skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I lived in New York, I was a customer of a home cleaning start-up that magically managed to avoid all of the legal quagmires and platform defections that plague sharing economy companies.

The magical secret to its success: the cleaner that would visit your home was an employee, not a contractor. That meant the company could control and guarantee the quality of the service provided and would be able to have its cleaners sign non-competes if necessary.
One "hack" is the pomodoro technique. Do about 20 minutes of work, then take a five minute break. This avoids burning out trying to work for hours on end, finding that you've accomplished very little.
I thought about this. Someone made a reddit article outlining how to do this and the profit margin depended on skirting the 1099 rules. This isn't a scalable business. Technology doesn't change the basic factors of the business in any meaningful way. I setup plans, bought a domain, had a partner but, never ended up doing it. My partner was disgusted with it as we were planning and over time convinced me.

Home cleaning is a well established business. The market is well served by multiple traditional companies. A Bootstrap 3.0 website and mobile app aren't really going to change that much. It's an uphill battle and trying to take the Uber model of skirting worker protection laws is your only real source of competitive advantage over time.
http://faq.sealedabstract.com/structs_or_classes/

This is a better explanation, I think. The structs for values and classes for references idea is a bit shortsighted and doesn't really cover all use cases.
I'm agreeing with that. I am totally fine with cashiers who are clearly dispassionate about their job and act professionally. I can see "the lack of passion," but it doesn't impact their professionalism.

In particular, I'm worried about judging people to be unprofessional simply because they are dispassionate. They are separable.
For example, Dutch has the letter IJ.
As a physicist for the last 20 years, I suppose I am to partly to blame... ;)

I would say that it depends on what you call physics. The areas of physics that were symbolic of advancement in the previous 20 years will not necessarily be the same areas where advances will be in the next 20 years. During the 1800s, advances in physics in the first half of the century lead to technological advances in steam power and electricity in the second half. If you thought of physics as meaning electromagnetism and thermodynamics, you might think that there were few advances in physics in the first half of the 20th century. And there were people that felt that way! But I think that nowadays we would think that Einstein's heyday was an era of major physics advances. So, maybe you shouldn't look at those areas that are reaching the plateau of their sigmoid curve, but newer areas.

Classic particle physics, exemplified by the likes of Chadwick and Lawrence way back in the 1930s, leading to the explosion of the particle zoo in the 1950s, and then the diminishing returns of the LHC era, would be a good example of sigmoid curve development in Physics. If physics only means this stuff to you, then yes, it is going slower than it was.

Areas of physics that have been closer to the high slope region of their development in the last 20 years:

Quantum Information Theory (as noted by @abdullahkhalids)

Dark Matter/Energy/whatevertheheckitis

Medical Physics (from lead block linacs and xrays to IMRT/VMAT & modern imaging)

Materials Science/'Condensed Matter' physics

Black Hole science, esp. thermodynamics

Gravity waves, or the lack thereof (interesting either way)

techniques for signal/data processing and analysis (such as superresolution or single detector imaging)

I'm sure there's more that I'm not aware of. Anything that is really very new is too small to get much press right now. Pretty much by definition, the new small stuff won't have the big press budget of CERN or NASA.
Ludicrous mode; Move bitch, get out the way...
>and profitable

Are they? Everything I've read indicates that they are not.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2015-06-30/uber-loses-m...
I'm sure there are other hardware upgrades involved to achieve that than just a single fuse.
Supply and demand... For every 1000 Tesla owner willing to pay $5, more than one of them is willing to pay $5k.
> No one consciously favors the rich kids; it's the confidence and status that they carry with them that gives them the advantages. They expect to be treated with respect, even by powerful people, and most of the time, that's what happens.

Yes this is a very important and subtle dynamic that this group uses to great success.

Though I think it's worth mentioning that it's just one of a few archetypes. There's also the street-smart working class hustler type who is just absolutely relentless and tireless as a self-promoter and takes no opportunity for granted, always puts in the extra effort. That approach can be effective too.

What's common to both is that they are not passive, and that neither believes in a myth of "fairness" that promises them rewards simply for their work ethic. What rich and poor have in common -- and the middle class often misses -- is a keen understanding that the system isn't fair and isn't designed to be fair.
It's the same as going around Ebay and contacting a seller directly. You lose any of the protection that the servicing company (Homejoy) provides.
Yeah, cost of acquisition is a big deal.
It's as fast as the Nissan GT-R, which coincidentally costs around the same price as the Tesla. https://www.google.com/search?q=nissan%20gt-r
They determined that people will pay 5-10k for the additional speed. Nothing more than that probably.
I'm not a developer, I'm an engineer, but I think the same principles apply. If you want to become the best at what you do, you must surround yourself with people smarter, more experienced, and more capable than you. So, go to the company from whom you can learn the most. If a particular startup has an experienced / innovative team, go there. If you find the same thing at a corporate giant, go there. I started my career at a startup, but found I quickly exhausted their expertise since their team was 'limited' in experience, capability, etc. So I ended up at a Fortune 500 where there were thousands of engineers to learn from. In the developer world, it might be completely opposite - the good ones are at startups. Just as employers pick their employees carefully, you should pick your employer carefully :)
Even if not a software update, I still find Tesla's way of thinking of a car as an actual (continuously update/upgrade-able) product fascinating. Very rare for hardware.

It gives an amazing user experience, "Hey restart your car and it's now got X and Y". Respect.

Edit: clarifying the term "product".
Dispatch services where by design you interact with a variety of vendors work because there's no value in building long-term relationship on either side.

But dispatch services where worker-customer relationship can evolve into long-term are indeed not adding much value outside of the original lead generator.
Hey your comments are really helpful. We just updated the content and it should be clearer now. We will make the design prettier later too.
I knew a guy who was a window cleaner. He was really and truly passionate about it. He would go to window-cleaning competitions and come home bragging about placing first in some category or another. People can take pride in a job well-done even if they job isn't prestigious.

I don't think it's reasonable to require cleaners to be that enthusiastic, but I don't really see why somebody should feel less proud about making things nicer through cleaning than I do about achieving similar ends through coding.
I think the plan is to sacrifice Greece to keep Portugal, Spain and Italy in line. If Spain or Italy starts demanding debt forgiveness, the Euro really will collapse.
On Advertising and the Upper Middle Class
Seaweed that tastes just like BACON
Hey, I absolutely meant it as such. I left this out of my original comment, but the design is clean and navigation is intuitive.
Uber will be the eBay of this "bubble", which I think is limited to on demand startups but not startups as a whole. It'll be one of the few co's to survive, imo
I've never seen Cycle before, but this looks somewhat similar to Mithril (http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/index.html), which is based on a semi-FRP virtual-dom approach.

The thing that I prefer about Mithril though is that at the end of the day, your code looks like regular, vanilla js and is extremely readable. It's a pretty much invisible framework that you can use however you see the best fit - it just takes care of rendering and updating without any magic, and provides you with some helpful tools for managing models.

My immediate grip with Cycle is the api - it just looks messy and more complex than it needs to be.
This is also a textbook case of what is seen vs. what is unseen. When someone dies from a treatment that the FDA has approved, that is a visible ("seen") tragedy. When people are suffering from ailments that could be treated more effectively if not for the FDA slowing things down and raising the cost of development, that is unseen. There's no single victim you can point to. But the latter is hard to quantify in the risk vs. reward calculation, and importantly no FDA bureaucrat will ever lose their job or be publicly shamed because of them.
Windows 10 updates will be mandatory for home users
This is such a beautiful art object. Interesting, does it author know that white is colour of death in the Middle East?
I agree. It would be far more efficient to have the government provide a baseline level of services to everyone. Then the vast majority of small companies and startups employing contractors wouldn't have to worry about it.

We already have a baseline level of retirement covered with Social Security. Companies who want to attract more talented employees offer enhanced retirement benefits in 401k plans or other incentives like stock options.

I propose we should give everyone healthcare regardless of employment; the exchanges should be open to all and offer Medicare as the baseline plan for free to anyone who wants it. I further propose that the government provide unemployment that matches your salary for 3 months, 80% for 9 months, then 50% for a year. I also propose free training and schooling so people can switch careers if needed. Now getting fired or "laid off" doesn't mean destitution... it means time to find a new job or go back to school to train for a different one. Then employers can be free of a lot of these pesky "regulations" and "taxes". We can pay for it by soaking billionaires with taxes which won't have any negative effect on our economy because we are overflowing with capital seeking return right now (and have been for 15-20 years). The only downside is listening to them whine and moan about how oppressed they are because they're money-penis isn't as big as they'd like.

... or were you just talking about fucking over everyone but the billionaires? (That's usually what "overregulation" means in this context)
Buy a NAS. It can be your physical copy of everything.
* But the nature of the Internet reveals basic truth - you cannot own music. *

Dude, this was as true now as it was 200 years ago. We've always created artificial systems to support markets for intellectual property.
A Reddit bot that uses Markov chains to simulate users
That, as usual, a court ruling on copyright doesn't change anything for either commercial entities (Amazon) or violators of copyright (TPB).
Thanks for writing this up!

At Joyent, we built a similar system for automated postgresql failover called Manatee. I'm sure today we would have used a Raft-based system, but that was not available when we did this work, so we used ZooKeeper. We haven't spent much time polishing Manatee for general consumption, but there's a write-up on how it maintains consistency[1]. The actual component is available here[2], and it's also been ported to Go as part of Flynn[3].

Edit: Manatee uses synchronous replication, not async, so it does not lose data on failover.

[1] https://github.com/joyent/manatee-state-machine

[2] https://github.com/joyent/manatee

[3] https://github.com/flynn/flynn
Lua might be a decent language to write an interpreter or compiler for.

It's a fairly small language and I've seen enough re-implementations of it that there some is evidence that writing a new version is reasonably doable.
This. So much this.

School taught you the abstract and theory of computer science and development. Working for a company takes your college level education and fills in the "real world" gaps that you don't even know are there. If you were a self-taught programmer before going to university, a good CS program will fill in the holes in your educations (typically data structures, algorithms, dynamic programming, etc).

In the same vein, a real world programming job rounds you out and makes you a stronger developer. You might understand things like program/object/interface/API design, Code reuse, documentation, etc in an abstract sense, or even some practical knowledge from working on small team projects in school. Finding a good team to work with in professional setting will help you mature.

This is why company size doesn't completely matter here so much as composition of the team. You need diversity. You want a team with 5-6. This will have a mix of junior and senior folks. It just large enough that having effective communication and planning becomes important.

If
>1. The cleaners were not professionals. It felt like they were just recruiting anyone who wanted a job. You could really feel this with the lack of passion from the cleaners and the severe lack of quality cleaning. Most of the people complained and were quite rude sometimes. Cleaning is very much a skill as much as it is manual labor.

For me personally, it felt they had little training of how to clean. Things like dusting diligently, wiping diligently, and mopping diligently just weren't done. Sometimes they'd spend way too much time in one area. One person spent 45 mins on my bathroom floor. I couldn't understand why and when I asked him to work on other areas he said, "please don't tell me how to clean."

There is definitely a skill to cleaning and unfortunately, I didn't feel they had enough training to call them skilled.

>2. People don't want to let just anyone into their home to clean. Especially for those that have valuables, you want someone you trust who is going to hopefully be your maid for years to come. I wouldn't want someone new every time and for that reason, I used HomeJoy only at our office but even that wasn't enough due to poor quality.

There was one guy that came into my apartment, and he was in the valuables room. Not much of a peep had gone by in 30 mins, so I checked in and I heard a drop of the jewelry box. He said he was just cleaning around and that an earring was missing and he was looking for it. I didn't say much because I was thinking in my mind what's he doing with an earring in the first place when I had just put all jewelry out of sight. I walked out the room and he said something like, "here it is, its put back". Its hard to describe in words, but the atmosphere was very uncomfortable at that point.

I can't tell whether he took something or not, but that was the experience Homejoy provided.
What you are missing is that it's a 1500A fuse.

Source: http://jalopnik.com/the-tesla-model-s-just-got-upgraded-to-l...

> While working on our goal of making the power train last a million miles, we came up with the idea for an advanced smart fuse for the battery. Instead of a standard fuse that just melts past a certain amperage, which means you aren’t exactly sure when it will or won’t melt or if it will arc when it does, we developed a fuse with its own electronics and a tiny lithium-ion battery. It constantly monitors current at the millisecond level and is pyro-actuated to cut power with extreme precision and certainty.

That was combined with upgrading the main pack contractor to use inconel (a high temperature space-grade superalloy) instead of steel, so that it remains springy under the heat of heavy current.

The net result is that we can safely increase max amp throughout from 1300 to 1500 Amps. If you don’t know much about Amps, trust me this is a silly big number of Amps to be going through something the size of your little fingernail.

What this results in is a 10% improvement in the 0 to 60 mph time to 2.8 secs and a quarter mile time of 10.9 secs. Time to 155 mph is improved even more, resulting in a 20% reduction.
I know it will never happen, but I'd love to see some way of standardizing how this information is presented based on various terms to help potential employees make informed decisions.

Right now there is MASSIVE information asymmetry and companies are absolutely leveraging that during their hiring processes. In many cases, they have to in order to stand a chance at being competitive when hiring (which is a statement in and of itself).

Given the complexity of these sorts of things for the average employee who has never looked at a term sheet before, has no clue about the tax implications of options, etc. what can be done to even the odds?

My personal rule of thumb right now is that the odds of getting equity that's worth a damn if I'm not a co-founder would typically not be worth it, so I make decisions based on the rest of the compensation package. It is simply the safest way to play it when I know I'm not the smartest one at the table in an equity-based discussion because of said information asymmetry.
I live in SF and the few times I used the service I was relatively happy. I certainly thought the cleaning was done better than Handy, but Handy got them beat in pricing. I also thought their UI was much friendlier than Handy. With Handy there is no way to terminate a recurring cleaning without contacting customer service.

In busy places like SF traffic and parking seem to me to be a major hinderance for services like Homejoy. Perhaps if they provided shuttle service of some kind for their cleaners it would solve that problem.

Also there is a lot of customization when it comes to cleaning vs Uber for example. With Uber you just go from point A to B, a pretty well defined problem. With cleaning services it's a bit more complicated, do you clean the light switches, door knobs, under the sofa (what if it's a 1 ton sofa?)... I think people have vastly different expectations to what it means to have someone clean your house. Sure, with Uber you care if they driver is not rude, plays your favorite music and doesn't drive like a lunatic, but there isn't a hundred others things that would significantly influence the experience, with Homejoy there is.
Nothing's ever 100%. You need to balance your degree of confidence against the patients who are dying while you accumulate data, and be prepared for the fact that sometimes you're going to get it wrong. Right now, the FDA faces little penalty for letting people die, but huge penalties if they approve a drug or device that goes bad.
If you believe the reviews on Glassdoor, internal management was a major problem:

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Homejoy-Reviews-E686596.htm
Actually, everything I've read says they are in mature cities. Leaked numbers say they're stupendously profitable in their oldest markets: nyc, sf, etc. They are losing money overall because they subsidize drivers when they move into new markets. But the key is always to look at existing markets.

The quickest numbers I could find were leaked in 2014.

est yearly rev run rate city
======================= ====
$212+mm sf
$312 mm nyc
$141 mm dc
$150 mm chicago
======= =======
$815 mm total

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-rides-drivers-an...

edits: made table
Storing a pdf or zip file is not a requirement nor definition of a filesystem. You can do neither of those with a CDROM or DVD and both those contain filesystems.
Having been in the Medical Device industry for the past 20 years, I read the article thinking I was going to disagree with you completely. Now I'm not so sure.

This is farther than I would have expected the FDA to go.
I can see releasing a device without full clinical trials, because those can be extremely difficult to set up and can create very long delays. Imagine having to find a large enough number of people with just the right disease state and who consent to be part of the group, then getting the right control groups, building relationships with labs and hospitals in the right places, etc.

But shifting reponsibility from the FDA to a third party is something I'm not sure I'm comfortable with. There's lots of precedence: nobody ships their devices off to the FCC for emissions testing, there are independent labs that sign off on that. Likewise companies such as UL that set safety requirements, have been around for decades. But as much as we bitch about the hoops we have to jump through to keep the FDA happy, I think deep down we're all glad they are there to do the job and keep us honest.

The moderating influence is that device manufacturers as a group are generally extremely, repeat extremely, conservative. The Quality Assurance engineers are generally a brick wall that have to be completely appeased before they will allow anything to be released.
Yup. That may kill Brennan's business.
I was one of the YC partners who interviewed and funded Afrostream. We made the call to fund because we fundamentally believe in this team and market. We accept companies not because they are flawless. No companies are, and none of the startups that succeed have been. They all have specific challenges. But we ask ourselves, is this a talented team, and is this something people want? Is there a path for this to be a big business? In both cases, yes.
You're using United Fruit as a counter-example to state corporatism?

United Fruit got its monopolies by subverting Central American governments, then maintained them by using the power of the United States government, up to and including actual raw military force.

If there's a better historical example of state corporatism, I can't think of what it could possibly be.
The greater threat is the Middle East destroying each other.

Israel has been very clear that it thinks Iran will drop the bomb on them. Then you'll also find Sunni verses Shia. The region is a powder keg of history.
Ha, right, I accidentally swapped the terms.
So, now that the masses have been (criminally) copying music and films into their computers roughly for a couple of decades and we've maybe ten years ago passed the point where music (and mostly films, too) are basically unconsumable unless they're in digital format, these people actually make a focused effort to shoot down a law that legalises this widely de facto usage, just to get back to the same old reality with a completely unenforceable situation that nobody cares about——based on the lack of court action, not even themselves?

They might see it as some sort of a moral victory but I had no idea they were so utterly out of touch with reality, for real.
Track it if you like: https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/details/ships/shipid:70...

Currently in a port along the East China Sea.
Without the performance characteristics for the fuse, I wouldn't imagine it would be cheap. Specialized electronic components are usually very expensive, especially if they're never mass produced and engineered to a specific task (component ICs for devices in space face the same issue). That engineering is pretty damn expensive, the tooling to make the small run of components is expensive, and quality control is expensive. Make a few hundred million and those costs vanish compared to the input materials, compared to a few thousand components where the overhead dominates.
The GTR is 2.9 seconds, so the tesla is faster- Its also faster in the 1/4 mile as well, so this is kind of a big deal.

I believe this is the fastest production car under 300k that you can buy.
Are you implying that taxes/regulations are punitive?