skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did the founder manage to build a company of 70 employees without a product and securing 30 million fundings after 2 years of not really showing anything?

Stanford Welfare and chicken-hawking.

Stanford Welfare sometimes works out. Snapchat wouldn't exist without Stanford Welfare but it's now valued at billions. It may not be good for the world but it would have been a good investment-- assuming it can find liquidity before a Flight to Substance (which is quite possible, because anyone who claims to know when an F2S will happen is wrong; no one knows).

Chicken-hawking is when a middle-aged man takes a young sociopath as protege in order to resolve a midlife crisis and live vicariously through him. People like Duplan appeal to such people. When your goal is to live vicariously through someone, you want to fund someone who'll go a bit wild with that money, not someone who'll be committed to the "boring" task of building a business.
USC MFA class of 2016 withdraws in protest
I wonder if there's intellectual property at play that would prevent others from doing so. If it's even possible to end up in court it may be cheaper to acqui-purchase the intellectual property via the company.
Plus merchant terminals + payment system?
That's a little over the top. While it's true that Open Source was effectively company-friendly branding and marketing for Free Software (and rather effective at that), it still refers to the same software (modulo very nitpicky differences in definition), and Open Source has a clear definition.
Just ignore the trolls, most of these naysayers have never implemented a new programming language in their life, but they feel entitled to talk about taste and morality.
Hi, what's your current project now?
This is not a thing that exists in the real world. There is absolutely no science whatsoever to back this nonsense up.
I'd like to use it commercially but it seems so expensive. $300 for only 3000 API calls.

I'd be happy to pay but it would need to be a marginal increment over the CPU + data costs. If that was the case they could get some serious volume and momentum.

With only 3000 API calls any cool little prototype you made would hit the limit within minutes of hitting the HN front page.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that you should compromise your security to enable auto-updating. Automatic updates are never better than correct file permissions.

The point here is that a large number of WordPress sites are running with file permissions such that the web server can write to the web root.

By trying to auto update, those sites with poor file permissions get a minor security benefit (shorter time between patch release and patch application) while all of the installations running with safe file permissions are entirely unaffected.

There's no downside to a secure site having the automatic update code. There's a small upside to an insecure site having it.
No forest can live unless the dead shit gets burned once in a while.
It reminds me of this from 1999:

http://www.theonion.com/article/species-of-blue-green-algae-...
Rather blame FF or some add-on, if you have to guess.

Mark Dalgleish's bespoke framework is tiny. The images are not, so maybe blame your ISP? Dunno, not guessing, but JS is last on the blame-guess list.
I don't know what they are doing for people who are no longer reachable online (deaths, disappearances, etc); but in my case, they reached out to me and asked for (and received) my permission.
Show HN: Yet Another CLI for HN
Is it an advantage? Getting investment is a good step towards validation. If you get funded for free, you lose that signal, and might just be extending the runway of your death march.

I'd guess it slightly increases your probability of success, but greatly increases the cost of failure.
Personal rapid transit (AKA podcar)
On this note, one of the few scifi book series I've seen that play up the distinctions between ship types are the Lost Fleet books: http://www.amazon.com/Dauntless-The-Lost-Fleet-Book/dp/04410...

They're not high literature by any means, but they're entertaining books, and the author clearly knows his stuff when it comes to military tactics and maneuvering. Screening elements and fleet composition are the only thing that prevent defeat in several cases, auxiliary repair ships are vitally important, etc.

By contrast, there's books like the Honor Harrington series, where larger ships are superior to smaller ones in every possible way and nobody ever worries about the cost of restocking missiles despite firing off thousands of them in every engagement.
> The differences between these languages aren't that big and they're largely aesthetic.

They are pretty big. At work I work on a Django-backed project that has a very fat JavaScript front-end client, and JavaScript is incredibly painful to work with compared to Python.

It's not merely aesthetics, but JavaScript in the browser is severely lacking in language features that allow it to scale to larger code-bases.
Like I said: it must be seen to be believed. Work in business consulting for a few years.
> Another annoying part is the lack of anonymous return types, which makes some types annoying to read or even impossible to express

Out of curiosity, impossible to express how? Can't one just store the return value in a variable, investigate its type, then copy-paste that as the function return type?
This is funny because I actually thought you wrote it, and had to double check the username after I started reading.
I worked for a company where this happened twice in three years.

I joined the company only to discover that the entire development team (sans one guy) had quit. We built up a new team, put up with an amazing amount of mismanagement, gas lighting, etc. For example: not only would they not make a spec, they wouldn't give us details about the features they wanted. We'd ask questions and they would be ignored. Then months later they'd chew us out for not building things they had never even mentioned wanting. And they installed an ex-navy seal who had 20 years in the military, a couple months n the business world and no understanding of (nor respect for) technology. He started finding people to hound out of the company and get fired-- because he always needed a scapegoat.

We put up with this for a year, and then all of us, quit again. (well the one guy who was there from the beginning is still there, and a couple people who don't have easy mobility are still there, moistly because they had been on the job only a month or two.)

And now they have a new team. Things have not improved at all... but so long as they can continue to hire people they will.

Management has decided that the engineering teams that quit "sucked" and that they're the reason there are "problems" today (like not implementing features that were never requested, etc.)

So long as they can keep hiring people, they're doing so.,

This while the glass door reviews are really terrible.

Most people don't read glass door.

So that's a lesson: Read glass door. Don't expect that even you and a bunch of others leaving will end the company.
I wasn't happy that GPLv3 wasn't an option, as I am against TiVoization; but I didn't want to throw a wrench in their efforts, so I accepted GPLv2.

(The older license was more permissive in my opinion; but a TiVo product was less likely if it couldn't be sold for profit.)
I have an incredible amount of difficulty believing this, and do not think this accurately reflects what took place with Clinkle (or many other failed startups, including even the examples you've provided).
Hi lsiebert!

We're focus on Haiti from now but our mission is to build as many self sustaining communities around the world as we can. One houses at a time. :)
The most implausible part seems to be that L is completely anonymous. He is clearly operating with other people, therefore he leaves a trail of information. Even if he is perfect at covering that up, people working with him aren't.

Light could also use his powers to extort. Someone in the police/media/politics must know who L is. Therefore it would be only a matter of time until you hit a person that knows him. An alternate approach to this, which is contrary to Light's beliefs, is to keep executing important people until L is revealed, someone will reveal him eventually.
God made the earth in 7 days, He couldn't have explained it any better. Go Brendan Eich!
Use ES6 via http://babeljs.io/ already, and be happy :-P.
Nice way to build a profile of a bunch of email addresses which will then be quite valuable for targeted marketing campaigns.
Sure, no prob. BTW, if you're interested, you might want to drop by http://operator-1.com/ which hosts the (unofficial) forums. The Teenage Engineering staff are known to browse and even make posts once in a blue moon.

It's expensive but well worth it for the people who click with it. I would recommend trying one before you buy it, especially if you can spend a good amount of time with it. I felt a little let down during my first week or so with it, but then it clicked and became instantly essential. It doesn't go that way for everyone, but it seems most people end up loving it.
Gamasutra targets game developers. And there are not many of them that would like to use license that would force them to release their source code. Such licenses (as GPL for example) may be used only for internal tools, and even then it may be a problem (GPL3). For example if you need to work with third-party outsourcing company that would hire people to do extra art for your project, and you need to give them the custom tools, if the latter are using GPL, then who knows what the third-party artists might request.

if MAME is released under MIT/BSD then it can be freely put in consoles, gameboy, psp, etc.
Don't expose elasticsearch to the public. You wouldn't expose your database to the public (or would you?), and this isn't any different.

At the very least, limit the set of IPs that can connect to your server.
yup, but that was dropped late 2012 in favor of debit cards for backwards compatibility, with plans to re-introduce merchant terminals once there was user adoption
At the time of writing there are 15099 filled tests so producing a match (assuming that all 8 answers must be the same) is highly unlikely (0,08%) if I assume even distribution.
Yeah, as usual, when I watched that episode, I'm turning to my wife and muttering "This is true." The writers may be story-driven, but it seems like Bad Money was introduced just to have an outsider who was in-the-know to be able to draw light on the VC machinery.
But the person is still there, and if he didn't get the company to 1B there would be no 1B-2B. Perhaps he was lucky and anyone could have been employee #1, good for him. People win the lottery all the time.
How does a visually impaired computer programmer do programming?
This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone.

Pretty much a blink of the eye in the history of the planet.
They actually address this in the comic / show: Light wants people to know he exists. He wants to be seen as a god with the power to smite evildoers, which requires being known to exist. Simply killing criminals covertly wouldn't accomplish his goals.
It's possible to have a reasonable story even then, with two stipulations.

First, obviously, that L is at least as good as Light; you can't scale up one side and not the other or you don't have a story.

And second, that Light fundamentally wants to be perceived as a real force, since he's nominally trying to deter crime. Sure, if he acted slowly and randomly, he could appear nearly indistinguishable from random chance, but he wants to send a message. That stipulation is enough to force him to reveal some information, and combined with a sufficiently good L, you'd still have a story.
This is a really good point. I've heard the term Chicken Hawking in a very, very different context but it works here as well.

I think the illuminating bit of information is there is a real difference between the worldview of a VC and a founder. VCs have no clue what's possible or not (and in my experience don't actually understand businesses because most haven't run thenm- they went to Biz School, got their MBAs and that's it.)

So, in todays environment where "founders" are usually kids right out of college with no actual business experience, then their perfect "mate" is a VC who also has no experience. The kid is young and ambitious and has no clue on the limits of his own possibilities-- and the VC is just looking for a payoff without real work the size of the kids ego.

IT's a great match and it explains a lot.

Like why real engineers and real business people building real businesses have a lot more trouble raising money.
Sounds like they had an app, but not a product.
It's not only good for the direct money (though that's nice), but also the connections to potential customers, if the source of the money is also well-connected (not all wealthy people are well-connected too, but many are). For example, somewhat famously, Bill Gates's mother served on the board of directors of the United Way at the same time that John Opel, chairman of IBM, also served on that board, which was instrumental in getting the young Bill introduced to the right people.
This is awesome. I spent far too many hours as a kid orchestrating imaginary space-battles based on the ships from Homeworld[1], also closely considering the specialised roles and hierarchy of the ships as presented in that world.

Since then, reading the "Essay on Realistic Space Combat"[2] took a lot out of the fun of those sorts of considerations, as you realise that actual space combat would be more like relativistic cold wars and sudden genocide[3] than the dashing image of privateering and admiralty fleet manoeuvres.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeworld
2: http://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/essay-on-realistic-sp...
3: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/04/on-the-g...
> There are only 5000 people in the world?
Did I miss something?
AMD already made a bunch of slides announcing the new GPU line to be VR dedicated
"the country's telecoms regulator ordered monitoring applications be installed on the smartphones of Koreans aged 18 and below"
Simd.js is only supported on one and a half browsers, is only supported on a single platform, and only supports two data types. I'd hardly call that supported, more like being hacked together. Its current implementation requires you to waste quite a few clock cycles and bytes of memory if you want to do things like graphics operations. 64 bit support is at the, "hey, you can store numbers. Have fun creating all the operations for them" stage." Furthermore, it deviates from the IEEE-754 standard in things like number handling -- Math.max(5,NaN) should return 5, not NaN. This means that libraries written in other languages and transpiled using emscripten and the like will not behave as they should.

I'd say that the weaknesses of web workers is absolutely relevant. Though you see it as protecting the coder from themselves, there are design patterns out there, like publish/subscribe, that are useful in letting threads communicate, but not generating race conditions. DOM access and the like can be done sanely, but Javascript doesn't even give you that option.

Given the reasons described, it's a rather poor compile target. It's a plodding beast of a language that mishandles numbers, requires circuitous coding to handle basic concurrency, and otherwise behaves in ways other languages don't. Transpiling just barely hides its flaws.

I will restate that it is a hack, and a rather ugly one. Its attempts to maintain compatibility leave us with a virtual machine that is increasingly obsolescent. An "assembly language" designed in 2013 shouldn't be lacking support for 64 bit integers (or 8-bit or 16), should have good support for vectorization, and should provide some sort of register and/or stack model so that you can better clue in the vm as to what items are going to be frequently used in functions. The missing features could be handled much like JSON was early in its life, by including a library as a fallback. It would probably end up looking ugly as hell, but at the same time, it would work, and give a lot more long-term benefits.

Regarding alternative languages, Javascript isn't always the best language to describe a problem in. Sometimes your program's better written in C, or Lisp, or Fortran even. Why should you force your problem to fit the language?

Regarding stagnation, you can move quickly, yet not really go anywhere useful. COBOL had 7 major versions and several minor in 14 years. Does it mean that it's a useful language today? The stagnation comes in terms of how people think of problems, and how they try to wedge those problems to fit into Javascript. The web would be a much better place if we allowed more experimentation into languages and behavior.
Bitrot and atomic COWs: Inside next-gen filesystems
> I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?"

Raw performance is efficiency. You must consider space efficiency, CPU efficiency, network efficiency, time efficiency, developer efficiency, etc
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Network_Management_Pro...

Specifically SNMPv3
I've gotten this too. It started DOSing ip addresses in China, which is a pretty funny thing for elasticsearch to be able to do. Lesson learned: don't expose elasticsearch directly to the internet; even though it is a REST server, it was never designed for that. At the very least take 10 minutes to write an nginx proxy around it.
Close Call Database for Cycling
Curious what rule did he break?
I avoid signing up for multi-day hackathons. Almost none of the venues guarantee quiet, secure places for naps. It'll be great if attendees can sleep at home without penalizing their teams.
We do test Android on ARM. That's an x86_64 buildbot which builds a cross-compiler to Android on ARM and executes a full test suite on Android emulator using a remote testing support which even includes running gdb remotely.

The official tested support is for V7-A, but V6 support also is in tree.
You're probably thinking of Nick D'Alosio, whose father was VP at Morgan Stanley. He "sold" his company through interesting means... http://www.businessinsider.com/why-marissa-mayer-bought-a-30...
So you really believe that young "successful" startup founders are neurolinguistically programming VCs to give them money?

Come on. The bar for your approval has to be higher than "derisive towards VCs and VC-funded founders".
Nadya - To make this weirder, I distinctly remember having a conversation with you in person about the spelling of "Berenstein bears". Maybe it wasn't with you but with somebody else, and the surprise of seeing you in this comment thread on HN caused a false memory. Maybe it's time for me to lay off the Nootropics.
> And yet so many of our soldiers have died for this very pretense.

"America is not at war. The Marine Corps is at war; America is at the mall."

https://i.imgur.com/HsDHUWU.jpg
The CFPB is doing its job. Things like these are very complicated and I'd much rather the CFPB take as much time as it needs with financial matters than let any little startup through or let banks and other institutions do whatever they want.
I've tried that as well... but (1) it's not a good platform for mobile and (2) it's not easy to set up for non-technical people.
I've heard that DeBeers kind of runs the place. I don't remember where I heard that though.
It doesn't have any desktop platforms, which was a critical criteria, and it doesn't support group chat in the way we needed it.
One is what you might call the "reptile brain," which reads such signals and simply interprets them as "this is my pack leader."

I'm curious to know, which reptiles live in packs?
That people try to dominate and manipulate others for business gain? Is that what you have an incredible amount of difficulty believing?

Well, I can tell you based on my experience in startups going back to the early 1990s that it happens and it happens a lot. Particularly with VCs.

In fact, one of the reasons I'm pretty down on VCs (vs, say angels or syndicates) is their desire for "alpha male" types, their hiring of them, their funding of them, etc. They all think they are alpha males of course, and they act like it (which is often perceived, correctly, as being complete jerks) but they also respect it as well.

It is totally plausible to me, and I believe I've seen it happen, that the difference between being funded and not being funded was the perception that the lead of the company was an alpha male.

I none early experience, the CEO was brilliant technical guy but he was quiet and contemplative. You asked him a question and sometimes he'd think for 30 seconds before answering.

Once we were funded, after taking forever and putting us over the barrel, the VCs brought in an alpha male asshole who had not real people skills or business knowledge. They forced us to accept him as our new CEO. He's gone on to have quite a career doing nothing but being a personality type. You know the CEO who delegates everything because he knows nothing, for whom its hard to please because he can't tell the difference between good and bad and just demands more, etc. But at the same time somehow takes credit for everything.

The one who gaslights people, initiates charm offensives when he needs something, and when you accidentally show he was wrong, you become persona non grata.

You've never met this type?
Alas, because we've been seduced by the promise of sweet sweet VC money + IPO's.

I'm a weird case, but maybe not that weird. I realized recently that I don't really even like programming. I mean, not as much as I like sitting on the beach, or hiking, or talking to a friend at a party. I'm in it for the money. I'd rather see the better technology/least sleazy company win, but if I had ten trillion dollars I'd go sit on the beach, not keep programming. I'm here for the money, I'm just determined to not be corrupted along the way.

So when I hear about the demise of Clinkle, I must admit I rejoice somewhat. Because their product was dumb, or at least unimaginative, and I know that funding is limited.

But I think technology used to have people more like Steve Wozniak, who really cared about the technology for its own sake. And someone like that would have no particular feelings about Clinkle, because they already got their wish of being able to hack around on tech all day.

So, yeah, an apology for schadenfreude.
Firefox 38.0.1, Windows 7 here. Works fine for me.
From my experience of going to 20+ hackathons, few things come to mind

1. Have a well defined target audience and reach out early. People make weekend plans.

2. Be very clear about judging criteria.

3. Heavy presence of organizers throughout the event. It's not always easy for newbies at hackathon's, and organizers/mentors being around during the whole thing is great motivation.

4. A good venue where people can find quiet space/at the same time space to socialize.

5. Find a good balance between cheerleading during the hackathon and people working. Sponsor events are important, but continuous interruptions do not help flow work.
How I run sublime text on my Android mobile?
Apparently no one on HN has used a dating web site before either. They have you do the same types of quizzes.
Similarly, I was absolutely baffled when looking back at 80's history that the TV show and pop icon named Max Headroom, was not, as I remembered and would insist as being named: Max Head-rom
You win. :-)
Any plans visiting Romania anytime soon? What did you like the most about Romania?