skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Stuck in transition: Is my startup doomed?
Hi,

currently transitioning from "friendship student startup" to "serious and professional company". Facing some challenges:

Background

- Company was bootstrapped by 8 student founders (12,5% share)

- Since beginning (2011) we had steady growth of 30-50% a year in turnover and profits up to this year.

- There are three branches of products.

1) Talks & Trainings about social media and IT-sec (40% turnover).

2) Contracting work e.g. creating websites and content (40%).

3) SaaS Solution for the public sector, we develop and sell (20%)

Recent Events

- Founders starting to work full-time, thus personnel cost exploding.

- Growth has come to a halt due to the loss of a big contracting client

- Money is getting shorter, salaries have been cut for everybody to reduce burn rate.

Current problems

- "Democracy": on decisions founders are in, conflicts decided by vote (little unpopular decisions).

- No central management, everybody kinda manages himself, no real due diligence (unpopular tasks get delayed).

- no leading figure in the team, no one wants to "be managed" by a colleague perceived equal

- Diversification, products are unrelated (Contract work != talks and trainings != SaaS).

- Not a single product / vision (many things done "for the money" without personal passion).

- Inconsistency in peoples commitment and attitude (motivated people looking for ideas and working hard vs. "employees" doing the bare minimum).

- everyone is employed but there are not enough tasks to fill everyones workday productively.

- Products are either to small (SaaS), dependent on third parties (public yearly contracts) or reaching the end of lifecycle (talks&trainings)

- Salaries are way below industry level, If paid properly there would be only half the staff.

- Everyone is friends which makes it harder to let people go.

Have you ever been in a situation like this or witnessed these problems?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel

You mean I misspelled ?
Oh, I've been looking for something like this. It's definitely going to help me with accessibility.
Companies Are Sold Not Bought
The most important point here is that the company that originally collected the data isn't that relevant. If other laws don't support privacy protection, you must assume your data may end up just about anywhere & everywhere.
Thanks. Unfortunately Neither of those suggestions worked here. Am guessing it's some combination of the browser/extensions that I use.
Mercurial at Unity
I clicked on Wakefield and got a video about Wakefield.
All of above - at the same time - ends up in the middle of Gartner's hype cycles: a solution has been found 20 years ago and people are searching for problem it solves ever since.
No. NoScript makes browsing faster, disables lots of annoyances and (to some extent) increases security - not just by blocking JS scripts, but also by providing great tools against stuff like clickjacking.

Maybe it fights some tracking as a side effect, but that's not the reason you install it, because it's not made for that and therefore is not very effective.
This is actually a really cool way to explore an area via videos. Some of the videos aren't really related, but keep clicking and you'll get one. Great tool!
Introducing moron.js – a new ORM for Node.js
I expected a vertical equivalent of this machine.
> but if you distribute them, you likely have to publish the code.

Sure, publish the code to the person we sell them to, and no one else. If they want to take the job of rebuilding the binaries themselves, they're welcome to try, but I think the hassle of doing that is what we would be getting paid to do.

Maintaining an online version of Octave seems like another possibility. A couple of people have already built online versions of Octave, and when I approached one of them several months ago, they seemed receptive to the idea to commercialise it.
Maybe I'm in minority, but I'd have preferred a userscript/extension alternative for those who don't use a bookmarks bar.

edit: Never mind, made a quick one for myself seeing that's MIT licensed https://gist.github.com/liviu-/62e8ce91b8723ef1a10a
RLSD, the Retro Linux-libre Software Distribution
I sure hope Google never goes up for sale.
5 Steps to Winning in the Data Economy
How one driver is helping rip off Uber in China
And yet all of the major exchanges have mandated down times that even small e-retail operators would kill for.

This thread has reached sort of silly proportions. Of course electronic trading impacts most people's lives even if they don't want it to, but in reality the markets are largely self correcting at this level, so even if there is some oddity associated with the leap second it likely won't have long term (or maybe even observable) impact on the wider world.
GPS + PTP +- < 1us

GPS + NTP +- 12us
Exactly, government-managed retirement funds were created after WWII, at a time when there was few retirees and a massive young workforce.

Now it's the other way around : the demographic transition is hitting the retirement age all over Europe and it is an alarming problems for many countries including France and Germany.
Burrito – A monadic IO interface in Rust
Ironically, that graph is taken from an IMF paper[1], which outlines a model for the effect of fiscal tightening on the Debt:GDP ratio, under which said ratio generally (depending on the country's fiscal multiplier) increases in the first year after a fiscal tightening, then declines after year 2 (see figures 2, 3 and 4).

In other words, that graph supports the idea that austerity helps reduce debt.

1: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2013/wp1367.pdf
I gave a talk on this subject at At the Frontend conference in Denmark recently. Take a look: https://vimeo.com/129469530 It goes over general techniques and then drills down into the React JS code base.
Ask HN: Firstnamelastname.com or firstnamelastna.me
When choosing a personal domain name, is there any advantage in choosing the regular .com domain, or, if applicable, take advantage that you name's last letters match another tld?
It's not very strict; it's the raison d'être of the GPL. The LGPL was written precisely to allow libraries without copyleft. A big chunk of CRAN is library-based and depends on a binary interface to R, and is GPL'ed.

The FSF also does not think that whether the GPL'ed program is a separate process or not determines whether the bundle as a whole is GPL'ed or not. In their opinion, if you bundle the whole thing and it acts as a whole, and the communication between the GPL'ed components and the non-free parts are "intimate enough"[1], then the whole bundle is copylefted. It seems to me that bundling R with SQL server and tightly coupling the two, even across different processes, could well qualify.

Of course, if the R developers do not want to enforce their copyleft, none of this matters.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation
Bitcoin fans eye potential in Greek crisis
Except the UK economy has been expanding for a long time now and it's still described as using austerity. Austerity now simply means reduction in spending on "social security" of pretty much any form.

Spending your way out of recession [in the midst of large pre-existing debt] has its own supporters and detractors. I've generally come to the conclusion that whatever your budgetary preference you can find an macro-economist to agree with you.
"A 2011 Harvard study by Michael Luca found that there was no significant statistical correlation between being a Yelp advertiser and having more favorable reviews."

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp#Alleged_manipulation_by_Y...
> Eventually the advertisers are going to pay for performance,

That assumes that you can actually measure performance or attribution. This is far from a solved problem. As such many publishers are reluctant to sell on this basis.

Trivial rebuttal:

User clicks on ad, buys product. Who's to say that ad caused the sale? Maybe they've seen that particular ad or a variant on dozens of different publisher sites. Or even better, maybe the true product awareness was driven by an offline interaction (billboard or word of mouth).

In the general case, you simply cannot measure direct attribution or performance with any real sense of confidence.
Android does it by giving each application a different user and then granting that user certain privileges.
>“Google appears to be strategically deploying universal search in a way that degrades the product so as to slow and exclude challengers to its dominant search paradigm, ” the paper concludes

So Google is hurting competitors by degrading its own product (if you believe this study commissioned by a competitor). This sounds to me like a situation that is perfectly self limiting and self correcting.
oddly enough, because i have noscipt installed, the site's typography looked fine to me.
I'd recommend the Phoenix Project - very easy read. http://www.amazon.com/The-Phoenix-Project-Helping-Business/d...
Good piece of economic propaganda from first word to the last:

"Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen considers the alternatives."

There is no such a thing like Nobel price Winners. There are Winners of Central bank's created Nobel Memorial price that of course say what the Central Banks want.

To say that the crisis that we have today is the consequence of austerity is like saying that because you feel bad when sober the morning after getting drunk, the problem is being sober in the first place.

There is no Western country today that is austere at all. All of them are spending more money that they have, most of it on bad investments.

This always has ended on one place: destruction of capital. It should had been done in an ordered manner but they decided to kick the can ignoring the problem but making it worse in the future.

Instead of removing the bad investments from the system, they had used the working part of the system to save the bad, actually rewarding the bad actors(that made a killing at the start of the bubbles.e.g 20% profits per year in Greece real state).

When Greece was bankrupt years ago, the problem was not solved giving them more money, and indebting them even more.

The proper solution was to bankrupt Greece as soon as they could not pay. Of course this would have bankrupted the irresponsible French and German banks that lend money to Greece in the first place. "Saving Greece" was in fact saving French and German banks and allocating the losses on public hands.
Could you please elaborate on what is the preferable alternative to temporarily allowing a page? You often do not know which one of the blocked scripts provides the functionality you are looking for. So you unblock them one by one, I guess? But then, when you unblock the offending script the damage is done.
Whispererly
Yep, soon as Rich Hickey gets around to writing a Lisp for it. Wonder what he'll call it though. Clotson? Watjure? Wisp?
I've heard it pronounced lim-cut-fee, so if I ever said the word out loud, that's probably how I'd pronounce it too...
I was about to join Whatsapp but heard rumors that FB is about to buy it, back then. I am still on FB and never gave FB my number, and never joined Whatsapp. Though FB has my number (hidden from me on), as many of my friends uploaded or sync their address book (FB app and Whatsapp). [FB is just an example]
Suddenly? I thought this had already been going on for a year or two.
Someone else will be the consultant, perhaps spending $20k on more useless products. In that case, you doing the consulting is still net positive.

Agreed, when you're evaluating the morality of the effects of an action - rather than the action in itself - you must compare them with what would likely have happened, not assume that nothing would happen instead.

A simple example is self-defence: punching someone it wrong - unless they would've harmed someone more if they hadn't been punched. Comparing the likely alternative scenario is essential to judge the effects of the action.
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Immutable serialisable data structures in C++11
Whispererly is a twitter bot that allows you to send anonymous tweets by simply direct messaging it your tweets!

The bot can be used to joke around, express political views, give feedback to you're friends or any else you want it to be used for. We already have close to 200 tweets in the past two days and can't wait for what the Hacker News community comes up with!

Test it out, and if you have any questions or suggestions feel free to drop them in here.
>>Each piece is an expression of patience and collaboration with nature.

>>Each tree is well nurtured and tended.

>>All we ask of the tree is that it grows along certain pathways.

Am not sure if its still collaboration while we alone dictate pathways!
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>A diesel engine running 24/7 is going to upset a few neighbors.

I'm looking at some new townhouses being built and they start at 7am and I think the noise by-laws say 8am so yeah, who cares about the neighbours? :P
Wow, that's a pretty bad illustration of leap smearing. I think a much nicer illustration would have been roughly like this (with obvious limitations caused by the ASCII spacing):

Real: true time, showing the 61st second
Comp: computer time, only counting 60 seconds

not smeared,
time counted at regular speed
...--->| |<---...
Real 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 00 01 02 03
Comp 54 55 56 57 58 59 00 01 02 03
|<- smearing ----------->|
time counting slowed down
by 20%
Is it? If I go and download the unreal engine to build a game, I got to pay 5% of gross revenue for using that in a commercially sold game. If I go to Flickr and download some pictures, I often got to pay the photographer for including it in commercial products.

GPL like any other software licenses defines the terms when authorization is granted, and instead of asking money it only request that you share and share alike the source code. Some people find that to be a fair concept, while others prefer to spend money and time to create their own implementation. Depending on the level of market competition, business models, and revenue streams reimplementing existing software can be valid but in most times its not.
Airtable raises 7.6M and hires FB exec to make databases accessible to everyone
The Holy Grail of JavaScript Testing
Beautiful, I love it. 60 fps in OS X 10.10.3 Safari.

Safari gets unresponsive when you “Inspect Element”. I guess that built-in debugger still needs some work. A debugger should be usable, especially if user code is broken.
I'm concerned what could happen in the future, if large corporations have stored a lot of data. I was surprised how much civil liberties got eroded in the US after 9/11. What if there are more big terrorist attacks, for example, and say the military takes over the government? Do you really want some central database of all the books you've ever read then?
"They are planning to sell Intel-based machines running Linux, with the SGI logo stamped on the box. They weren't very clear about the migration path they expect IRIX software to take, but they do seem to be very enthusiastic about Linux in general."

They chose Itanium as the new platform, and used the same technology as Apple did for Rosetta to smooth the transition between instruction sets (and in SGI's case, operating systems too).

http://www.itjungle.com/tug/tug080405-story02.html
3D printing is great because it's something physical and useful.

Other physical alternative is, quite obviously, Arduino. I have no experience teaching kids but I think that it would be a really solid option too given they implement something useful (to some extent), and that's a really important point.

I mean a blinking LED is cool for the first time but then you just forget about it. But for playing cards, or 3D printed stuff, it's something you can actually use it and you can keep improving it, driving more learning.

Given the adoption of Arduino, I'd be surprised if no one has developed a solid course for kids yet.
It's also worth remembering that the asset bubbles in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain were inflated by the Eurozone's low interest rates. The reason those interest rates were set so low was to boost the German economy, which was in the doldrums, post-reunification.
First, i'd like to state that i'm talking about austerity in general, not about Greece in particular. Greece needs a debt restructuring, there's no way around it.

The whole reason for all that austerity was that some countries were unable to refinance their debt and other countries are afraid they might not be able to refinance in the future. Refinancing debt in hard times becomes harder yet if it is externally financed.

You need to convince someone to lend you money if you want to run a deficit.

Love it or hate it, the Germans don't like a soft currency. The reason is probably the prelude to the rise of Hitler, which was marked by hyperinflation from printing too much money. It has been in their "DNA" since WW2, and no amount of economic handwaving is going to change that, at least in the forseeable future. In practice Germany has had a budget deficit nearly every year of course (such is politics), they just aren't that big.

The reason Germany joined the Eurozone was the absence of debt mutualisation. The Bundesbank warned that this was hard/impossible without political union, but they were ignored. And so, here we are.
Not really: growth -> becoming more popular, but not necessarily popular, in the absolute sense, which is based on density comparissons, of course: going from 10 to 15 inhabitants is a 50% growth, but it is not more popular than a city with 2 million habitants, even it that city is having a population loss of 1%.
Actually, sounds interesting. You could use it to discover flaws in the game play, given you can quantify 'bad / boring gameplay'.
Researchers double fiber optic capacity limit
I guess maybe the practical limits of traveler behavior trump the theoretical ideal? The mathematical solution to boarding passengers was examined a while back:

http://phys.org/news/2008-02-board-plane.html
Are there any security implications for leap seconds? Do pseudo random number generators have any issues with 61 seconds in a minute?
Did Famous Finally Get It Right?
R doesn't have built-in parallelism features that I know of. There are a lot of packages, though: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing...
Misconceptions about code reuse
That can be fun :) How do you plan to moderate it?
Is there a plan to able to run this in a CI environment?
We do have laws that support privacy protection around here, and I still assume it may end up just about anywhere. Data is just too easy to copy around. What these laws give me is the power to tell those companies to delete it, and to get our National Commission for Data Protection to fine them if I ever get evidence that they didn't.

But I would never assume the data is actually protected.
It is an unfortunate fact of academic life that you need a grant to complete your study. Take a look at studies that come out of HBS or Stanford GSB; more often than not they are sponsored by big banks and investment firms.

I do feel as uncomfortable about this as you do. This sort of sponsoring ruins academic objectivity.
>>How could that not fail?

The dev team got paid for ~7 years?
Part of if might be a constant offset/day.

26 seconds over 43 years (1972-2015) is 0.60 seconds/year. If this matches the average offset from 1820...1972 (which would add up to about 92 seconds), it means that our average is wrong by ~0.6 seconds, but the time length doesn't gain additional seconds due to "spinning down" (caused by tidal interaction with the moon, or whatever other effects there might be).

That's actually also what the graph suggests: It's havnig a short-term daviation of +/- 1ms over the course of (judging by eye) weeks, and a long-term deviation of +/- 2ms over the course of decades. The average deviation of 0.6seconds/year (number of leap seconds inserted) translates to an average of 1.65ms/day from 1972-now.
I do have plans and ways of moderating in place but, for now I want to see what the community can do with it!
For those interested, fixing the price is called "resale price maintenance," and fixing it at an unsustainable low level to force someone's hand is called "predatory pricing," and it happens.
Sounds reasonable :) We too often build restrictions before even being sure we actually need them.
Microsoft buying Revolution Analytics is another piece of evidence shoes Microsoft has its A-game back. R is massively popular in the statistical community, it is basically the PHP of analytics (huge standard library with no namespaces but very easy to get started with and powerful for advanced users).

Additionally R is one of the few languages where you can be productive in a non-unix environment. At my old Windows workplace, R was the only open source language with working network NTLM authentication out of the box. Everything can be self-contained in RStudio, an interpreter and gui package manager to stop you jumping to the command line, and a help system to stop you using man.

By buying becomming closely associated with R, Microsoft is more likely to be a component in large analytics investments i.e. "let's get Microsoft's R distro, oh and why not their big data plaform too?", and ensures its services and databases are well integrated in this upcoming language.
Having an <h4> tag below an <h2> tag is an accessibility concern? What does incrementally decreasing in heading size have to do with accessibility?
Sorry, seen this only now... please feel free to write directly, thanks.
Show HN: A simple password generator
Potentially, although it might need quite a lot of infrastructure to make that work usefully I think, as most of the design in Capsicum has been around reducing capabilities for a single group of programs for security, not a whole system. You can do much of that with Linux capabilities now - see man (7) capabilities and the section "The securebits flags: establishing a capabilities-only environment" which says how to disable suid so root is effectively removed.
Is Digital Marketing Training Good for a Future Career
Always good to be precautions!
How to integrate PayPal in an iOS application for future payment?
The A-Z of a Social Jobseeker
For cool secret features of the bot and some more information - https://medium.com/@Go_Soroush/introducing-whispererly-705f6...
I make colouring(with paint) books for kids on iPad and have been giving serious thought to make adult ones. Do you think your girlfriend would interested in working on a digital surface?
Computer museum seeks BBC Micro fixers
If I'm reading the numbers right, we currently spend ~1bn a week on interest payments, out of a total budget of ~14bn a week? So ~7% of our spending each year is just to pay for debt already accrued.
Amazon Introduces the $100 Mln Alexa Fund to Fuel Voice Technology Innovation
Most of the things can be transformed through lapply family (and d/plyr equivalents). d/plyr has simple parallel=TRUE. For other problems use mclapply().

That's basically all you need on a day-to-day basis.
Very fun, do you plan to let user choose which anonymous animal will whisper it's tweet ? I don't trust anonymous chipmunks ;)
> "to delete my memories of how ux"

> "hogan is being interviewed and talking about how "snake people" act are normally just lazy writing. they"

....yeah, I think it could use some work. It looks like it's just grabbing the middle of an entire random tweet from my timeline, then sprinkling arbitrary words around.
Experiment: What happens when you make a $20 iPad app free?
Couldn't even be bothered to read the explanation, could you?

> "[...] In order to maintain a consistent outline of the page for assistive technologies..."
Beginner’s Guide to Quora: The Most Helpful Uses for Marketers