skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The deal doesn't mean they have to abandon all weapons. I'm sure Iran would argue they have ballistic missiles for the very same reason the USA has them - for defence, i.e. to dissuade other countries from attacking them.
I also think this is one of the best entry level books, and the Stanford course looks good. This is what I recommend to people. In some ways, R is a very good match for this material, and you could move to python later.
That's probably part of it, but also, to the extent that they were bona fide contractors, the cost of actually policing them to prevent direct contracting with and referrals from the people they were matched with through Homejoy was probably a problem.

Contracts may theoretically restrict this behavior, but actually policing them is non-trivial.
Haters gonna hate. He figured out how to milk Pfizer for a salary to underwrite him while he built his personal brand. So what if his github account is weak, this guy hacks life.
Hey, I am Ludovic and cofounder and CTO of Afrostream

At first yes we are French (with baguette and beret and all that stuff), and we know very well the European and African Market in the french spoken countries in this area. So we will start with the market we know well first. But we have a tremendous demand from other countries which send us a lot of messages.
> Not crazy Arabs and their religious agenda.

I may be misremembering, but weren't the Americans supporting the crazy religious? At the time, they were considered less scary than the godless communists.
I would wager that the answer is to provide some other value to the contractors, but I have no idea what that could be.
I had the same experience. I signed up but, when it came time to actually make a reservation I did some comparison shopping and found many cheaper alternatives. I think Homejoy's main challenge is simply the vast pool of available labor out there, much of which is also bonded and insured, like Homejoy, and that is already quite accessible to customers. The added layer of technological ease that Homejoy brought to the table was welcome, but ultimately not worth too much monetarily. For me, the real barrier to hiring a home cleaning service is the awkwardness and trust problems of having a stranger cleaning my house. And the technological mediation that Homejoy and similar services provide actually heighten this feeling of alienation, if anything.

To make matters worse, I then got an almost comically confrontational phone call from a Homejoy rep demanding to know why I hadn't completed my booking. This is probably an isolated case (maybe the rep was just having a bad day?), but it certainly didn't make me feel like I was missing out on much--all the more so since this experience was so at odds with the rest of the Homejoy brand.
Pretty interesting analysis around how the funding in the sharing economy is drying up after the "they are employees" decision by California.
The difference with AirBnB is its usually a one-off situation rather than an ongoing relationship.

If you use AirBnB to visit NYC once every 3-4 years, its a very different situation than someone coming to clean every 2 weeks.
I saw them on How to start a Startup. Was a good lecture. Sad to see they closing the doors.
Getting them more customers is incredibly valuable!

I've heard this as a need from literally every service provider I've ever used. They relish referrals.
I'm just so glad they didn't say it was an incredible journey.
So I understand where you are coming from, but I think we're thinking of different things.

When I say "no recruiters" I don't mean "no recruitment". What I mean is that there shouldn't be these people that spam your inbox with messages like this:

https://imgur.com/ajnxsQ6

The problem with recruiters is that to them its a numbers game. They don't care if they waste a minute of your time, they aren't really there to help you. They actively try to prevent you from even finding out who the company is so you don't go around them.

A site that helps people find better places to work is a good thing. The way recruiters and companies do it (by spamming people) is not. Ultimately we'll have to have a company profile page, but we want to make sure it is done right.

As for finding companies worth working with, that is something we'd like to tackle, but we're a professional social network for people before we're one for companies. But I agree that it is important to at least present information on a company, even if there isn't company-wide accounts (which we're still thinking about).

But fundamentally, you are right, we aren't a LinkedIn competitor the same way that Pepsi is a Coke competitor. We are building something different, and if you love LinkedIn then that is just fine with us.
As a former customer (have not used in years), I actually felt uncomfortable with the cleaners. Not because of anything they did, but because you could just tell they were low income and being paid very little by Homejoy (I think less than $15/hr). It didn't feel right, and I stopped using them in part because of that.
is this related to insufficient infrastructure or the services are just blocking you by IP/region?
For a house with 4 roommates, this service worked great as a solution to the "tragedy of the common [space]" problem. We've been using them for a year or more now and I'll be sad to see them go. I hope they follow through on putting people in touch with the actual cleaners.
Can you elaborate on the oil deals that existed, what the terms were, who made what investments and who discovered what oil, and on what legal basis Iran claimed the right to nationalize those deals?
This serves as a strong counterpoint to the infamous "Dear Future Homejoy Engineer" HN job posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956

Working as a family on a holiday may not be enough to save a startup.
"The tricky part is then notifying the hell out of everyone who needs to be notified that something really bad has happened, a failover occurred, everything is OK, but it needs some attention ASAP."

If there is a need for multiple 9's of uptime, there should be an escalation process for these kinds of events, which will probably include 24/7 on-call rotations.

Even if the problem is entirely self-resolving, it should still be looked at by more than one system. It should be noted, observed, documented, and confirmed it's truly resolved. That system is usually a human, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.
A related recent breakthrough: https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/a-new-angle-on-controlling-l... While it has long been possible to selectively filter light according to its color or polarization, selectivity based on the direction of propagation has remained elusive.
I'm pretty sure you can't.

Let's say you want to render realistic skin using Cycles. You can't, the only BSSRDF profiles that Cycles offer are simple bicubic and gaussian profiles, these wouldn't work for rendering realistic skin. Cycles doesn't even offer a simple dipole. Renderman on the other hand offers a dipole, it offers the state of the Photon Beam Diffusion, it offers Pixar's recent approximate BSSRDF, which is almost as accurate as PBD and is as easy to compute as a gaussian or a bicubic profile. So you'd have to implement your own BSSRDF shader, which is only doable for large studios such as Weta which have their own R&D department.

So let's say you want to render hair. You can do this with Cycles, but their importance sampling code is not state of the art (last time I checked), which means that you can probably expect double the amount of noise in Cycles. You could still use this for rendering, but computing time is quite limited (especially if artists want to compute previews). You'd either have to implement your own hair shader, or you'd have to purchase a ton of extra hardware.

Let's say you want to render a scene with tons of triangles and textures, you probably won't be able to do that in Cycles. They don't use special tricks for quantizing those triangles in the memory. Their code for caching textures (sometimes multiple terabytes for a single scene), is also not as good as Renderman, especially when using the GPU (a GPU isn't very good at constantly streaming terabytes of data into it), which means that your texture date either needs to be limited, or you'd need to throw a lot of rendering machines at it.

Cycles can do most stuff that Renderman (or Arnold) can, but that's not the point. If you'd pay me to work on a renderer for you fulltime for a year, I could produce a feature complete renderer, but it won't be optimized. The code won't be optimized, but probably more importantly the ray intersection code and the importance sampling code won't be optimized, which means that renders will be slow and noisy. Pixar has a whole team working on optimizing their code and whole team of researchers working on improving the importance sampling. Cycles is made by hobbyists who are doing an excellent job (Cycles is an amazing renderer for amateur users), but it's just not in the same ballpark as Renderman or Arnold.

Cycles is an absolutely amazing renderer, but it just lacks a lot of stuff that you'd during production of feature movies. If you want to use Cycles for your own use I can absolutely recommend it, it will have everything you need and it's open source!
I'd wager that most AirBnB stays are one-offs on vacation. Home cleaning is recurring, making it more vulnerable to the "here's my phone number" weakness.
Besides the need for brief physical activity, these are people-problems and not problems specific to physical meetings.

Showing up late can happen in chat rooms.

Taking it off the rails into a tangent can happen in chat rooms.

Not ensuring accurate minutes are recorded is a failure of whoever is conducting the meeting, and should never happen.
I've heard stories of almost-new Priuses being sold for a pittance or given away because the battery went - batteries are expensive to replace, but they're not quite as scary as some people think. They can be replaced with generics for $2000 and installed at home, and an article about how to do that would be an awesome idea.
Unsanctioned Web Tracking
If it were that simple we would have unlimited free energy by simply using heat pumps to power steam turbines.

I don't think heat pumps can generate very high temperatures efficiently.

Resistive heating is 100% efficient by definition. There is almost no energy lost. the only loss of energy is light generated.
Yes, more customers, but I don't know if the end result was more money?
Benedict Evans on search, discovery and marketing
I actually just had my home cleaned yesterday through this service. I'll be sad to see it go =(
I just had my home cleaned yesterday through this service. I'll be sad to see it go.
The U.S. had a chance to do things right if they had left Mohammad Mossadegh alone. Can you blame the Persians for being pissed? We are the authors of our own misfortune.

Your average American has never heard of Mossadegh.
When I hear about companies like this going under, I always think how odd it is that I've never previously heard about them.

Then I realize, that may have been part of the problem.
It looks like they have taken the Steve Miller Band approach [1] to users who are also creditors: http://blog.homejoy.com/faqs/ . Hope you didn't have a gift card!

[1] i.e., hoo hoo hoo, go on, take the money and run
There are ways to solve this, like stored value. http://platformed.info/network-effects/
Only if the customer base is growing. Otherwise, it is just taking revenue from another provider.
CrunchyRoll seems to be doing fine in their niche, despite the 800lb gorillas in the neighborhood.

it might be easier for the gorillas to just let them grow, spend the time rounding up and acquiring all the rights, and then buying out the smaller company.
I never used the Homejoy service, but I was in the audience for the Startup School Europe talks last year where Adora gave a fantastic speech (Notes: http://theinflexion.com/blog/2014/07/26/notes-from-startup-s...) about going through so many ideas and working so hard to get to Homejoy. The talk's ending had a 'And look, we made it, so you can too' feel, and I had no idea that they were doing anything but crushing it after all those years of grinding work.

Its hard not to be disheartened when a pair who seem to have worked as hard as they have still don't make it with an idea. I just hope they keep going.
Eid Mubarak HN
Just wanted to say Eid Mubarak to all the Muslim HNers here! Happy Holidays :-)
If Uber have had defend their case and employee classification, perhaps HomeJoy may get their next round of funding and not have to close...but year, the timing sucks.
That depends. It's incredibly valuable if the provider retains those customers. But if the service is set up to fence off the customer relationship from the provider, that's a much harder argument to make!
Excellent, please continue to undermine communal belief in the importance and relevance of laws. Hope this works out well for you!
The biggest is probably that the home care industries operate on such a shoe string budgets that there really isn't all that much room for a middleman to take a cut.

This isn't taxis where you can bank on regulatory arbitrage to take a cut. They seemed to be trying to make money on customer acquisition and scheduling, but I'm sure they realized too late that their partner companies don't spend a huge amount of money on those activities.
That particular idea has been done over and over and over again since the mid-90s. It's come in many forms (sometimes as part of a browser). You were right to let it die.
So then they didn't get paid and you didn't get a clean home? That seems like a loss for both parties.

Also, Homejoy let you tip, with 100% of that money going to the cleaner(s). I usually gave the cleaners a 20% tip.
To be fair, it was the government that passed a law to legalise such activity; it was the industry that challenged that law and the High Court that overturned it!
I think people overemphasize the difference to be quite honest. What I would recommend is disregard the startup/corp distinction and instead look for the following:

A company, where software is the product (ie you get paid based on customers wanting software that your company writes) and there is a good mix of experienced vs junior developers.

There are lessons you can only learn at a software company and the sooner you learn them the better. Further, learning from experienced developers will jump start your own experience in ways nothing else can.

If I had one major knock on the advice to join a startup right out of school, it's that so many of them are lacking in experienced software professionals. Full disclosure though, I joined a software startup right out of school (during the first dotcom boom).

This advice is largely based on the assumption that you want to have a long term career writing software for a living. If that isn't the case the variables change dramatically.
Your last point is probably the biggest issue in some ways. The true customers of reporting and scoring are lending institutions and you need to provide them with accurate data. But at the same time you have legal and IMO moral obligations to make sure you are reporting accurate and complete (as possible) data to make sure the lender gets a true risk profile and consumers aren't left screwed.
Recurring business is really tough when you're effective just introducing customers to other businesses. Thumbtack handles this by not even addressing the recurring aspect, and focusing on getting good introductions. Recurring revenue is great, but how does a matchmaking service continue to provide value once a good fit had been found?
How are you not in touch with the person who cleaned your house for a year?
NASA’s New Horizons Discovers Frozen Plains in the Heart of Pluto’s ‘Heart’
Faking Software Design
Is this the beginning of the end of the on-demand bubble?
Whatever. Zero fucks given. I have no physical media and never will again. Not playing these games any more. I'll continue to steal stuff. If it is good, I'll buy the mp3 or go to a gig.

What about those newly defined criminals Amazon with AutoRip?
Yes, doesn't that amplify my point? I wasn't making a normative argument about the quality of the case against Auernheimer.
They've raised $40M. I'd be surprised if they were valued at more than $400M when they raised the last $38M, but I don't think that was public.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/05/homejoy-38-m/
Below some facts about the actual situation.

1. Fault with storage platform was due to a platform bug; we're working on data validation and where necessary restoring from backups
2. Operations staff worked overnight and are continuing work on service restoral. Operations staffing has been split between rapid recovery (expediting restoral) and data validation.
3. Slashdot site service was restored.
4. Work is in-progress to restore SF site, download data, mailing lists, and project web and every other service.

[Disclosure: I do work for SourceForge]
"Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work,"

The need for work hasn't reduced, it's just changed.

The issue is that someone will need to be doing the work and the people doing the work aren't going to put up with giving the majority of their pay to the rest of society (that don't need to work) for very long.

This idea will eventually lead to total wealth distribution and then the issue will be how you decide to split up the money.

Do we then need to have control on the number of kids a person can have? How about risky behavior (so health care costs aren't that high)?

Also, who decides how it's split up?

All of the articles about basic income and 'post capitalism' only take into account what will happen in the very beginning, which might seem like it's working.

They never discuss the long-term where 3 generations of families are living off of the system and the continued dependence of more and more people. What happens when the number of people on basic income vastly outnumbers the amount of people working? Will the government force people to work? A revolution? Starvation??

Capitalism is not perfect, but it's the one system that not only brought us the most technology and advancements, but also brought the most people out of poverty.

Most of these ideas aren't new. They have been tried and failed and are now just being re-packaged and prettied up into something that seems more palatable.
> What are these companies doing for the laborers that makes them valuable enough to be skimming returns from the work?

As someone who used to build/sell websites to small cleaning companies, real estate agents, tradesmen, etc.

Marketing+Parts+Labor was the formula for almost all of their costs. Marketing represented ~20-25% for the few that were willing to discuss it with me.

http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2014/07/22/homejoy-hikes-ho...

That is in line with what Homejoy was asking for [25%].

Homejoy providers had direct access to the customer base they interacted with and could siphon off those clients they built a relationship with relatively easily. I know that is what I did once I found one I liked.
They've raised almost $40M in funding:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/homejoy
FWIW Thumbtack and many other companies have the same problem, and it can be solved by just charging the cleaners more money for the initial introduction. Instead of charging 20% of the first cleaning, charge 50% or 100% or 200% and let them own the customer (Thumbtack charges fixed amounts but it is the same principle).
What does Apple or steam offer developers for their 30% cut ? customers and ultimately revenue to sustain themselves. An open marketplace has incredible value if its popular. Tech is the easy part of most startups.
Revisiting Vesting Schedules
Mullet Stack: Facebook in the Front. Walmart in the Back
Could they operate as small business and/or flip the company as a running small business? I imagine home cleaning is sort of loyalty space, where they must have a good number of regulars?

It's also interesting that they are managing a workforce of around a 1000 cleaners, and they burnt through $40 MM. That's the amount of seed Elon Musk needed for SpaceX.
I'm a fan of the unix command wc. It also counts lines and you can do things like piping the output of ls or git file listings into it to get totals for a directory or entire repo
This is far less of an issue than you might assume. Modern steam engines can have around 48% efficacy and combined cycle power plants can hit ~60% where IC engines rarely top 35% with cars generally averaging less than 25%.

A much larger issue is trying to scale this down. Power plants are optimized for efficiency and cost not weight, where IC engines can be very light relative to their power output.
I never heard of them either, but then again I never needed those kind of services.
Big data projects gain a pause button
PlanGrid (YC W12) Is Hiring TPMs, PMs, Back End, Android and More. Build with Us
Curta: a mechanical calculator
Is your market rate using legal taxpaying workers?
Wow. Lots of doublespeak from the founder in the Re/code piece. While it's true that "The [California Labor Commission’s] Uber decision...was only a single claim", I'm not so sure it was "blown out of proportion." You could also see it as the tip of a big iceberg. Presumably, that's what the investors they were courting thought.
Initially they only wanted to audit the books and renegotiate terms, only after they resisted that effort they considered nationalizing.
The question that comes to my mind is: should an entrepreneur really "fake it till you make it"?
It's complicated. If dealing with the service makes buying easier, it can grow the market.

I driver Uber more because it is easier to get a cab. They alone are already making more than the entire taxi industry in SF.

If anything, it seems Homejoy's problem is in making it too easy for their cleaners to find retained customers.
I would pay more for a professional cleaner. I have no idea what the experience level of the average Homejoy cleaner is but I had very mixed experiences when I used them.
You felt uncomfortable that they made less than $15/hr and solved that by making sure they never got any business from you again?
I ran the same business as Homejoy but on a smaller scale in Germany before stopping last year (for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here). What you mentioned is the main reason we focused on holiday lettings and B2B cleanings.
Unicorn Startups – Tell me a story, don't sell me technology
Or perhaps we need to re-evaluate our laws surrounding employment. Events like this (supposing they were caused by employment laws) are perfect illustrations of how overregulation kills jobs.
Most of those shaders written back then are pretty much worthless now that Renderman has introduced RIS mode (instead of REYES mode), which was introduced last year. Pixar recommends writing shaders in C++ now instead of in RSL, as C++ shaders are just way more performant right now. OSL is pretty mature, I know that both Sony Pictures Imageworks and Double Negative use it in production. Now that Renderman also support OSL I'm pretty sure we're going to see OSL examples posted online. OSL shaders are awesome compared to RSL shaders, as OSL gives all control to the renderer, which allows it to do a lot of optimization (such as using the renderers own importance sampling strategies).
The housecleaning industry still exists without homejoy