skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Homejoy customer here. For me, they succeeded in making home cleaning accessible to a guy in his early 30s who clicked a few buttons past a Facebook ad to schedule 2x/mo cleaning - a big stress reliever and quality of life improver. I never used a cleaning service prior to Homejoy.

Where they failed was in providing an adequate supply of cleaners (no one available for weeks on occasion) and last-minute cancellations without substitutes.

Never did a cleaner solicit me to hire direct, but I DO think Homejoy should leave their customers with a way to reach the cleaners I did like for rehiring. Why not, after all?
Security breach at Walmart website, credit cards stolen
Hey,
I am Ludovic, cofounder and CTO of Afrostream. And I am black too, and French :) (yes I certainly have many other flaws too)

To answer to your question : Yes absolutely, we are here in part of diversity. I thought 1à secondes about why I am here, and that certainly played a part,

But the second thought I have was this : even if am here because I am "from diversity", that's ok. I know who I am by myself. I want Afrostream to be big, that's my only goal. And I am at Y Combinator, is that not the place to be big ?
For these sorts of businesses (Upwork, Homejoy, etc.) Legal protections and payment processing are reasons to encourage people to stay in the system.
Hi, just a small question. Is "Intouchables" a film you would carry or does the majority of the cast need to be "African-American" (or Afro-French, Afro-Brazilian, etc etc)?
That post still makes me cringe.
It's also the government that made such activity illegal in the first place through copyright law and excessively strict interpretation thereof. Without that, it wouldn't need a law to "legalise" it.
If Homejoy cleaners were going to be classified as employees, entitled to minimum wage and subject to being verified as citizens or legal residents, then this seems like the right move. I can't see how they would ever be able to compete on price with all of the independent outfits out there that employ undocumented workers.

It's one thing to sell your services at a loss while you're growing. In the home-cleaning business, though, there will never be a shortage of undocumented immigrants willing to work for less than minimum wage, quite possibly at a higher quality level. There would be no way to ever raise prices to fully cover costs without immediately losing out to that competition.
It's tough being a middleman parasite.
You were responding argumentatively to people who were clearly making a normative argument about the trial conviction (and also blaming the CFAA for it); and it seemed like you were making a contrary normative claim about that conviction; if you were intending merely to argue that the actual structure of the CFAA didn't support the conviction so that the blame-attachment was misplaced, that didn't come across clearly to me.

But if that's what you were saying, then, yeah, there's nothing really to argue about.
I would disagree with you somewhat:

Cable isn't a natural monopoly, they are sanctioned monopolies due to their negotiations with municipalities; Previously their only competition was over-the-air broadcast. We have this model in place of a company being given sole propriety over the physical 'cable' infrastructure.

But, just look at what has happened now that Verizon can compete by using a different set of wires (FIOS). They want to compete because it is a huge business and the monopoly has been broken.

The difference with a video streaming service is that they don't own the infrastructure over which their service is delivered.
Was this the company that posted their ad directly onto HN talking about how happy they were to be working on Christmas eve (or whatever holiday it was)?
Bigdata updates
I'm looking for new trends,updates,experiences,blogs shared on bigdata and its eco system. Can some please point me to them. Your help is much appreciated.
I get the opposite reaction when I hear of someone grinding away until they've got a startup. I understand that investors invest in people. But the idea has to have a life of it's own, and a value on its own. I remember when urban adventure games were a thing, and a thing that tended to attract very energetic people. But it was shown that no matter how much hustle you've got, urban adventure games are not an investable thing.
Enabling mobile payments for slot machine
Lots of people are already using it, so it has familiarity (I was thinking more than pgbouncer, pure conjecture though).

I think if you wanted to have the simplest possible solution, pgbouncer and postgresql-specific replication mechanism would be perfect. This is along the same lines as my question - I don't really see how these alternate solutions could be construed as lacking...
I agree completely that these are people problems.

I have a huge preference for technical solutions that do the right thing by default, rather than trying to get people to do their jobs right. Most people are aggressively mediocre and don't seem to have any impulse to do their jobs in the most efficient way. So I can either get on their ass and chaff them along all the time to do things right, or you can use tools that make doing the right thing easier than not doing the right thing.
Ah, that objection (varying quality) is more understandable.

I didn't have a single bad experience. The level of cleaning was the same as other services.
A prediction about "sharing economy" companies. Almost all of them are tacking on a thin rind of web/mobile UI and smart dispatch technology to an existing service. The long-term winners will be companies like Flywheel that recognize this and focus on providing that service to existing operators, much like payment processors. This, of course, is perceived as a smaller market since they can't count revenue the same way.

EDIT: on the other hand, an advantage is they don't have to worry about acquiring customers, drivers, etc, nor the regulatory overhead of the underlying business, but instead just focus on customer experience, schedule/dispatch, etc.
In a few minutes of playing around, you realize you can just click long paths and get a nearly infinitely high score.
Or Handy
I think you have it wrong here. The fact that HomeJoy was actually playing in a market which required skill labor was responsible for their downfall. Think about it - if there is an HomeJoy operator who's actually good and did her job very well (and thus is skilled), next time I will want to deal with her directly (to save on cost) and not deal with HomeJoy at all. I certainly did this. In fact, many HomeJoy operators proactively offered to do this.

However, for unskilled labor, like Uber, I care a lot about needing a car right now - and dealing with drivers directly is not efficient at all. As such, Uber is doing so well in this market.
Is it wrong that a comic book is actually the best insight into this whole ordeal?

http://www.amazon.com/Persepolis-Story-Childhood-Marjane-Sat...

http://www.amazon.com/Persepolis-2-The-Story-Return/dp/03757...
> I have read the agreement

You must not have read it very carefully. On page 3 it says:

"Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons."
The problem with etcd members on every Postgres node is that clusters fixed nodes or members. etcd doesn't function well in an environment where you could tear down / build up new nodes. Most of our Postgres service runs on AWS, and thus we must expect that any single node may vanish, and our system must replace that node. We tried running etcd alongside Postgres in an early prototype, but ran into issues with etcd cluster stability when destroying and recreating nodes. Thus, we opt for a stand alone etcd cluster distinct from the Postgres cluster.
Emails with double opt-in still can BE spam. The act of signing up for an email list does not give the email list owner the right to send any amount of any email content to you.
I had heard of them but with most companies that spring up then wind down a little later they never expanded to where I live. I would have loved to try them though.
There are laws surrounding employment? California is an at-will state. Further, 1099 contractors don't get health insurance, workers comp, or any coverage by the employer. There's also no assurance of long-term employment, thus no reason for the company to be loyal.
A d3 wrapper that has 'legend toggle' functionality built in is [c3.js](http://c3js.org/samples/chart_bar.html)

I agree that this is an important tool to have, that many other charting libraries have (thinking of HighCharts, Rickshaw, ...)
ahahahahaa

the music industry sometimes reminds me of creationists, blind to reality

It's like 2002 all over again
Easy (Homejoy customer here). They show up at the scheduled time, say hello, clean, leave. I'm sure it's a personal relationship for some customers but wasn't for me.
Sure, I might be overstated the problem of parking, but I still don't see how this is more economical than car ownership. If I have to summon a taxi for everywhere I need to go I need the taxi rates to be a fraction of what they are today.
Etsy stock skyrockets 37% after bullish Google comments
gotclocked.com
I'm assuming they folded before burning $40m. IMO, it would be hard to go through that much money when you have (hundreds of?) thousands of customers and (should have) a decent profit margin.
I'm more inclined to believe that HomeJoy was sold to investors as the beginning of a platform, and when it failed to hit traction, or growth potential seemed to stall, the investors decided to cut their losses and move on.
"Valuable". Even a piece of broken stone is valuable. What matters here is how much you are willing to pay, or sacrifice, to get a piece of broken stone.
Optimizer's Anonymous – The deceptive performance of simple programs
Done. Thanks for being responsive to feedback.
So other countries can frame laws that don't criminalise a large percentage of the economically active electorate. Why couldn't Call-Me-Dave? Have you got any insight/reasons?
And a rather opaque one at that. I've never heard of anyone discussing the implementation details of a Scheme or Lisp compiler, leading me to believe that they must have really complicated internal logic.

I might be better served applying my time towards development on Chicken (Scheme).
I am surprised no one has mentioned quantum information yet. Quantum information is the subfield of physics whose goal is to understand what new information processing tasks are possible/efficient that are not possible/inefficient in the quantum world. Two such tasks are quantum computing and quantum key distribution.

This field was birthed in the early 80s and has seen steady progress since then. Various architectures for quantum computing have been proposed and experimental control over them has steadily increased in each one over the last few years. While we are not there yet the sequence of results shows that we are rapidly approaching the fault-tolerance thresholds after which it will be possible to build quantum computers.

Quantum key distribution is a simpler task and has already been achieved commercially. Now we are trying to increase the rates of transfer. We are slowly also relaxing experimental requirements. For instance there are protocols where you don't have to trust that your devices where not tampered with by an adversary.

These are exciting times in quantum information. While important theoretical results where found in the 80s and 90s the experimental momentum today far outpaces it.
Well, it matters if you care about measuring your fat loss. Measuring fat loss by tracking weight is less accurate, because muscle is heavier than fat, if you are exercising to lose fat you may get heavier due to increased muscle mass, even though you are thinner, i.e. carrying less fat. There are other factors that affect your weight, such as water retention. As for why to measure at the hip, well, there isn't much muscle around that area compared to say your thigh, so the size of the muscle is not affecting the measurement output so much, meaning you are measuring fat loss, rather than fat+muscle loss/gain. (Muscle loss is generally not a good thing, it's very important to our health).

Personally I think we need a way to measure our health rather than tracking metrics that can encourage unhealthy relationships with our bodies. Ideally we would be able to quickly assess how close we are to a healthy level of body fat, lean muscle mass, be it is too high or too low. Measuring how heavy / big you are feeds into "weight status" and "thigh gap" fixation. In a less-imperfect world we'd be competitive about how healthy we are, rather than silly and often unhealthy things like thinness, and weight.
Founder of Lawn Love here. We think a lot about disintermediation risk.

We do a number of things to prevent it, but it ultimately comes down to providing enough value to the supply side of your market. If you build a product that drives real, ongoing value for your service pros, they will be much less incentivised to cut you out of the transaction. The same is true for the demand side.

Also, lawn care has a reduced risk profile compared to services that take place inside the home (maids/babysitting, etc). There is no key hand-off and the nature of the service is somewhat less intimate. Our customers don't need to be present for the work, which both reduces this risk and boosts the value of our platform as a means of managing your service.
Cofounder Adora Cheung is worth following. The story is a great example for founders. Check out her lecture at Sam Altman's startup class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yP176MBG9Tk
You were probably not their target audience, or probably never google'd for home cleaning services, if you did, you would have heard of them.
HomeJoy seemed OK, but I never seriously looked at them because I have always been so happy with ServiceMagic (now HomeAdvisor). When you have a solid competitor who has been in business since 1999, you need a strong differentiator. HomeJoy was/seemed more focused on cleaning, HomeAdvisor on repairs and improvements... but it always seemed to me that they were trying to re-invent a wheel that didn't need re-invention.
Walmart Canada’s Photocentre website != Walmart....

Misleading title.
It appears from this article that recent worker classification lawsuits also had a part to play - http://recode.net/2015/07/17/cleaning-services-startup-homej...
> But after the cleaning lady they sent me was done, she offered me her direct phone # and told me I could contact her directly for any future cleaning needs.

All companies that contract to contractors have this issue and it probably isn't solvable using the same model. For instance Home Depot and Lowes will contract out service to contractors and I've had them, on every single occasion, give me their information to contact them directly in the future.
The human cost of global spyware sales
Not just that. Uncomfortable with Homejoy's relationship with the cleaners. From everything I read, including Glassdoor reviews from the cleaners it sounded toxic and demeaning.
The point of your comment is disproved by your last paragraph! The more science is discovered, the more it gets compacted into the essentials of this knowledge. If 100 year old PhD level fluid dynamics can be taught to undergrads, this means it got digested into the most useful part of the work.

Similarly, it's considered basic undergrad work to understand Fourier decomposition; but the notations and clarity we get the insight from is the result of two centuries from the 1807 paper by Fourier. It was certainly PhD level at the time.

Certainly science is compacted and that's how it gets transmitted to younger generations. And remember that our brains get bigger, so maybe we'll never hit any "limit" to understanding? :)
I've always wondered if Zynga would have been more successful now if they had pivoted and turned into an analytics and monetization SaaS platform with consulting services.

They are clearly masters at the mechanics and psychology of this, and the technical implementation as well. When your mine runs dry, there's still often quite a bit of money to be made selling shovels to the other miners.
Jack Ma Getting Blamed for Chinese Stock Market Disaster
I could see people buying "priority" access to the self driving car fleet. People who don't mind waiting or don't need to move around during peak hours would just have lower costs.
I think that was Handybook (now Handy), not Homejoy, right? http://thebillfold.com/2014/10/my-day-interviewing-for-the-s...
Intouchables is definitely an Afrostream movie. We want to show some positive characters who are Afro-descendants and it's definitely a movie which shows that
ah, I missed that part of the rules. Without effort, I found myself with a score of 67k. Knowing that, I may be able to do better. A leader board would be nice so I know how that rates.
Are we sure that was the problem?
Java developer,android developer
> Ops, flipped it. If the price moves up you sell, if the price moves down you buy.

But then you aren't maintaining the invariant that you hold a number of shares equal to the current price.

> So, you will make money on a bounded random walk

Yes. If you know ahead of time what the price is going to do (even probabilistically) then you can make money. If you don't, you can't.
Some of the questions I'm curious about are:

- Did the Iranians pay market-rate compensation for the nationalization?

- Whose technology and investments made it possible to find and extract the oil to begin with?

- What were the terms of the deal, and in what way were those terms violated (or not) by the foreign oil companies? Is it an 'Iran says so' situation, or is there tangible proof of impropriety regarding the deals?
So we should watch a video about "how to go from zero users to many users" from someone who did it by selling services at a loss and then going out of business?
Higher prices, questionable convenience, and poorer service.

The quality of the cleaning had deteriorated over time and the price was higher than independent cleaners I later found through personal referrals.

I had 4 different Homejoy cleaners. The very first one was awesome and I thought, "Wow, this is great". Then every single cleaner after that was terrible. Two of them started wet mopping before vacuuming or using a dry swiffer, thus pushing wet dirt around. Another one let the toilet brush sit in the toilet in a way that the entire brush, handle and all, fell in. When I came over to oversee her, to make sure she doesn't do other things like that, she got angry and refused to work until I went into another room.

As other's have said, the model sucks. In order to make money, you need to charge above market rates to get your cut. In order to justify that, you need to offer something to both sides of the market. The customer expects convenience and high quality service. If you cannot provide both those things, why would people use Homejoy? And of course, what are you offering the service provider to stay on your platform?

Lastly, there was no Android app and the web app had so many bugs that even the sign-up flow was hit or miss. The sign-up flow! Logging in from my phone never worked and I always had to use a laptop. Unreal.
Show HN: Has.Menu – A service and API to discover food online
The Good and Bad of Techno-Optimism in the Valley
I've had the exact same experience with Vint (https://www.joinvint.com/) - Go through personal trainers until you find one you like and then move off the app. The hourly cost will be lower but the personal trainer will still make more money.

I've also had Uber Black drivers give me their personal limo service business cards. The difference is that a cab is a commodity while a personal trainer is something that needs to click on a personal level.

I see no future for Vint even though I loved it when I used it.
Why don't you just tip them then?
Sure, but is it worth their margin? The market resoundingly answered "no".
Not sure I understand. We have a law that makes a large percentage if not a majority of UK adults criminals. How can that actually be taken seriously? By anyone?

Can you imagine what would happen if anyone was actually prosecuted?
PSVita: RaceVita alpha released
In part we have acquired rights for a group of countries in Africa, so there will be a blocking by IP. Other part is yes, some regions are under-equipped, and we will be there with some Internet providers which are deploying their networks to have some interesting contents at the start.
This was a good talk but I can't help to think that she should have spent more time working on the business than doing these types of speaking engagements (because she had done quite a lot of them, not just this one).

Though the time spent doing these engagements and preparing, maybe that was worth it for the advertising? Not sure but they don't sit right with me.
"I used Homejoy and I liked it's ease of use. But after the cleaning lady they sent me was done, she offered me her direct phone # and told me I could contact her directly for any future cleaning needs."

I used Airbnb and the host told me the same thing, he said book 3 nights and the other 20 pay me cash or transfer the amount to my account and avoid the Airbnb fee
keepalived uses vrrp and will issue a gratuitous arp
You think cleaning is skilled labor and driving isn't? Uber drivers better not be unskilled. You're putting your life in someone's hands every time you ride in an Uber (as with any car). There's almost no skill to scrubbing toilets and vacuuming rugs, and if you mess it up you get fired but no one dies. The only skill required is attention to detail and caring enough to do a good job.
I found that the easiest consistent strategy is to play it like Minesweeper: start with randomly clicking (to gain time) until you find it too risky, then start with the easy portions (2-3 chains like 5-5 and 3-6-1 to clear out blockers, also remove 1s and 2s to increase overall average value), then move on to the difficult part when you're ready (chaining 40+ numbers when you have a lot of time).

There are of course other strategies, but I'll leave that for others to discover. :D
Why not use something like PayScale.com which crowdsources salary data so you know what the market is paying in real-time? It takes into account location, skills, and experience, for example, so it'll tell you the pay for your specific jobs.

Disclaimer: I work at PayScale but this scenario is a reason why we're building this service.
USA tops International Math Olympiad for first time in 21 years
Absolutely, however another "advantage" of many "sharing economy" companies is that they skirt regulations that incumbents must adhere to.
As long as the existing nuclear powers are not considering to bring their nuclear arsenal down to zero, trying to force other countries not to develop nuclear weapons is pure hypocrisy. Why can the USA and Russia and the others have nuclear weapons but not Iran? There is no justification for that. If you don't want them to have nuclear weapons provide them incentives, guarantee military support, pay them or whatnot. Embargoing them and attacking them with Stuxnet is just evil.
This is an incredibly important point. We often imagine that the price of convenience is pretty high, but more often than not, the markets we serve turn out to be incredibly price conscious. Sure, there are sections of the socioeconomic pyramid that will pay a strong premium for even marginally better, smoother service but the majority of the pyramid (a surprisingly large majority) will not pay such a premium.
In this case (as reported), the message was correct, but the recipient's phone wasn't capable of displaying Turkish letters.
Sometimes when you think you're "building things that enable and will change the way people live and work" you might just be missing out on family time as a young person because you've prioritized your goal of helping make the affluent slightly more affluent.
Mainland China creating a state-run margin trader with $483B of firepower