skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I liked their branding. It had that hip internet company feel. The little leaflets and stuff that they sent with each razor pack were just fun. After time, their razors began to hurt and feel like they were pulling hair more than I remember at the beginning. One Saturday I did an A/B test with a store-bought Gillette 5 blade against the DSC ultimate 6 blade. I lathered up and shaved with a brand new DSC blade and it was just a little painful. Brand new Gillette, smooth as silk. I decided that even though the Dollar Shave Club was cheaper (Gillette from a drugstore is 15-20 bucks for refills) I couldn't have a painful shave experience. I had my phone in hand to take pics of the experience and thought... hey, I'll just cancel right now. I could not find a way to do it. I could only pause my delivery. Finally a couple of months later, I hunted around their website a bit and didn't immediately see anything related to "quitting the club". After a google search, I finally met with success.... only to start receiving plenty of email from them. I unsubscribed and so far I haven't heard from them again. I doubt I'll try Gillette's shave club as I've heard they just send out their "not as sharp" razors for the reduced price. Maybe I should just grow a beard....
I don't see DSC as overvalued at all. They're selling real products that everyone needs (not wants), in an arrangement that makes total sense (razor blades are the sort of consumable that needs restocking at predictable intervals). They face high competition in the sense that I wouldn't bet on any retailer that isn't Amazon, but I'm sure that's priced into the valuation.
Regarding that last sentence, given that most such countries would be European countries, or one of the US or the Canada, it is clearly normal what is the reason you would have more words about it, it is simply a familiar culture. China's culture is fascinating because it is opaque, or rather, because it was opaque, but by now less so. By time, as westerners get to know it more and more, it will be less relevant and/or fascinating, and contemporaneously rot. As westerner tourists are fascinated by some places, these places quickly become fake, they become parodies of themselves and ultimately tourist traps. Eminönü, Venice, Napoli, others, southeast asia, in these places there has been left nothing authentic. The fascination and interest of westerner tourists is such a plague that it has killed some of the most characteristic and beautiful parts of the world. So I'd rather be happier if china went undiscovered, than it be discovered and used up.
I think this logic breaks down when you run out of people who already have the skills du jour.

If you can hire people who already have the specific skills you need, sure, let others pay for the cost of acquiring those skills. But, when you run out of those people, then the choice becomes paying to train them, or suffer the cost of leaving the work they'd do undone. If the value of the work they perform is more than the cost of training, it's logical to train them.

In this example, the market rate for someone already trained at a certain set of skills is $90k, and the cost of training is $20k. Nothing prevents a company from offering people who are smart and capable, but not trained at whatever the company happens to need today, $70k. But with a promise (in the employment agreement, not orally) to offer $90k one year from now.

Everyone benefits from this arrangement — the candidate, who now has a better job they otherwise would have (which is presumably why they're taking the offer in the first place). And the company, who's getting a capable employee without spending more on training.

So, the bottom line is that you can always structure your incentives in a way that makes the training worthwhile for all parties involved, without asking the employee to pay for it.
How would you envisage Cap'n Proto or Protobufs working in a web application that has to talk to a number of 3rd party APIs and services, where you may not be provided with a .proto or .capnp file?
I'm curious, for how many of your (say) 10 closest friends do you know where they buy their razors?

For me I'm going with one; I know one friend who swears by his electric and although I'm sure he also has some sort of low tech option it almost certainly isn't DSC.
If your language has something like "None" or "null", then you should be checking against that to implement a default, rather than checking a truth value. After all, what if you wanted to implement a boolean parameter with a default value?

Personally, I'm a big fan of languages with a "Maybe" type for this kind of thing.
We Got Geeks
Another way to save money on razor blades

http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-extend-the-life-of-yo...
Please reconsider your tone.
Exactly this but with a Wahl Professional Peanut Clipper for like 50 USD.
I did the same until I got a safety razor and found some good blades.

Smoothest shave of my life, refills come out to about $.50/week. The first shave wasn't pretty, but after that it was smooth sailing and I'll never look back.

Makes things like DSC seem quaint; people think safety razors are either:

- archaic
- dangerous

But the truth is they are a fantastic, cheap way to get a high quality shave and I don't mind being an evangelist about them if it gets people away from fully disposable razors.
Something something Age of Aquarius....
Because I ran out of punched cards?
The logo seemed like a good place to start. Look up "hipster ribbons" and "hipster arrows" and "hipster fonts" and you can find the rest of the pieces that make up their style. They've got a complete implementation of a popular formula; it's nicely done but it's far from unique.
Note that there is not any rough revenue multiple that would apply in a broadly formulaic way for early-stage companies. They are all unique to some extent along axes that matter to investors (addressable market, growth rate, competition, etc.).

However, a couple of numbers from TFA might support the notion that DSC did ~$175m last year:

"“We have 2 million members that get a shipment every month or every other month"

...

"On average, the company’s customers pay a subscription fee of about $7 per month"

If those are both accurate, that's a $168mm run rate. (Right, that's not TTM, but if the company is growing rapidly, investors will want to have more of a forward bias and so TTM becomes less relevant.)
Truthfully, I never considered this use case. Are you saying the computer is taxed because the USB controller is saturated?
They must be resonating with some group that doesn't really overlap with the HN crowd... I've not seen any advertising other than the original YouTube video.
As a result, a business can't pay to train it's own work force - if a business invests $20k in training and $80k in salary, there is nothing stopping another employer from offering $90k in salary after training is complete.

If the training has increased her market salary, then the simple solution is to raise her salary to meet the market.
$20 Merkur Double Edge Safety Razor
$20 Large sample pack of razors from amazon
$10 bristle brush and lather bar soap

That was three years ago, haven't bought anything since. I'm confused why if people want an affordable solution this route isn't more popular? Is it simply because most stores have stopped selling plain razors for much more expensive handled disposables?
I've never understood the appeal of the dollar shave club. Razors are very cheap when bought in bulk, and they take up very little space to store, even an entire year's supply. Wouldn't it make more sense and save money to ship a year's supply at a time?

For example, here are 64 razors for $16: http://amazon.com/dp/B00XKVH4O6. The comparable dollar shave two-blade option would cost you $48, since it's $1/mo for blades and $2/mo for shipping.

On the high end six-blade model, here's 24-cartridges for $30.49: http://www.dorcousa.com/pace-6-cartridges-6-pack-sxa1040/ The same thing from dollar shave would cost $54.
Flattered to be on featured on hackernews.

We're hiring Devops, Platform Engineers, Mobile developers and QA automation engineers.

For more info email: engineering-careers@dollarshaveclub.com
I bought a double edged about 2 years ago and haven't looked back. I shave my head with them every 1-3 days and find the closeness unparalleled. I am generally less diligent with shaving my face, but it's terrific for that as well. There's a really nice thing about the whole ceremony of it all; making the lather, making the strokes from the different angles, fixing any mistakes.
Does that mean $1,000,000 to $4,999,999?
> They're selling real products that everyone needs (not wants)

Sikhs?
Every format has limits, sometimes people just choose to not document them.

For example, try transmitting 3↑↑↑3 as an integer over HTTP.
Japan’s bullet trains being cleaned in 7 minutes flat
I'm skeptical. Humans adapt to circumstance and use different tools, but I'd need some convincing to believe our essential nature has _ever_ changed since we first climbed down out of the trees. Tribalism, selfishness, violence, lust, love, superstition and an occasional rare burst of insight and reason.... all still plainly manifest and driving our social world. Look at Nigeria. Look at the local penitentiary. Look at the Mideast. Look at the office politics in your workplace. Same motives, different manifestations. Nothing really changes as long as the condition in which we find ourselves remains the same. And that condition is scarcity and fear of death and pain and jealousy and constant competition from competing tribes. A same organism in the same conditions is likely to act in the same ways. And we do, and we will, at least until we become something else or until these circumstances change for everybody (which dream is very very far away).

On the other hand, maybe we are gaining the tools to change our nature through changes in biology/physiology. This is hardly metaphysical or philosophical or psychological though.
Total cost of ownership is another issue:

> Also, with much lower power use, there is a TCO saving to be added to the equation. Power savings work out at around $8/drive-year, so add another $40 to the 5-year TCO balance and the hard-drive doesn't look so good.

And I wonder if Mr. O'Reilly has included the cost of power for cooling.
Move to Romania. We have uncapped 1Gbps for 15$/month
Alexis Ohanian's "Without Their Permission".
I don't really look up razors or related products online and I also see their ads all over Facebook. I'm pretty certain they're just aggressively targeting the 18-35 demographic.
A better place to look is their video ads, which have gotten quite a bit of viral traction: https://www.youtube.com/user/DollarShaveClub

The DSC business model is really simple: take a no-name commodity product (Dorco razor blades: see http://lifehacker.com/5903771/forget-dollar-shave-clubbuy-th...), wrap it in very-social-sharing-friendly marketing, charge three times as much. Boom, you make enough money to cover the costs of the marketing and then some.
Hahaha. I had exactly the same thought and almost posted something similar.
Likely, yes.

If you already doing efficient work, you don't need someone to join your team and to justify his existence to inflict methodology over your already working workflow.

Methodologies makes sense to organize large teams with diverse backgrounds and experiences.

Small, efficient, and already professional teams usually neither need babysitting nor organizing methodologies to do it's work.
You're right, it'd be strange if I did. However, given that they have a referral program I would have expected a bit more buzz for 7% market share.

http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/faqs#/faq11
Add Atlanta, GA metro area to your list. They've had me on a 300GB cap for the past year. I've only gone over it once (burning one of three overage allowances) because we stream most of the TV and movies we watch, and I do a lot of OS testing, downloading ISOs and packages on a daily basis.

I really don't get a data cap of 300GB for today's culture of "stream everything". I can see something like a 1TB cap to knock out the heavy torrenters, but 300GB/month is 10GB/day. A decent sized family will bust through that easily (Dad watching a 3GB movie, Mom streaming 1GB of Pandora throughout the day, Daughter downloading 7GB of new Xbox/PS4 game content, Son binging half a season of a Netflix show at 5GB).
Very good way, and it's a good boilerplate for new CLIs :)
When using Flask, I like the fact that for form handling with an ORM, there's a flask-wtforms plugin, a wtforms-sqlalchemy plugin, and a flask-sqlalchemy plugin. This is part of the reason why I'm sticking with Django.
If it's ain't broke, don't scrum it.
Do not come to Seattle. There's no room and the tech sucks.

Love,

A local
I did the same, until I saw a tip that somebody posted here :)
Since then I've been using the same Gillette cartridge (it's been over a year) and it's still as sharp as it was when I bought it.

The trick is to rub it against your bicep or forearm (effectively stropping it) before use. I also do that after use, which helps to dry it up (keeping it even sharper).

I've already saved a small fortune on cartridge refills. Best shaving tip I ever got!
What do you do? mirror every drive?
No Intelligence Required: Her, Ex Machina and Interstellar
> Whatever a competitor is willing to pay, the company that provided the training can just pay that and not risk their employees being poached.

Yes they can, if they want to go out of business.

If I spend $20k to train a new employee, I can afford to pay them their value to me - $20k (less than that if I want to make a profit, but this is the maximum that allows me to stay in business). Meanwhile, my competitor waits 4 weeks for me to do the training and offers their full value. Now I can either let them go, or match the offer - but either way I'm down $20k, while my competitor comes out even.

So you can imagine why I might not want to spend money on training.

Given your other points, this is only a problem is the cost of the portion of the training that is transferable is more than the extra cost of poaching (over that of hiring a fresh employee). As the job market becomes more liquid (decreasing that poaching cost), this becomes the case more and more.
What methods of communication do you think have replaced the simple mailing list?
The "hold to the camera" thing looks like it's just for show, but it also makes sure the watch is close enough to the phone for pairing to happen. It also provides a little bit of visual feedback. One of those little Apple touches that adds to the feeling you get when you unbox their products.

The iOS pairing procedure for the 3rd gen AppleTV asks you to tap the phone to the ATV to pair it. The tapping doesn't do anything, it's only the proximity that matters.

http://www.imore.com/how-wirelessly-set-3rd-gen-apple-tv-any...
What is the gross profit margin on the back of your envelope?
They advertise on TV, nationally. I've seen the commercials. They also advertise heavily on Facebook.
Couple thoughts.

1. 40 lines of glue code, sure. How much external code did he pull in/write?
2. All of this is predicated on the idea that serialization/deserialization is the primary bottleneck. This becomes not your bottleneck when you've got other distributed components in play.
What do you mean by "gamifying"?
An Introduction to Kotlin
That's on the front page right now already...
Security ? How do you find out what libraries / versions are in a container ? ... you are pulling the curtain dont look back there :)
I absolutely prefer capped service far, far more than uncapped services. In Singapore, I can get a LTE SIM for $35, and then pay $25 for 7 days of data @14 Gigabytes, with roll over of the amounts I don't use.

In general, I get 50 megabits down/20 megabits up. And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.

I've never been a fan of unlimited/uncapped services, they quickly degrade into poor experiences for everyone in a very short period of time.
Gag from the early '90s, being the "Gillette 3000, with 16 blades..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YleuLyCUx28

Worth watching for the description of what the blades do.
I'm a practician, not a theorist or an academic. I couldn't care less whether something is based in CS theory. I care whether something will be useful to me over the course of my career. If it is, I'd like my education to train me for that.

In fact, some of the academic stuff like compilers and automata have been useless in real life. That's a failing of academia from my point of view.
If people thought this way a lot of things would go out of business.
The `||` pattern is super common in a bunch of languages though and to code it with a `== null` test you would need to expand it to a full blown ternary operator

name != null ? name : "default name"

Some languages have a "null-coalescing" operator you can use in these cases but its a niche thing.

(And I agree with you on the Maybe thing but, as I said previously, 0 in conditionals is not a problem when conditionals have to be boolean)
I shave with a razor about once a week and I think I've been using the same blade for 2 or 3 years now.
Dropping の can create a different meaning. For example, 日本料理 (Japanese cuisine) and 日本の料理　(cooking in Japan, which could well be used to refer to the quality of the italian or chinese food here). The former is truly a single word and the latter two words separated by a particle.
My wallet disagrees with "unpaid" and "disrespectful"
> We exceed expectations, do we need Agile? We are organized and documented.

I would ask your boss this question.
This is true, but what the tree will become is there from the stage of the seed. At best your contribution is to allow the tree (and your children) to become the best they can be, but if you miss one day of watering, or forget the fertiliser another, then things will turn out OK. Children really only need love and attention and they will grow through any mistakes you might make along the way.
I am in the exact same boat. Though I have since spent a few extra bucks on a stand for the razor and brush and a mug for my soap. It makes the shaving ritual a bit better.
Your basic contention that business can't train it's own work force.

Your original analysis neglected transaction costs entirely.
Do you know if the quality is the same?

The dollar shave club not only sells cheap shaving gear (compared to gillette at the supermarket) but also sells reassurance that the gear isn't crap, which I think many consumers fear about no-name alternatives.
I went through a similar thought process, but I just resigned myself to shaving with dull blades most of the time.

After the dollar shave club hoopla I researched more into a better way of shaving (electric razors gave me really bad rashes and didn't cut particularly close), and ended up switching to a safety razor[1].

100 refill blades are about $10 and can each be used about four times with the blade being razor sharp each time. I went whole hog and got a fancy tub of old fashioned shaving cream[2] and brush, so every shave is a neat ritual of lathering up the cream. I'm getting pretty good at it.

Each shave costs approximately 2.5¢ for a fourth of a razor and a few pennies more for the pea-sized spoon of really nice shaving cream I use, and it's blindingly sharp and perfect every time.

I might at some point switch to a straight razor, but I have no reason to.

1. Like http://amzn.com/B000NL0T1G but not this exact model - they're all very similar.

2. http://amzn.com/B009BLN3M6 Don't get shaving soap - it dries your skin out and usually smells terrible.
Show HN: Sentopia – E-Mail Marketing, Simplified.
Both are still lagging the "Trac LXXVI Razor", published in 1979 by Mad Magazine.
I haven't tried an electric razor for a while, maybe they are better now but they always seemed to take forever to get a good shave. I buy half way decent 4 blade disposables and get 5 or 6 months out of each one. I shave in the shower with soap. A few weeks in they loose their edge a bit but then come back. The slight corrosion of the stainless steel actually puts an edge back on.
This is worth reading: http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management-process...
Ask yourself how many animals you would kill to save you own child. If the answer is a number without limit then there is no morality in letting someone else child die to save some animal.
Has anyone ever advertised a low performance web server (on purpose...)
> We've known for years that Ruby and Python are slow, but we were willing to put up with that. However, as we more and more turn servers into REST APIs that are supposed to deliver JSON to numerous clients, for many it is time to find an alternative.

> You see a lot of competitors trying to fill this void. Some people are crazy enough to use Rust or Nim or Haskell for this work, and you see some interest in JVM based languages like Scala or Clojure (because the JVM actually handles threading exceptionally well), but by and far the languages you both hear discussed and derided the most are JavaScript via node and Go.

Meanwhile the Java programmers just keep on delivering with Jersey, Spring, Restlet etc. etc. so forth. Less blogging, more doing.
Would love to see this as well. I know my way around the CLI but not enough to even grok what Docker does. Any good overviews/getting starteds/tutorials out there?
alright wise guy
Same thing here. And if you buy a new head every 6 months to a year, the quality/closeness of the cut is still as good as the day you bought it.

I've had the same electric razor for about 6 years now, the battery still goes a couple weeks between charges, and shave quality is as good as I ever could get with a manual razor. I just don't get why most people prefer the more expensive, more labor-intense option of razors + shaving cream... I guess for some, it's nostalgia?
That is true! This will just help you get started, so that your early tweets get in front some more eye balls
Well played! :-)
Have you seen Go Challenge 1? Like that: hex dumper, investigative work, some captured packets.
Anything from Greg Egan gets my attnetion!
We're hiring software engineers at DSC: SDEI (software development engineer in infrastructure), SDET, iOS/Android engineers and platform engineers. Email engineering-careers@dollarshaveclub.com
Just give it a try for a week and see if you find value in the methodology.
S3 Lifecycle Management does this for you! http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/object-lifecy...
DADSS: le système qui vise à empêcher l’ivresse au volant
Recently "The Witcher 3" sold 4M copies in a short amount of time whereas 1.3M are attributed to PC sales [1].

Even Indie games like Cities: Skylines which is PC/Mac only recently sold more than 1M copies in a short amount of time. [2]

I don't really play much but i follow PC Gaming and it has been on the rise for years. Free to play MOBA games like League of Legends have over 8M concurrent players in peak hours with 27M people playing at least game per day. That is more than the viewership of even the most popular TV series, every day of the week.

[1] http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-witcher-3-out-of-its-4-mil...
[2] http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8414099/cities-skylines-hit...
Geomagnetic Storm Hits Earth
All true. Also been true for ~7 years, so maybe it doesn't matter much.
Razors are practically, not quite, but practically caveman technology. I'd imagine that any products making it it to the modern market are roughly the same grade.

One thing I'm sure of: A good sign of a superior product is that it doesn't need monthly replacement.
Gillette's brand is valued by forbes at $20B (~2.5x Revenue)

http://www.forbes.com/companies/gillette/
Rick Santorum Funded by Gay Torture Porn
iOS 9 Jailbreak is on the Way
Inside Google's ugly war against the homeless in LA
Hacking saved passwords- Google chrome