skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When do you know your startup has failed?

That's a good question, maybe not the right one. I'd rephrase it as "When should you decide to stop working on your startup project?".

You should decide when to stop pushing the startup, when you realistically see no path to revenue, and your savings get low. Try to take this decision early enough.

As you write you don't have any cash anymore and can't pay your rent anymore, it's probably urgent that you seek revenue asap.

> I'm currently going through a mini depression

Don't worry, it's normal, you know, entrepreneurship is an emotional rollercoaster. We all go through this. Let's try to focus on what can and should be done at this stage.

What have you learned from the startup experience? You can probably make a big list of things to do, and things not to do.

Let's forget about your startup idea, product/service for a minute.
What skills do you have, how can you help people with them?
In your network, are there people to whom you could benefit from your help, either as a freelancer or as an employee?

I've been in your feet recently. After much hesitation, I've decided to kill my startup last January, after working on it for 2.5+ years. Taking this decision has been difficult, uncomfortable. However, after taking it, I was much relieved, and had this sweet feeling of freedom.

Fast-forward four Months, I have now lots of revenue from consulting on interesting projects, and lots of people keep trying to recruit me. I didn't need to make much effort to launch this, just create an attractive offer, where my skills can solve a common problem. It's very surprising to me that this is happening so easily, after facing so much difficulties to sell a product at my startup previously.

> I'm not in a developed country

This probably doesnt' matter. People do business, you can find clients anywhere. Just decide to leave the startup now, and move on fast. Good luck :)
читать в России!
As an Italian living in the UK I'm not sure anything changed in Italy in this field. I see more and more Italians establishing their companies in the UK or Germany, because it's mostly hassle-free and better in the long run.
Italy has a problem with business, risk is not something that the few investors are willing to consider and startups are just a tiny fragment of an IT market ruled by short-term contracts with 3 levels of outsourcing.

There are exceptions, but you can count them on the fingers of one hand.
Show HN: We open sourced hardcover our internal code coverage service
Good, but not good enough. Ask some successful founders if there was ever a time when they felt like all hope was lost. Very few will say never.
In a shameless self-plug, my book walks through setting the Docker development workflow, showing how to develop, test and deploy with containers. You can get it on early release now, but the current version doesn't have the deployment chapter yet. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035671.do
Is there anybody who wants your product? Do you have customers? Are they paying you? Is there cash that's just going straight out the door for hosting etc, or is there no cash at all?

I've run one startup that failed outright after 18 months with 10 grand still left in the bank, and I've run one that scraped through to become a success after 4~5 months of having nothing in the bank - I was sleeping on couches because I couldn't afford rent and my girlfriend bought me most of my meals - I got very close to packing it in. The difference between the two was that nobody wanted what we'd built the first time, the second time we were losing money, but people were paying us good money to use the product.

If somebody wants what you're selling - keep selling it, tell your partner that if he wants it to work he needs to put some cash in your pocket to keep your lights on and focus on the money, do whatever you need to do to get your customers to give you more. From where you are, the time for focusing on perfect product is over - you need to cash in what you've built. If you haven't built anything that anybody wants to pay for yet, forget about it, it's not going to happen this time - take a break, get an easy job, get some money and start again when you're ready. It'll be sooner than you think.
C++ has left the horrors of the '90s largely behind it, and I'm rather liking it these days... But every time I work on a C++ project, I soon get "array angst" -- a feeling of profound incompetence because I feel uncertain about basic array operations.

Seems like every project has its own take on array classes and their ownership semantics. Std::vector appears to be largely useless (or at least it's not used anywhere in practice, so the effect is the same). Boost is just scary. Qt is almost like a different language by now.

I wish the C++ standard had something like Cocoa's NSArray/CFArrayRef -- a general-purpose ordered container that is consistently used everywhere in APIs and does the job everywhere, even though it may not be quite the optimal data structure. But I guess it's 15 years too late for that.
Not being a native speaker, I can't find a handle on this quote. Can anyone please explain in simpler words what Shakespeare meant?
Proponents of on-demand startups argue the Craigslist side of the analogy. In their view, these workers do have more independent agency than a typical employee, and therefore are properly classified as contractors. After all, Uber drivers and Homejoy cleaners aren’t required to work a certain number of hours per week, and they set their own schedules, even though some companies try to steer them to busy times by incentivizing them with “surge pricing.”

I have been an employee without being required to work a set amount of hours per week, is called a zero hours contract and didn't make me any less of an employee, it just meant it was really difficult to plan anything.
converting to OP units: 1 hp is about .75 kW, so 3 hp is 2.25 kW, compared with the 231 kW used by the engine. 1/100.

But apart from drones, perhaps a specifically designed aircraft to target this could help: lighter, smaller, larger surface area, slower cruising speed would reduce air-friction so increasing efficiency. Mightn't be practical to get down to self-fueling, but at least make a significant contribution to range. NB: longer flights collect more fuel.

Human-powered flight is possible using only 0.35 hp (0.26 kW), though superslow at 18km/hr. See Gossamer Condor http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Human-powered_aircraft

EDIT: here's the real deal: human flight, pure-solar, no batteries at all
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Challenger

EDIT2 Solar Impulse 2 is currently on a circumnavigation of the globe (they store power to continue to fly at night)
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse At the moment waiting for ideal weather in the China leg
> Acquisitions would be one. We might have to defend ourselves against predators.

Soooo time to create a Slack clone and sell it to Slack for a few million?
IME there's quite a bit of overlap with Yammer (they pitch themselves differently but the actual use case is very similar), which was a high-profile recent MS acquisition.
"dotcom":

https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/?q=dotcom&mfrom=&mto=&titl...
My favorite one is C-t (transpose)
Is Mobile the Future of ERP and Accounting Software?
Acquired savant syndrome develops after ski accident
>The thing I really notice is how everybody with a mac has a machine that is newer than two years. Those who are hitting the two year mark are experiencing hardware issues, particularly lighting, which is needed for dexternal montitors, but it seems trackpad longevity is also an issue.

Yeah, no. I have 10 year old Mac (damn, 15 year old) that still work perfectly, as well as 7, and 4 year old. Not to mention that Macs, in general, retain their aftersale value better, so that they commonly "experience hardware issues" does not play well.

The reason some people get newer machines every couple or years or so is that the Mac ecosystem favors newer anyway -- you get quite updated specs etc every two iterations (usually the first iteration is speed bump upgrade), and sometimes things work only with the newer models (e.g. a feature that needs the later bluetooth chipset and wont work on the previous bluetooth generation, etc.).
Machine learning software will tend to use floating point, hence the result IMO. In HFT for instance I'd expect things to be the opposite.
Soundbrenner Pulse Helps You Get Down to Your Own Sick Beat
If you don't care about anything political you won't care about this. But, surely, you must understand that other people do care about those things and therefore would care about this.
Cute but extremely risky. The kernel has access to all memory-mapped devices and all weird privileged mode instructions, and the nested kernel has to ensure that the IOMMU is safe and no instructions that can turn off paging, modify the page tables, etc. appear at any offset within the code, including unaligned. Which also means that even if working around coincidental unaligned instances of such instructions is easy in practice, as stated in the paper, there's always a chance some (code, compiler) version combination will randomly fail to compile and (even if this is hypothetically made to work automatically most of the time) possibly require manual intervention...

So, have they missed any such instructions? To be fair, they are assuming the original kernel modules are trustworthy but have been compromised at runtime, so these would have to appear either for another reason or by chance in the kernel, but ... off the top of my head:

- Hardware breakpoints/watchpoints in the inner kernel or at the CR0 writing instruction.

- - Or hoping/somehow ensuring the CPU gets an IRQ or something right after executing the PG0 write. Problematic, but not out of the question.

- - This could be partially negated by ensuring that like the PG0 enabler, the fault handlers are mapped at an address that corresponds to a physical address containing a trap. But I don't think this is sufficient, 'cause... now that paging is disabled and so you can write to code, you should be able to set the stack pointer in the TSS to overwrite the handler!

- Hardware VM support. I checked the Intel manual: the VMCS structure points to some addresses that map guest physical addresses to real physical addresses, so this really needs to be disabled. (Also, the VMCLEAR instruction, which requires VMXON first, writes directly to physical addresses.) There's also whatever AMD does.

And with a bit more manual reading - but I could be wrong on these:

- Switching to 32-bit mode and confusing the inner kernel that way.

- Switching to 32-bit mode and then using hardware task switching to load CR3.

Those two only require the iret instruction!

Based on scanner-objdump.py, they seem to only be checking for movs to cr{0,2,3} and wrmsr, so all of the above should work. I'm not an x86 expert, so (a) some of the above may be wrong, but (b) there are probably more potential avenues I don't know about. :)
This isn't directly my area of interest but the physics sure are interesting. I wonder if the space of screw drive shapes can be generated by a computer and evaulated with a fitness function that calculates the weight, profile, strength, contact area, for every given application.
I agree. They have. And that was their spouse/girlfriend/family/benefactor investing in them. Or in case of side job, themselves investing in themselves.

And whether those investors wanted anything in return or not, doesn't matter. Said founder/writer/actor/bandmember/mathematician still could not do their work if somebody hadn't put food on the table.

You really do have to stay alive and relatively healthy, if you want any chance at success.
hang in there my friend. may the force be with you
It's not fair to compare a programmable circuit with a fixed-function circuit though, because programmability is often a requirement.
He the fellow breaking internet into pieces and breaking net neutrality.
He is the fellow breaking internet into pieces for promoting facebook
It's not just Italy which has horrible rules around private limited-liability companies (LLC).

In The Netherlands you need to invest 18k EUR to create a BV, which is the Dutch form of a pLLC. Combined with strong worker protections it's amazing that there are so many startups here. I guess the culture, high level of English-speaking and high education level explains it.
And of course there's kill C-k and yank C-y
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response - ASMR
Zuck wants a walled-garden version of internet (with FB as gatekeeper) to be made free for the poor. We're saying poor Indians should have access to the same full open globally-connected internet as we all take for granted. And that free & fair competition will & should take care of things like access on the cheap, sachet-mktg etc. (...) As of today on my Vodafone India plan I can get a 2G plan starting for 22¢.

I agree, but then why the wailing and gnashing of teeth? They've released an inferior product for only 22¢ less than the superior alternative, doesn't seem like such a threat. Just let it fail, no?

Personally, I do think the name is fraudulent (and they should be forced to change it), but the service in itself seems like a non-issue to me.
What’s new for designers, April 2015
Hi Superpi :-)

First of all I want to congratulate you and your partner for taking the huge step of starting a business - something that very few people will ever attempt (although many will think about attempting). In my opinion it's a great thing to take hold of your destiny in that way but it's a very difficult thing to get right and for every success story there are dozens or hundreds of "failures" - I use quote marks because that word gets a bad press generally; many people seem to forget that they "failed" at many things in their life on the way to learning how to succeed at them. If you're not failing then you're not learning and life would be much less interesting that way (although of course much easier).

About ten years ago I went self-employed (you wouldn't call it a start-up as such, I was just a freelance software developer), and for me, the point where I had obviously "failed" was when a) I was deeply in debt and could no longer afford to sustain my personal basic requirements, that is, a place to live, food to eat, a car to get around in, and b) there was no prospect of improvement in the business. I think if you're on the point of losing your house but the business is looking very promising then it's probably worth the risk - spending your last dollar to win the $1million contract, as it were - but if the business looks like it has no future then why make sacrifices to keep it going? Perhaps the reason is...

>I'm 25, I feel like I'm losing at life already. It was okay to be broke earlier, because it's expected. It's not anymore, when almost none of your peers are.

You're not losing at life, you're learning about life, and instead of making safe choices that suit everyone else, you're making difficult choices that suit you. Bravo! Sometimes those choices don't work out well but that's life, unfortunately; if you don't take risks, you won't get rewards - if you do take risks, sometimes you still won't get rewards, but other times you will, and those rewards may be far greater than you would get from an easy life. Try not to worry about your peers - they are living the life that suits them, you are living the life that suits you.

So I would say: make an honest assessment of the future of the business. If it still has good potential, then suffering hardship now could lead to great reward later. If you're keeping it alive because you don't want to feel like a failure, then recognise that, as I said, "failure" is really just learning, and don't be ashamed to make mistakes along the way. In that case, get a paid job for a while, take a break and recharge your batteries. Then you can start your next great adventure when you're ready :-)

Best of luck to you!
For those who didn't know who the two men are:

Jiro Ono, Japanese sushi chef, is often regarded as one the greatest sushi chefs. Owner of "Sukiyabashi Jiro" a three-Michelin starred sushi restaurant in Tokyo. The documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" is about Jiro Ono, the restaurant and his son.[1]

René Redzepi, Danish chef, and co-owner of the two-Michelin starred restaurant Noma in Copenhagen, Denmark. Voted the best restaurant in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. Renowned for reinventing and refining new Nordic cuisine.[2]

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772925/
[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Redzepi
They may say and think they felt it, however I don't think they would have kept going if they honestly thought no hope at all was there.
I've been there. CEO had rich parents and could do the startup indefinitely while I was seeing my peers do everything I've wanted to do while I was shit broke living on ~120USD in a third world country where nobody understood what I was doing ("You're smart why dont you just work at X. Look at Y's son, he's already working at Y"). Lost a lot. Lost money, opportunities, relationships, my youth. I quit, worked corporate (still working corporate) just to recover my sanity and finances and some semblance of "life". It's been one year and looking back it was the right decision. If you want to talk my email is in profile.
Data.gov not found
Anatomy of a Hijack
Great work! And I could not agree more with the conclusion. It's like people think that they either have to get exactly what they want, str8 away, or the cause is not worth their effort at all. But if everyone chipped in a little, as much as they could, mountains could be moved in a day.
Using docker-machine as a superset of boot2docker is my favorite on OS X instead of the "plain old" boot2docker command (due to simple local machine management and VMware Fusion support), doesn't it run on Windows since it also has an Hyper-V driver?

[0]: https://github.com/docker/machine/tree/master/drivers
I guess I should say something positive about Audacity, but... in terms of overall user experience it is so typical for open/free applications to look and feel just horrible, especially on the Mac. (Inkscape also comes to mind.) Every time I need to do something in Audacity I catch myself thinking, I should do my job as quick as possible and close the hideous thing.

Of course you will say but it does the job, and as a free app it's pretty unique. Oh and there are these people who work on it voluntarily, they are not paid for it! That's okay, I contributed to open source myself and I think I know what it feels like to be criticized for not doing enough for your project or being too slow.

But I have just one question for the Audacity team and all those who work on some significant open source GUI apps: why isn't the user experience your top priority in the first place?
I sincerely doubt that being self-taught has anything to do with how well clean your code style is.
It gives me €.
Only C-something works, no? I'm also still trying M-b / M-f regularly (with either Option or Command for Meta, which has surprising consequences every single time.)

C-t works though, and that's awesome to correct typos.
Not "old school" but you have a different learning style than I do, as I prefer to puzzle things out on my own.

It took me to my 30s to realize that not everyone wants to learn on their own (or are capable of doing so), even if I still don't understand why they can't learn on their own (the pivotal moment was when a friend complained she didn't know how to use Microsoft Word and wanted to take a class. I asked her why she couldn't just start using Word. I mean, it has a help system, there are books on using it. What's with the class? But that's her and her learning style. Like I said, I still don't quite grok it).
There's a pretty neat vector graphics app for Linux called Inkscape. I used it for some time when I worked on Linux and got used to it. Of course, I was happy when I could go back to Adobe Illustrator, but for a free app Inkscape is pretty great (and it's the only usable graphics app on Linux)
What is really missing from this debate is how cheap the internet already is in India. It is not something that needs to be distributed for free.

On my old Nokia phone, I didn't even subscribe to a data plan, and was thus charged at per kb (I'm not sure exactly how much), but I used to read HN, check my email, facebook and much more over Opera Mini.

It hardly cost me 2 INR/day. Now that I am on a smartphone, costlier options are much better for me, since my smartphone uses far more data. But if you can own a 6000 INR smartphone, you can surely pay 100-200 bucks per month for data charges.
They just want the hardware. They do not want to learn how to use a different operating system.
Not entirely on topic, but sometimes I wonder what would have become of companies like Google and Facebook if they never went public.

I realize that the extra capital helps them better expand and compete, but does every startup have to aim to take over the world?

What's wrong with just providing a useful service to society and having enough revenue to cover your expenses and grow at a modest, organic pace without having to compromise your values?
I will go ahead and show Internet.org about how wrong they are in thinking that offering a few basic services will cover people up. Say they offer,

Google (or any search engine) - the search is useless if the sites returned are not accessible for free. Offering google for free and blocking the rest is like saying, "Hey, you can see all these trailers for free. Wanna see the movie? Pay us a truck load of money." And no, the "preview" is not enough. I cannot ask question on Stackexchange from the "preview", for instance.

Facebook - The people are most likely already communicating with each other. How sharing "pics" and "liking them" for free will give them "raw knowledge" is beyond my imagination. I, among many other people, am not a Facebook user and enjoy my life with all the productivity in the world.

Wikipedia - The thinking that wikipedia contains all the knowledge in the world, and we can get all the information from it is utter crap. Say a poor person in a village wants to learn web development. Tell me how exactly does Zuckerberg think that Wikipedia can teach him JavaScript? Wikipedia provides overviews, stories, and some details, but it can hardly be considered as the library of all books.

News sites - seriously? Radio stations are free, much more helpful, feasible, and have a more affordable infrastructure. And they would be limiting users to only selected news sites so the chances that they get a one-sided view of things is more than likely.

Skype - In India, the rates of phone calls is ridiculously cheap. Indian service providers provide the cheapest phone call rate in the entire world. The problem is not cost of the call rate, it is the lack of infrastructure. Network problems, dropping lines etc.

Cleartrip - Let me tell you something, no poor person will be able to use cleartrip or the likes to book anything since poor people in India don't sit in flights, they don't have credit and debit cards to make online transaction, they don't book hotels.

Anyways, getting a usable internet enabled device is more of problem, IMO. The Indian government still took the most authentic step to help the situation, by making the world's cheapest tablet (Aakash) with a fair spec set. If Internet.org expects poor children to stare at a 3" dull screen showing wikipedia or anything in tiny text all night which can harm their eyes, they really need to think again.
I'm not talking about marketshare. I'm talking about superiority.

I have been using Windows religiously for 15 years. I moved to OS X last August and it's way "too" superior to windows/linux.
Well, you can't put millions behind bars.
Reminds me of the day I foolishly did "docker run -d debian yes" so I could play with some of the inspection commands. I forgot about it and an hour later it had eaten nearly all of my hard disk space...