skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Working prototype but funding issues. Seeking advice
Hey HN,

Long time lurker but am seeking some advice.

We're self-funded team that has a prototype in the genetics field working in a one-off computing state. It has some scaling issues that we're getting resolved however we're not quite ready to go commercial. We do have potential customers in the pipe. Our goal is to build this into a company.

Our problem comes down to hardware and costs. After benchmarking AWS, we've found out that it is not economically nor architecturally feasible for what we're trying to accomplish. Ironically enough, we're dealing with too big of data sets at scale and their computing architecture doesn't scale like we need it too. This was somewhat a surprise since my day job consists of dealing with large datasets on the AWS stack (although, not nearly as big as this).

We have identified a vendor that does allow us to get the performance we need and we did prove it through benchmark runs. However, they're fairly pricey, we'd have to co-locate, etc. Up until now, we've been gifted compute time or personally paid for it to test our prototype but now that we're looking to get early adopters, we need a way to do this somewhat right.

Question:
Is this enough to get a reasonable seed round?
Should I even try raising or try and get a paying customer?
Is it better to try and go big on raising or small to purchase the minimum?
Do I have other options that I'm not seeing?

I can shed more light if needed, especially on the AWS stuff. Appreciate any advice!
> We rely on individuals for long-term orientation because organizations no longer make themselves adequate.

The flip side of that coin is that organizations are only as good as their leadership. Being able to select good leadership generation after generation has been something that has eluded mankind since the inception of civilization. There hasn't been an organization invented that doesn't eventually fall to corruption.

So, how do we create institutions that will last? It's a problem that appeals to the ego. The solution would have a much larger impact than just on tech.
When submitting these wikipedia articles, it's a good idea to leave a comment with a little quip about why you found this interesting.
unfortunately not, adblock blocks ad related media only. This is one of the few tools that will intelligently block people from tracking your email views/opens
Source: https://github.com/ramoq/PixelBlock
On the other hand, consider terms like "cowboy", "best boy", and "bus boy".

While "cowgirl" exists, it's usually associated with a different set of roles than a cowboy. We also usually find "cowboy coder" in a negative context, but a search now for "cowgirl coder" finds more positive contexts. Eg, "My name is Tarah Wheeler Van Vlack, and I blog about Linux, coding, current technology, and women’s issues in the IT workplace right here at The Cowgirl Coder." and "I was one happy cowgirl coder, so I just kept going—learning as much as I could about design, development, and tech in general."

(The general neutral term seems to be "cow hand" or "cattle handler".)

The term "best boy" appears to be used for both men and women, with no difference in their roles. This would be a non-sexist, or at least minimally sexist, use of the term.

The term "bus boy" appears to be disappearing, in place of busser. This is part of the general trend towards gender-neutral job titles, but part of me thinks it's also part of a longer trend of egalitarianism. That is, "boy" when directed towards an adult can indicate superior status. Hence why "garçon" - French for "boy" - should not be confused with the polite way to get the attention of a server in a French restaurant. As a more direct example, traditionally "boy" was also used by many white people to refer to any black male, no matter the age, specifically because blacks had inferior status than whites.

(And then there's "cabana boy", which can be used in contexts where "young male" is an essential aspect of the job, in the same eye candy way that "young woman" was an aspect of being a cigarette girl.)

You could pick out how "boy" is used in "best boy" to argue that it isn't a sexist term. But that argument would be incomplete because the issue isn't about any single title but the default-is-male implication in many titles.

I believe that your argument with "fisherman" is similar. If I ask "how many businessmen wear dresses?", I suspect that most would be be confused, and think I am asking about male transvestites, and only secondarily consider that many businesspeople are businesswomen who wear dresses.

I can ask the same question using other gendered topics. How many firemen have given birth? Of the policemen with heavy periods, do most prefer pads or tampons? I think more people would have a double-take with these -man/-men titles compared to the general-neutral forms of "firefighters" and "police officers". If I'm correct, that would suggest that -man in those titles comes with an assumption that they will be held by males, which makes them more sexist than the gender-neutral forms.
Myers-Briggs types for developers compared to US population
google already grabs the images via image proxy.. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.htm...
Norway Will Be the First Country to Shut Down Analog FM Radio
>These are obviously based on nationalities of jihadists, not based on percentages of populations whom become jihadists - which I suspect you are confusing my comment as implying.

You asked why many Middle Eastern countries produce "so many" jihadists, implying that the majority of these countries are producing a high number. Thus, it makes no sense to respond by listing examples of terrorists or terrorist groups originating in Middle Eastern countries, since one could give similar examples for more or less any European country or for the USA. We have our homegrown terrorists too (both Islamic and otherwise).
Parent is most likely referring to the telnet GOAHEAD character and its related SUPPRESS GOAHEAD protocol: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc858

I am the author of a MUD client for iOS[0] that, like most other clients, will capture and silently discard the GOAHEAD character. GOAHEAD is most common on MUSHes but I've seen them in a few MUDs as well.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mudrammer-a-modern-mud-clien...
Interesting, the random down-votes. Did y'all really down-vote because you hate vim? I didn't say I hated emacs, I didn't even imply that emacs was bad in any way.

Users here seem to read way more into my comments than they should…
Believe me, I'm not hurrying. I haven't touched it since Christmas last year.
Have you tried not having any friends?
Use your phone or do your schoolwork outside and your eyes will be fine.
Sorry to be "that guy" but it was news to me.
Your smartphone is equipped with an FM radio tuner that you can't use
Unique images still allow for read receipts.

The proxy effectively prevents cookie setting, ip address determination and geolocation, and injection-type attacks.
"When people think they’re going to do this shit for the money and this stuff for their souls, it becomes a real disservice. They’re resigning themselves to be professionally schizophrenic: they’ve divided their minds in a way that, at its core, is somewhat dishonest. Those lucky people who are fully integrated at the highest level figure out how to make everything—their lives, their work, what they do for fun, and what they do for money—all the same thing." - Michael Beirut
Shit! RobConery is my new best friend!

He embodies the same passion I have about Postgres and SQL, and the same hate I have about ORM's and Sproc/Function/DB-Averse people. =)
Thanks for posting ibejoeb!
Eh. Water scarcity has been a way of life for Southern California for quite a while now. I think the internet tends to magnify things (not downplaying how bad things are), but we've been through this before. Growing up in So Cal, every 5-7 years we would deal with a massive drought, fear, uncertainty, desalination, etc etc. Then a huge rainy season, floods, etc, rinse and repeat.

I think the recent drought is definitely worst than normal, but it is something that we will deal with and "moving out as soon as possible" isn't really an option.
Because you need to ask why they dig a manly chin.

Long hair makes sense because it is a crude history of our health. Symmetry also makes sense, as it is a sign of healthy, strong genes. Being rich enough to afford to waste stuff also makes sense (and explain a ton of weird human and animal behavior)

But if a chin serves no purpose what so ever, why would it become a sex symbol? They're not big enough to work like antlers (look how much energy I can accrue to grow these big ass antlers!) so why would they start to grow in the first place?
I do the same. I also have the philosophy that a book worth reading is worth re-reading. Sadly, you have to read it the first time without knowing if it will be worth reading at all.
SmartArt Customization, Presentation Export to PDF and Slide Thumbnail Enhanced
Buyers Guide: 2016 Mercedes C350 Plug-In Hybrid
pgbouncer and pgpool should be considered. Choose pgpool over pgbouncer in clustered environments.
I'll email. Happy to give feedback.
> In your opinion what does an organization which does pay for Sistine Chapels of code look like?

The OpenBSD Foundation: http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/index.html
It will be intelligible, but will it still be art? English lends itself well to all manner of subtext. When what we call english today becomes a dead language, will it still even have the same meaning? It's something I occasionally wonder about Shakespeare. It's full of subtext and innuendo, but are we comprehending that subtext and innuendo the way they did back then? Probably not. The definitions of the words and phrases used are too different, let alone the subtext, idioms, etc.
Create DVD from Videos
Software is eating the world (2011)
BTW what is the point?

I mean, one can legitimately want that they do not receive the tracking information. But are there any real security implications, like siphoning off any unauthorized data, facilitating spam, etc?
Coding is playing.

Just kidding, of course. One thing I've noticed is that my kids have vastly more homework than I ever had, and homework now starts in kindergarten. There are only so many waking hours in the day.
>> "You can't de-sprawl Southern California as a whole..."

Wait till the key parameters of our present socioeconomic order are perturbed. A lot of ducks have to line up in a row for suburbs to work at LA scale, and something tells me the party won't continue indefinitely.
The first man to descend into Turkmenistan's door to hell
Really? I thought it would be ideal for an extrovert. Instead of spending all your newfound downtime reading, you could instead spend all your newfound downtime interacting with real humans.
Neat tool, thanks. I wasn't going to install it because it required access to mail.google.com and googleusercontent.com, but since it's open I feel better about it. It might be helpful to others to mention that and link to it in the chrome store.
But they'll know the general scheme, which would help them extract the current day's code.
A question for the LA natives on here.

Last year at this time, I had the chance to visit LA for my first time. I stayed in a B&B in Los Feliz and spent a few days walking around it and Silver Lake. My first day I asked the B&B owner about walking to the reservoir because I read online that it's a gathering point for people in the area. The owner told me he had never walked there and recommended that I drive. At most, it was a 2-3 mile walk. Do people in LA really consider it incomprehensible to walk that distance?
It's the programming model, not the FPGA itself that people are asking to be free (as in freedom, not cost). Comparing to the world of software: the FPGA is analogous to the CPU, the programming model is analogous to the instruction set, the tool chain is analogous to the compiler and the hardware Description Language" is analogous to source code. The freedoms that apply to software/compiler/information can equally be applied to their analogue in the FPGA space.

Incidentally, FPGAs start at US$1.24 in single unit quantities from Digikey, and go up from there. US$6.75 will buy a "proper" logic cell based FPGA. They are no more expensive than a CPU. A Zynq development board, which has 2 x ARM cores with integrated FPGA, can be had for US$119 [1].

https://adapteva.myshopify.com/collections/featured-products...

---
Edit: fixed price on dev. board
This is entertaining. I've used Xilinx's tools for a while, almost exclusively on Linux (CentOS usually). I thought that renaming/symlinking libraries to get things to work was something only Linux users needed to do, and I figured this was just because Xilinx tests more on Windows (makes sense). If these kinds of problems also affect the Windows versions, then, I don't even know what to say. At some point you just can't make excuses for this stuff anymore.
Hofman describes his furniture as contorting into "grotesque" and terrifying shapes. He mourns his family and the loss of his research lab as he believes he is dying. He himself explains at length the curious and terrifying situation.

Further, there was nothing to prepare him for this. Heroin, largely demonized by society and a quite potent drug has a "standard" dose of about .1g or 100mg. Obviously, a dose differs based on habit and potency, however this is certainly enough to feel the effects. Hofman consumed 1/4 of a mg. A dose 400x smaller than that which was just described. With little known about hallucinogens (certainly native Americans and Amazonians had discovered psychoactive plants) at least to Hofman, this feelig was wholly original. It would be entirely possible, probably plausible given his disposition, that he was lethally poisoned.

Hofman, did say that as he descended down the bell curve after the peak that it was an enjoyable experience. He even remarked that psychologists would line to study it. However, given how intense and terrifying he deacribed the initial onset, I would not fault him, not call him cowardly, for not wanting to resume self-experimentation. This likely would have lead to LSD-25 not being put into widespread circulation, possibly forever.

To your point of the self-perpetuating bad trip. I concede that it is entirely possible that the meme of a bad trip and the medias portrayal of the drug could certainly induce one to have a bad trip. However, the knowledge of how the drug interacts with the body and the now well-known pharmacology can be leveraged for confort when one is under the influence. The knowledge that one is safe and it is only a temporary state brought about by a drug. Hofman did not have this. He could not take comfort in knowing approcimately when the effects would subside, or even of they ever would. i don't think comparing a trip where a person jas knowledge of the drug academically, but never practically (a contemporary persons first trip) can be legitimately compared to the first ever trip.

It goes to show how amazing and extraordinary the feelings and perception must have been when Hofman became comfortable. After the fear and heavy effects wore off, he must have truly marveled at the changed perspective, and been willing to try amd acheive it again for its benefits accross a host of disciplines and use cases
I've got the instinct to hoard - particularly when it comes to electronics. Most recent example of the condition for me: I had a bag of old wine bottle corks gathered maybe 15 years ago, boxed away. I needed a stopper and one of those corks fitted the bill perfectly. Perhaps that's just reinforcing unhealthy behaviours??

In part for me it's about waste - it pains me to throw away plastic (for example) knowing that it came from a finite resource and had so many different inputs. There's so little effort made to recycle - I swear that within a century or two we're going to be mining old landfill sites.

People throw out TVs when the power button fails, throw out whole computer base-stations (aka towers) when a HDD fails, scrap cars that just need new piston rings ... as a society we seem particularly bad at addressing these things; corporations move ever more to accelerate [the appearance of] obsolescence. To encourage the throw-away society.

I wonder if there's not a structure that can be used to gather in and warehouse, for example electronics, and make them available without cost - maybe using something like prisoner labour. It definitely doesn't seem to be immediately financially sustainable to (for example) gather in all the working components from household goods. A second-hand washing machine controller might cost £100 for an old machine, commercially; when in reality it's just saved from someone's scrap. Given a new machine can be had for £200, it's not financially valid. But that scrapped controller can give 12 months more service to a complete machine - how can we engineer in a greater value to repair and recycling than the immediate financial saving/cost? Should we?
Sorry, meant to earlier - I find the calendrical significance fascinating. It's almost a form of proto-writing in some ways (in the sense that it encodes knowledge in a material yet non-illustrative form) but I love the fact that it does so while also being, well, a hat. I also enjoy the potential connections to other Bronze Age oddities like the Trondheim Sun Chariot and the Nebra Sky Disk:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk

But if I had to be totally honest, I found this while researching the history of wizard hats and that's what I like the most about it. Granted, there's almost certainly no link there, but it's fun to imagine a scenario whereby Bronze Age proto-druid ceremonial headgear leads to Gandalf's hat.
Netflix could pivot slightly and offer white-label hosting of content for each content provider. Spinning up a hosting service to compete with Netflix can't be cheap.
I'll never forget being looked down on my high school teachers and some of my family when I decided not to finish high school and then not to go to university. But it was the right decision for me and worked out very well.
Hey, I’m an engineer at Oscar.

If you have 20 minutes, our CEO gives a great summary of what’s wrong with the current system and how we look at it differently, with examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4EOsOznZ-Q

Some concrete things that are special:

- We’re investing in wellness by offering everyone a free fitness tracker that syncs with our iOS and Android apps with a $1/day reward for reaching step goals

- We’ve built real-time systems that enable our medical management staff to reach out to members to manage their care and guide them to the right care. One system I’m proud of building gets us real-time notifications when members get admitted to local hospitals and emergency departments — http://hitconsultant.net/2014/12/12/shin-ny-oscar-introduce-...

- We made tele-visits completely free and very easy to use.

We have big ambitions to rewire the healthcare system and a team with exceptional backgrounds in technology and healthcare that has a pretty good shot at executing successfully on those ambitions.
Jama Raises an Additional $20M
All of the benefits sound the same as MongoDB, which also does sharding and JavaScript queries, including arbitrary code in "callbacks" in map-reduce or $where clauses (though it's slow).

Can someone explain the benefit of RethinkDB over MongoDB?
Have you noticed anybody else with better software and chips ? no ? maybe because it's extremely hard to to get to the level of ISE and the competitors ?
As I struggle to wade through it, I wonder why it was ever as popular as it once was. What is it about this book that make so many people recommend it?
The reason there is malaria and potable water shortages in the developing world is that no one gives a shit, and cutting funding for cancer research isn't going to change that. There is absolutely no reason not to do both.

Also, disagree that cancer research is "well into the realm of diminishing returns". Seems quite fruitful to me.
I think this would fall into the category of "picking up the dance". For some software, people don't want the performance to end, so they bring the performances to new stages, but, as soon as they stop actively "performing", the dance will end.
YC Interview for non native English speakers
I am neither laughing nor screaming, but rather praying for nuclear desal.
Judge Recognizes 2 Chimpanzees as Legal Persons, Grants Writ of Habeas Corpus
Imperial II-Class Star Destroyer
The Microcorruption CTF looks fantastic, thank you for sharing!
Tracking an email open is enough of a security threat by itself.
Well the guy I know who used to be in charge of strategic marketing for Xilinx shared that it had not met sales projections and support costs were higher (which cut into margin) when people were trying to program the things with their own tools. So sharing all that stuff about the chip alienated some big customers, reduced profit margins, and didn't help volumes. That pretty much defines 'fail' in the chip business.
I've read Stranger once. It was OK (to me).

I read Time Enough for Love every few years. Each time I can't wait for enough years to go by until I've forgotten enough to read it again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love
> That sort of delayed feedback loop is no way to participate in a community

Who says he's participating in any particular community?

> The survivorship bias is a logical fallacy, not a prescription for choosing what to read!

So you suggest reading works that didn't survive? How would you go about finding content that is by definition dead?

> Why disable images in your browser, when many concepts are best expressed with a diagram or photograph?

Yeah, you've got me there. I understand his viewpoint on this, but the execution is problematic. I'd wager the vast majority of images on websites have nothing to do with the content you're reading. Even images that are technically a part of the article you're reading frequently add nothing to the text. How do you filter the useful from the superfluous?
>In a very real, observable sense--political representation--white men far outweigh their population size, and outweigh every other group put together.

You keep saying that, but proof by assertion isn't going to get you very far.

>To go from that actual real fact about the world, to the conclusion that women therefore rule the world, takes a rather grand leap of imagination.

Again, we were talking about the US. Please try to stay on topic.

>I also can't figure out why you have that fixation on family law...

Because it's grossly unfair to men, and it wouldn't be if men actually exercised the power you imagine.
Any YC Alumni Interested in Mock Interview?
We have an interview with YC this Saturday for the S15 cycle. We would love to have one of you YC Alumni grill us beforehand.

We will be in the Bay Area this Thursday afternoon. We are available Thursday night and all day Friday.

Drinks on us!

P.S. If you are not available this Thursday or Friday, we would still love to meet you before we leave. We will be around until the 30th to scout the Bay Area, hit us up if you want to connect!!

Project: www.cheer.io

Looking forward to meeting a few of you out there!

Turk
Remember how deep and cool we thought the guy from The Guy I Almost Was was when he decided to check out of techno-hip cybersociety, become a citizen of the past, and search for true meaning in old, or absent, technology?

Yeah, turns out he was just going full hipster. Which is just as bad in its own way.

Balance. In all things, balance. Not very profound to say. You can't make a manifesto out of it, because duh. But yeah. It's what works, I think.
Well Quartus isn't bad. It will be interesting to see what Intel does with it. They have a history of open sourcing things other folks don't want to open source (like Graphics Drivers).
Jsonnet