is a search engine that promotes what he wants over what users want. He fails to understand that Google became popular specifically because it didn't do that.
Which results users click on, and especially which results they click on and then don't come back is a huge input into Google's ranking algorithm.

In fact, this is pretty big barrier to entry when creating a competing search engine. Google's scale enables them to get a much better signal from this input than anyone else can.
The post is a bit winey, but it's a real problem. Google's search results are not much better then they were five years ago (worse in many cases). They are having a difficult time combating web-spam. Also, are you suggesting no business should try and create an ad supported website? To get the volume of viewers any public site needs organic search is a must.
BTC seems a bit volatile as a vehicle for transferring between currencies. I personally would want something much more stable if I were transferring any significant amount. If it was just on the order of holiday cash -- and it was convenient to find buyers and sellers -- then maybe, but it seems a lot of trouble to go to!
Very cool!

What is it using localStorage for? Without dom.storage.enabled, it's just a blank white page with a footer.
Nice! Hopefully they will use this to become more open. Right now all you get is a map and some small API stuff. No free/open licenses anywhere.
It's a common method for indie Mac developers. Look at anything Panic does, or even someone like Daniel Jalkut with Mars Edit.
This device's use case is not to pump HDMI video or act as a RasPi replacement. It is to accomplish heavy GPU tasks cheaply in both power and money.

This post on the NVidia blog shows two good use cases: http://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/low-power-sensing-...
There's plenty of horrific violence in dune its just more implied or done of screen.
It's basically a long-form complaint that Google doesn't show users what he wants it to.
I recommend XE as well. You can transfer using EFT, which saves you money in wire transfer fees a bank would normally charge you. You'll also get the best exchange rates from them.
Tethering makes sense. It seems that may people use that much data directly on their phones and that is what I have trouble imagining.
It would have been interesting to see them add Puppet to the list of tools to evaluate (while doing their best to do so objectively as 'new users'). It seemed to me like most of the issues they'd encountered were self-inflicted, rather than the result of using Puppet specifically?
Funny: Two cats play and fight (Original Video)
They are not "real cores". GPUs are massively parallel, so these are 192 computing cores, but they share everything else.
"done of[f] screen."

Unless it's the David Lynch movie.
You actually answered your own question.

>I have seen guys try these 9k+ lines of complex syntax Salt systems only to break things, misconfigure them, and leave the system totally dependent on the author (aka the genius).

A lot of it is job security, even if that job doesn't pay them anything.
Investing in freelancers
Not a solution, but a thought: it's easier to game a single search engine that owns the market than it would be to game 3 or 4 competing and different products with a significant market share each.

Google's success has its downsides.
I just remembered that Tower is releasing a V2 now as well.

I wish I had numbers on the effect of those V2 and V3 and even V4 releases.