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Title: Teach anything - math, literature, problem solving etc. As long as it isn't digital. Something like card games, board games, simple DIY toys etc?
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Title: After a year at my job it seems like I'm no longer interested in programming - I am no longer excited about new frameworks, etc and I feel like my skillset (Python and Django) is slowly fading into irrelevance (everyone seems to be about machine learning and data science nowadays), and I don't feel interested in learning those fields (ML looks like magic to me and involves lots of math, which I suck at). I also would like more interaction with people instead of spending my days in front of a monitor. Note that I am only 20 so I don't have that much experience either, and finding a good developer's job seems hard given the competition for all the good startups.<p>Anyone else feels that way? How did you solve this issue in the end, and if you did switch careers, what job are you doing now?
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Title: I'm Vikram, one of the founders of Dropleaf (<a href="http://dropleaf.io" rel="nofollow">http://dropleaf.io</a>), a subscription service for all-you-can-play indie PC games.<p>Zi (Rygeko) and I started Dropleaf because, as gamers, we feel that space around games could be so much better. With the rise of tools that make games easier to make, more people from diverse walks of life are creating games. That means the potential for more games that speak to a wider set of people, and we think that’s really good for the industry. We want to encourage that trend in a few ways:<p>Discoverability: It’s hard for smaller developers to find people who love their games, and it’s also harder for gamers to find games that will resonate. Our focus on indies and our discovery tools mean that we’ll be able to connect devs with the players who will connect with their art.<p>Diversity: We think the industry wins when gamers, devs, and media are more diverse and inclusive. One of our goals is to encourage that with our community and the way we think about what we do (You can read more about our community here: <a href="http://bit.ly/2uyCsFK" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/2uyCsFK</a> ).<p>Dollars: Pricing trends in the industry don’t favor smaller developers or gamers. Gamers are less likely to take a risk on buying a game they don’t know much about, so it’s harder for indie developers to gain traction. And when indie devs can’t make money, they can’t make games. So our customers play a flat monthly fee, and devs get paid based on time played. This means games people like to play will be rewarded, and players won’t have to worry about the cost of entry.<p>We’re really excited to launch Dropleaf! We’d love to hear any questions you have, or learn about your favorite games!
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Title: A book popular in our industry is now a decade old.<p>Has anyone put the advice from the author Tim Ferriss into practice?<p>If so, how did you manage to do it and what have you learned from the experience?
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Title: Hi HN! I was wondering if there's some sort of service that would check our client websites (we're a web agency) automatically before go live. We currently have our own doc to run through but it would be nice if there was something that would automatically do that for us.<p>Examples for checks are:<p>- HTTPS and related (HSTS -> cookies etc) enabled/correctly configured<p>- robots.txt configured<p>- Correct API keys configured (e.g. Stripe live key instead of test key)<p>- No dead links<p>and so forth..
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Title: Hey HN!<p>Ryan and Shaz here. We’re building muzmatch (<a href="https://muzmatch.com" rel="nofollow">https://muzmatch.com</a>), an app that helps single Muslims meet their partner. We refer to ourselves as a dating app largely for SEO but the reality is our users don’t tend to date, they marry!<p>Marriage is central to many Muslims’ upbringings and ethnic, family, and religious pressures make it a difficult search. The casual Western apps don’t cater for this market and the existing Islam-specific offerings are outdated, ineffective websites.<p>As a practising Muslim, Shaz experienced this problem firsthand. He quit a 10 year career in banking to write and release an MVP back in April ’15. With promising traction, he found me (Ryan) on LinkedIn in the then New Year. It was clear it could be a massive opportunity but I believed it needed to broaden its appeal (then it was as an ultra serious marriage service) and modernise its branding/marketing to position it for the new generation: this seemed like a great challenge!<p>We’ve tried to build a product that feels fun and light but respects our demographic’s culture and sensibilities, being halal is essential. Some unique features:<p>- Chaperones: In keeping with Islamic tradition, users can opt to have a “Wali” present in their conversations
- Full privacy: Users can blur their photos and use a nickname to remain anonymous to friends and family
- Fully verified: All manually approved, Selfie, GPS, and SMS verified users
- Relevant: Profile information that matters to many in their search, like Islamic, sect, and ethnicity filters<p>We’re now ~2 years in with 200,000 users and are thrilled to have helped over 6,000 find their partner.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and answer any questions!
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Title: Hi HN! ScriptEd (www.scripted.org) is looking for volunteers to teach web development twice a week after school in Oakland this coming school year, to students attending under resourced high schools. This is a great way to give back, volunteer in your community, also it is a ton of fun. Volunteers teach as part of a four person team, with support from ScriptEd staff. Apply at bit.ly/ScriptEdSFBAYvolunteer .
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Title: Hi HN,<p>I am Billy Guan, co-founder of CocuSocial (<a href="https://www.cocusocial.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cocusocial.com/</a>) participating in YC S17 batch. CocuSocial is a marketplace for cooking classes that are hosted at restaurants and hotels.<p>Traditional cooking classes are expensive and intensive, but we want to make them affordable, easy to access and fun. We offer a relaxed way of learning, whether it is an interesting background about a cuisine, a useful cooking technique or a delicious recipe.<p>To lower down the cost of cooking class and make it accessible to everyone, we partner with local restaurants and hotels who host cooking classes during their slow nights or weekends.<p>We encourage everyone who love food or cooking to try us (only in New York so far) especially if you are celebrating a birthday, anniversary, or any other special occasions. We also help planning private events like corporate team building activities, bachelorette parties, bridal showers, fundraising events, etc.<p>Looking forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts. Thanks!
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Title: What are the real alternatives to Ruby on Rails in 2017? When I saw “real” I mean, what frameworks offer a wide variety of packages/libraries, common integration with “as-a-service” offerings, and have an opinionated methodology for delivering high level web and API functionality rapidly?<p>I hear constant refrain “Ruby is dead” so much so that it reminds me of the situation with FreeBSD many years ago.<p>Admittedly I’m partial to Rails but also love microframeworks too... Sinatra, express, Kemal, iron, etc. but none of those seem to really offer a comprehensive opinionated toolset the way Rails does. There are things that are close but don’t satisfy.<p>Is there anything close in JS/ES, Kotlin, Rust, Go, Crystal, Scala or Java 8+?
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Title: I'm seeing more and more people saying they've switched to DuckDuckGo. For me, 95% of my google queries are programming related. I'm wondering, for anyone who has switched, how has DDG performed in terms of surfacing the programming topics you're looking for? Does using it decrease productivity?
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Title: Often when I suggest to non-programmers that programmers should get their own offices, I'm met with incredulity: "Where do <i>any</i> programmers get their own offices???" Microsoft and Fog Creek come to mind, but where else?
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Title: Hi HN — My name is Nate Fox. Along with Nate Maslak (Nate^2), I am one of the cofounders of HealthWiz (<a href="https://www.myhealthwiz.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.myhealthwiz.com</a>) in the current YC batch.<p>HealthWiz guides employees to convenient and cost-effective healthcare decisions and lowers healthcare costs by eliminating wasted spend. We help users understand what’s wrong and how to get better quickly and cost-effectively.<p>While lowering costs frequently means taking away benefits, we do the opposite — we bring transparency and information to a messy healthcare system that allows employees to better navigate their benefits, resulting in less wasted spend and a faster return to health.<p>This is personal for us. When Nate Maslak's mom needed to find a doctor for joint pain, she went to one physician, then another, then another. Six months and thousands of dollars later, she still wasn’t better and gave up on looking. Nate and I found it ludicrous that despite all the information available to us, healthcare remained opaque and intimidating.<p>Without HealthWiz, we have to scour the web for (often biased) information for what’s wrong and take our best guess at how to find treatment, only to be shocked by the bill. Our goal is to help you triage your symptoms with AI and access the most convenient ways to get better while knowing the cost in advance.<p>We’d love to get your feedback on the product (i.e. would you want your employer to offer this?) and look forward to discussing the nitty-gritty of just how we do all this, if people are interested!
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Title: Hi,<p>5+ years ago I started working for a Life sciences company, and I was pretty stuck in that landscape, doing basically nothing but that.<p>In retrospect, it was foolish of me not to get some BTC since they were $1 per coin (!!) last time I checked.<p>I read about new stuff that happened, ETH, and now Filecoin, and i was wondering: what are my options comming this late into the game??<p>As I understand, small scale mining is dead for years now, so, what is the best investment I could do now?<p>Thanks for your answers!!
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Title: Do you even validate your ideas or start implementing right away?
What does your process of validation look like?
How do you generate leads? (landing/coming soon pages, emails, etc.)
How do you make the final decision whether the idea is worth implementing?
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Title: I often read articles talking about the next big thing in the short term (2-4 years), but thinking about the Bill Gates 2-year-10-year quote* has me wondering about 10 years from now:
Will the most surprising thing be an expansion of an already rising technology? (AI, blockchain, biotech, nanotech, AR,...)<p>Or will it be something most people have never heard of yet?
Thoughts/ predictions?<p>* "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."
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Title: Does anyone else run large newsletter lists? We're having a hard time monetizing our weekly emails to our members.<p>We have nearly 2 million members (that haven't opted out) in English and close to a million in Spanish for a book website. We send weekly emails with new featured books. We've been looking for interested sponsors and I've been looking at other previous discussions here on HN on monetizing NLs for ideas. Most of them seem to be for a much more niche/focused NL list though. Any tips or ideas on how to monetize a large NL list like this that isn't too focused (other than it relates to books)?<p>I've tried submitting to Upstart.me but don't see it added yet, so maybe it's a bit too generic to be listed there as well.<p>We've been using it mostly for promoting our own products (such as membership upgrades), but using the same few products over and over again start getting diminishing attention and returns from our members.<p>(note that we are capable of segmenting our list internally by topic based on the books our members are interested in, but I'm not sure how to turn that into a steady revenue stream as of yet)<p>Thanks for your answers!
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Title: Two major articles were shared on HN today regarding the Google memo: "Google CEO should resign" and "Why I was fired from Google." Both were flagged and hidden within an hour. I understand this is a deeply divisive topic, but it's clearly relevant to a large majority of readers on HN. Are we comfortable being a "close my plug my ears" echo chamber community? Or should we be brave enough to have lengthy discussions about hard issues that give others a chance to hear both sides of an argument. I like the approach we took when the original article was submitted - the thread was locked to new users.
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Title: Hi, I'm selling a software and cracks are given in forums on the internet. The thing is, theses users don't come to my product page for getting updates for example, so I think it's a loss for me because I can't reach them and talk to them. I feel like I won't ever be able to convert them to paying customers.<p>I'm wondering what I can do about it. Could I add a "I cracked your software, is it wrong ?" in the FAQ and try to not show it if I detect the software is not cracked ?<p>What if I distribute the pirated version myself ? Wouldn't that look weird to paying customers ?<p>Should I add an infinitely renewable 15 days trial instead of a limited features trial ?<p>Do you know of projects that went open source / free software and how they handled it ?<p>Thanks !<p>PS : I didn't say Piracy was bad in itself. I spent my childhood pirating stuff and now my livelihood is selling software.. I have faith that some of my pirate users can become my clients one day or another and I would like to take care of this issue myself rather than letting people going to underground forums and download virus.
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Title: Hey HN,<p>We're Lambda School (<a href="https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science" rel="nofollow">https://lambdaschool.com/computer-science</a>). We train people to become software engineers, and we charge nothing until a student gets a software job that pays more than $50k/yr. At that point we take 17% of income for two years (capped at a maximum of $30k total).<p>There are so many people held back from a high quality education simply because they can't afford the cost and/or risk. Even if you can get student loans, four years and a potential six figures of student loans is a daunting proposition, especially if you come from a lower-income background. New alternatives, such as code bootcamps, either require expensive loans or tens of thousands of dollars in cash up front, which most people don't have, and they vary widely in quality. This leaves a lot of very smart people working for not much money.<p>We're different. We're an educational institution that owns the risk: if you don't get a good job, we don't get paid. We do everything in small, interactive, online classes with world-class instructors (currently from Stanford, Berkeley, Hack Reactor, etc.). Our curriculum goes a lot deeper than code bootcamps as well; we use C++ and spend a lot of time with lower-level algorithms, data structures, architecture, scaling, etc.<p>The full curriculum is here: <a href="https://github.com/LambdaSchool/LambdaCSA-Syllabus" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/LambdaSchool/LambdaCSA-Syllabus</a>.
Happy to answer any questions and looking forward to hearing feedback!
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Title: I would like to know if HN thinks it is worth to go through Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science in Computer Science.<p>https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/<p>It is basically an online program of academic education in CS planned to be taken while working, costing around USD7,000 to complete.<p>My context: I am brazilian, living in Brazil, 37 yo, graduated in Economics and just recently made the career transition to become a developer. I basically studied more practical things about software development (web, mostly javascript) through free content available online. I am already working as a frontend web developer.<p>I believe this program is a good complementary source of knowledge to become a better software developer. I assume the more theoretical academic approach would benefit me as a complement to my more hands-on learning I had so far. And I also assume the Georgia Tech credentials will benefit my career.<p>So, what you think?
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Title: Do you ever suffer from brain fog after a day of intense thinking/coding ?<p>Some days after intense working I leave the office spaced out, to the point I wouldn't drive. Thankfully I hop on the train.<p>I also find the whole prolonged screen exposure and posture just leaves me with a headache and neck ache.<p>I really notice how much better I feel after maybe 3 days off work..
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Title: Hi! I’m the CEO of Thematic, <a href="http://www.getthematic.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.getthematic.com</a>. We analyse customer feedback to tell companies how to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn.<p>We are one of the handful of companies that got into YC through the Startup School, and (I have to say) the only company that signed YC itself as a customer!<p>I have a PhD in NLP and ML and was consulting when two large media companies came to me with a problem: They collect tons of customer feedback in free text as part of their NPS surveys, but don’t have the time to sift through the responses.<p>This turned out to be common. Most companies collect feedback but, especially in large companies, nobody reads this data, and definitely not people who are in charge of strategy. Customers are screaming what’s wrong and what they want, but nobody is listening.<p>I tried a few open-source packages but found that none worked well. Developed on canonical text like news article or Wikipedia, they either failed to understand the variety of expressions, or were too hard to explain. I wrote a new approach capitalising on my PhD and new Deep Learning approaches. It's completely unsupervised: just needs raw data but, unlike topic modelling, produces clear and specific themes. My husband Nathan joined as a co-founder and for the next year we learned how to solve this problem in a way customer insights professionals find valuable.<p>Those media companies became customers and we quickly bootstrapped into a profitable startup. This is when Nathan signed up for YC’s Startup School. We grew 20% in those 10 weeks, loved the accountability and the focus. Our mentor suggested we apply for YC, which seemed like a crazy idea, but we gave it a go.<p>Fast-forward another 2 months, and we are just before Demo Day! Thematic grew 3x in that time, and we are working with brands like Vodafone, Air New Zealand, Stripe, Ableton, and Manpower Group.<p>Hope you found our story interesting, and happy to answer any questions.
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Title: If you're willing to share, which portfolio project do you think contributed most to you landing your first FT dev job, and what kind of job did you land?
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Title: Hi HN! We're Puja and Amit. We are the co-founders of ShiftDoc (<a href="https://www.shiftdoc.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.shiftdoc.com</a>). Our website is the first online marketplace that directly connects private medical practices with healthcare professionals looking for temporary work.<p>As doctors, we experienced first-hand the difficulties of finding coverage for time off or additional help at our private practice. We would spend hours calling friends from our Rolodex or posting on Facebook, with limited success. The other option was to use a staffing agency, that charged between 40-100% fee for finding coverage.<p>We realized that this problem can be solved by bringing both sides of the market together on one platform and eliminating the middleman, so we created ShiftDoc. We use the Airbnb type model to help offices search for available healthcare professionals during their time of need. Eventually, we plan to add automated credentialing and video calling for interviews so the process is seamless.<p>With the Affordable Care Act, aging population, and baby boomers, the number of patients has increased greatly, but there is a shortage of healthcare professionals. This has led to a rise in temporary staffing and is expected to grow 6% annually, making it a $15B industry. Hospitals and some practices can spend up to $4000 on top of the daily salary for a temporary hire. We want to significantly reduce those fees by making the entire process automatic, so facilities can hire more professionals to care for more patients.<p>We look forward to getting your feedback. We would love to discuss your thoughts on leveraging technology to improve healthcare. Thank you!
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Title: Lessons from Mythical man-month aside, what mistakes does management keep making and what do they never seem to learn? And of course the effects on those on you and your peers?
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Title: They have an open position in my area but their Glassdoor reviews are really mixed. It seems like a great company with a great mission but I worry it's a sinking ship and I'm not interested in changing jobs too soon in the future.
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Title: Hi! I am Lyal Avery, founder of PullRequest (<a href="https://www.pullrequest.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.pullrequest.com</a>) - we’re currently in the YC S17 batch. PullRequest is offering code review as a service.<p>We built PullRequest to help developers. After waiting several days for feedback on a pull request while a colleague was on vacation, I knew there had to be a way to improve this process. Our mission is to improve code quality and save time for dev teams. We combine static and linting tools with real on-demand reviewers to help augment your current code review process. Dev managers like extra coverage, but our real intent is to free up developers to make better software more efficiently<p>We’re onboarding experts across a lot of different languages for this reason. Sometimes teams might only have one person working within a given framework/language – it can be difficult to get objective feedback before shipping to production if you’re working on an island.<p>All reviewers sign NDAs to protect your IP. We start with surface level reviews – complying with framework or language standards, algorithmic work, performance or other questions. Since our reviewers continue working on the same projects, they will also gain context for deeper reviews.<p>Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback!
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Title: Make contact with aliens in a very transparent way, visible to the wide public.
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Title: I'm 95% curious, 5% hoping some HN reader gets a startup out of it.
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Title: Hi, this is Ajay and Alex, and we’re the founders of Plasticity (<a href="https://www.plasticity.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://www.plasticity.ai/</a>). We're building an API that helps developers create human-like natural language interfaces.<p>Four years ago, we hacked 3rd party commands into Siri without jailbreaking before Alexa Skills or SiriKit were released (<a href="https://www.wired.com/2014/04/googolplex/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2014/04/googolplex/</a>). It was the first App Store for voice commands. Since then, we’ve worked on NL interfaces at Google and Apple Siri. Now we're tackling the next problem: products using NLP are fairly simplistic in what they can do for users. For example, systems like Siri still struggle to directly answer a basic question like "When is the Y Combinator application due?" because it can't understand and reason where the answer may lie in a sentence on Y Combinator's website.<p>We’re approaching the problem differently by understanding the structure of language and relationships within text, instead of relying on more simplistic methods like keyword matching. We build a graph of entities and their relationships within a sentence along with other linguistic information. You can think of it as “Open Information Extraction” with a lot more information (<a href="https://www.plasticity.ai/api/demo" rel="nofollow">https://www.plasticity.ai/api/demo</a>).<p>Currently, we use a TensorFlow model to perform classical tasks like parts of speech, tokenization, and syntax dependency trees. We built our own Wikipedia crawler for data to better handle chunking and disambiguation, which helps return more accurate results for multi-word entities in sentences like: "The band played let it be by the beatles." We wrote our open IE algorithms from scratch, focusing on speed. It's written completely in C++ and we are adding more features everyday.<p>Our public APIs are in beta right now, we’re constantly working to improve the accuracy, and we’re looking forward to hearing feedback. We’d love to hear what the HN community is working on with NLP and how we can help!
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Title: So, I was actively paying attention to a particular topic that was on the front page recently, Facebook saying no to a licence change request from the Apache Software Foundation.[1]<p>This thread had over 750 points, and 250 comments. However, all of a sudden, after 12 hours of being present, it is being marked as a duplicate of [2], which has under 150 points, not nearly as many comments (approximately 130), and no presence on the front page (or the next 10 pages for that matter).<p>Surely policy should prefer the thread with the most activity and more points? Particularly when it's on something I really wish to pay attention to (or rather, the commentary of HN participants which I value, of which [1] was receiving a lot of), given that it seriously affects the direction of present and future projects (which, at this stage, will no longer be utilising React).<p>Cheers.<p>[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050841
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15050705
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Title: * Where did the architecture and ideas and accepted rules around ICO's come from? Where were the discussions taking place? I would expect something of this magnitude to have a mailing list at least as active as LKML.<p>* 0xproject on their blog landed 24M in coin funding from 13,000 investors at $1800 each. Where are the online equivalents of roadshows and pitches taking place? Again, where are the free and open discussions around this taking place online? Show me a historic record. Its like these things popped up overnight.<p>* Assume, from above, that at a 3% acquisition rate, to acquire ~15k gross number (as claimed by them) of investors they need to reach an audience of 500,000 potential coin investors. Where are these 500k investors with 1800 to throw away hanging around online? Are they all actively looking at the listings? Talk to anyone who works in private wealth management.. trying to convince someone to invest is hard.<p>* Given the number of ICOs, either the same groups of investors is investing in multiple ICOs or the number of investors is massive. Lets say the latter, we would expect at least 10x the number of 0xproject target audience = 5 Million active ICO investors. Again, where is this happening? It should be possible to confirm/track this on bitcoin at least. Has anyone done the analytics on this?<p>* If these discussions are occurring offline, what group of people are driving this, and why? Are they preparing for an event where fiat currency becomes worthless? Should we be worried?<p>* Why is it that the teams associated with these things come from elite institutions like ivy league unis and investment banks? Look at the teams for coinbase and 0xproject for example, and compare it to the team of an elite deep tech startup for example. You need brains and hard work to create an hard tech startup. You need what to create an ICO funded startup? Looks like elite institution connections.)<p>Thank you.
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Title: I got impressed after read that this company has just 500 employees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JetBrains<p>How they handle all these complex products? Do they have an army of contractors?<p>JetBrains Products: AppCode, CLion, DataGrip, Hub, IntelliJ IDEA, Kotlin, MPS, PhpStorm, PyCharm, Gogland, ReSharper, Ultimate, Rider, RubyMine, TeamCity, Toolbox App, Upsource, WebStorm and YouTrack.
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Title: What's a spectacular burnout story of yours that happened to you or someone you know? How did you crawl back to reality, did it change your outlook on life? was it a meh experience? what would you advice others to not do or do?
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Title: Hi!<p>I'm an italian guy, 32 years old, currently working as an ERP programmer on Microsoft MFC based stuff (basically the most unexciting job ever).<p>I'm trying to improve my portfolio/Github in order to have something presentable during a job interview.<p>I'd like to change country/job (front end web dev or app developer would be cool). I also develop simple games/demos in my spare time (Unity/UE) and put them on Github and itch.io.<p>Should I remove them? In my country when I last interview I got treated like an fool every time I mentioned I program games. (Like the interview having that attitude like saying that stuff like "in our company we make important software non useless stuff like games). Every time I got pretty disheartened to be honest.<p>What about the rest of Europe/USA/World? Do you think games detrimental in a programer portfolio?<p>Thank you!
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Title: Hi! I'm Matt from Mystro (<a href="http://www.mystrodriver.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.mystrodriver.com</a>) and we're in the current YC batch. We're building an app for on-demand drivers to automate the process of driving for multiple platforms.<p>My co-founder got the idea for Mystro while completing over 10,000 trips as an Uber/Lyft driver.<p>We automate switching multiple on-demand apps on and off. This ensures that drivers are available on all services to get the maximum number of rides but never get penalized for not accepting a ride because they are already on a trip. We also automatically accept trips according to driver's settings so they do not have to look at/touch their phones to accept trips while driving.<p>Currently, we support Uber and Lyft, but we are planning to add many more rideshare and delivery platforms as we grow.<p>We have found that using Mystro makes drivers 30% more money, reduces distracted driving, and makes driving much more relaxing for our drivers.<p>We run entirely on the user's phone and integrate with the driver apps directly, avoiding any need for API access and letting us easily integrate new platforms as we go forward. For now, we are only available on Android (which 65% of drivers use), since app-to-app interactions are much more restricted on iOS.<p>We have a SaaS business model and charge drivers $12/mo or $99/yr for unlimited trips, and all drivers get 10 trips per week for free.<p>We're happy to answer any questions about Mystro or about ridesharing in general (especially from the driver perspective).
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Title: I wanted to build a tool to help people decide <i></i>when and where to travel<i></i>. As I started building, I realized that "when" and "where" need separate treatment to be most useful. The map tool handles "where" best:<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/travel-weather-map/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/travel-weather-map/</a><p>Clicking through each week would be frustrating for those who know where they want to travel but not when. For these people I built "best time to travel" pages using the same data.<p><a href="https://championtraveler.com/best-time-to-travel/" rel="nofollow">https://championtraveler.com/best-time-to-travel/</a><p>My hope is this site will help travelers plan.<p>This data is taken from the National and Atmospheric Administration's global summaries of the day (NOOA's GSoD). I used an SQL database to crunch the numbers into monthly and weekly averages by station. For the "best time" pages I used and calculated several more variables. I then imported the data into Tableau and added the filters you see on the map. I also used data from the State Department regarding travel advisories.<p>Would love your thoughts!<p>The whole buildout was a solo project, but I owe Ryan Whitacker a big "thank you" for his guidance. He built a similar tool on his site (<a href="https://decisiondata.org/the-best-time-to-visit-anywhere/" rel="nofollow">https://decisiondata.org/the-best-time-to-visit-anywhere/</a>) in April, and was generous to offer me guidance for expanding upon his idea.<p>Known issues:<p>* I am aware that the map is bad on mobile, so my next step is to improve the mobile experience.
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395
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Title: Several employees vouching the info of the record, no public links available yet.
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319
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Title: I've been working on a SaaS product side project for about 4 months now. Progress feels painfully slow, but I wonder what typical one-man consumer SaaS projects look like. Years of development? 6 months average? Specific examples would be helpful so that I can compare the scope/size of the idea to mine.
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Title: Hi HN, I'm Padideh Kamali-Zare, co-founder and CEO at Darmiyan in the current YC batch (<a href="https://www.darmiyan.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.darmiyan.com/</a>). We work on early detection of Alzheimer's disease.<p>I'm told that launching on HN should come with the backstory of how we came to work on this, so I need to tell you about my grandmother, the most precious gift in my life. She was a poet who raised me, and was always full of life and stories to keep me amazed and excited. As the first female bank executive in a conservative society in the middle east, she was also socially progressive and outstanding. A brilliant brain. A beautiful mind. A few months before she died, on a sunny day, she told me: “Do you know what I want the most from my life?” I stared at her in silence. She continued: “To die decently while I still remember myself, my memories and my loved ones. It feels like as I’m getting older, I’m somehow losing my brain. As if my brain was lemon juice before and now it’s becoming lemonade.” That statement has been stuck in my brain ever since. Her wish never came true. She died not remembering even basic things of her amazing life.<p>Now, 14 years later, it’s been exactly 14 years that I’m researching human brain structure and function, and modeling how they degrade with age and by diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. Believe it or not, it has been 110 years since the initial description of this devastating disease by Dr. Alois Alzheimer. Yet there hasn’t been much progress in pre-symptomatic diagnosis of the disease and no progress in finding a cure for it despite all advances in science and technology. One in every five Medicare dollars is spent on Alzheimer’s disease and the entire health care system will go bankrupt if no revolution happens in the field. “So, what is missing?”, I always asked. And what can be done to find the missing piece? I always tried to answer. Driven by these questions, I spent several years in biological physics master’s and PhD programs and neuroscience postdoctoral research.<p>Now I’m the founding CEO of Darmiyan. At Darmiyan we detect Alzheimer’s disease up to 15 years before symptoms, meaning exactly when treatments are feasible and brain damage could be slowed down just by simple life style changes such as regular exercise, eating well, and sleeping well. We do this early detection non-invasively, using only standard brain MRI. We have spent the last three years in Darmiyan developing and validating a software platform that models the human brain and simulates the tissue architecture underlying every individual voxel (3D pixel) of the brain MRI. Our proprietary methodology and results have been officially reviewed and approved by clinical Alzheimer’s experts at Stanford and the world leading Alzheimer’s expert and Nobel prize winner Paul Greengard. The most challenging part of our journey so far has been to get access to the largest MRI databases for Alzheimer’s disease and clinically validate the software. Now we have analyzed more than 3000 brain scans and our software’s predictions are 90% accurate.<p>My co-founders are Thomas Liebmann, PhD, a top-notch experimental neuroscientist who has managed to visualize the most hidden parts of the human brain through the eyes of the most advanced microscopes; and Kaveh Vejdani, MD, an extraordinary physician who always seeks complex problems at the interface of physics, biology and medicine and solves them with high level of knowledge, creativity and innovation. Thomas was my first office-mate in Stockholm 12 years ago. We met when I had just started my PhD at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and we became friends on the first day. Kaveh and I met at a classical music event in New York 7 years ago and have been close friends ever since.<p>Our vision in Darmiyan is to help all those people in the world who suffer from complex brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. We want them to be diagnosed early and get cured. We want to save those millions of precious brains who are unfairly stolen by Alzheimer’s disease and bring them back to their family members.<p>Thanks for reading to the end! We look forward to hearing your feedback and questions.
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Title: Having them so gives the employer all the power as the employee negotiating an increase is left in the dark and with few tools. Not everyone has three offers in their pocket.<p>It’s annoying that things like Glassdoor have to exist. The economic principle at play is asymmetric information and it sucks.
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Title: Hey HN!<p>We are Jess and Oscar, the founders of Life Bot, a voice app that helps you complete daily activities.<p>It’s available on Amazon Alexa. To enable, say “Alexa, enable Life Bot” or click on:<p><a href="https://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#skills/dp/B0749C8YD5/?ref=skill_dsk_skb_sr_0" rel="nofollow">https://alexa.amazon.com/spa/index.html#skills/dp/B0749C8YD5...</a><p>Alexa is useful for things like timers, music, and news, but so far, most people don’t bother with Alexa apps. Voice apps are hard to find, they tend to do just one thing, and each has a different name and set of phrasing you need to remember.<p>Life Bot solves this by bringing the most-used features under one voice app. We’ve made the on-boarding process easy and have eliminated the need to visit the Alexa app. We also aren't tied to just an echo device, since users aren’t always at home.<p>A popular feature we have is morning news - Life Bot gives your morning headlines through Alexa, but can send the full article to your phone to read up on your commute. Or you can set up a reminder to
pick up milk through Alexa, and have it sent to you by text at 5pm the next day. SMS reminders are our most popular feature!<p>Oscar and I first started working with Alexa in 2015. We set up Europe’s first "voice design agency" to build Alexa Skills for large brands. We experienced first hand the problems of discoverability, setup, and usability with Skills, and saw a huge opportunity to create the first voice app that people love.<p>Long term, our aim for Life Bot is that it becomes the only voice app you need – providing a consistent experience across all voice platforms and devices.<p>We’re excited about voice as a new tech interface and are convinced of the trend in voice. In our view, it won’t be long before voice interfaces will become the first port of call over a phone.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback on the Life Bot voice app, and looking forward to discussing anything voice related!<p>We’d also love to know, what do you wish Alexa could do that it can’t already?
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Title: It looks like i am stuck around 150k range compensation despite having 10+ yrs of experience. The only thing against me is that I am an immigrant. Nowadays, new grads are pulling 120k to 130k right away.<p>I no longer enjoy coding but I am good at getting things done and building good rapo with people. What can I do to move into leadership roles?<p>How does someone like me get 200k or more in compensation?<p>PS- I am not a native English speaker but I have studied in English throughout my life.<p>Any suggestions?
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100
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Title: One of the things I enjoy most about Hacker News, is the level of discussion.<p>I would define ‘level’ in this case to mean:<p>1) Generally, discussions are analytical, emphasising reasoning and evidence<p>2) Submissions and discussions deal with topics that are intellectually stimulating<p>3) Many commenters show a high level of expertise around a topic - these comments often float to the top<p>4) For the most part, people are civil. Those who are uncivil are usually downvoted<p>Admittedly, this is much easier to foster with a community discussing technology, science and math (with a sprinkling of news/current affairs)<p>I often use HN as my ‘filter’ to decide what is interesting, and to observe and engage in discussions that offer multiple perspectives on a topic. It’s a much better filter than a social media news feed.<p>I’d like to find other intellectually stimulating communities - perhaps with a broader range of topics under discussion than the technology/science bent of HN, but having a similar ‘level’ of discussion.
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66
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Title: I’ll be here for the next 2 hours and then again at around noon (Pacific) for another 2 hours. As usual, there are countless possible topics and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases for obvious liability reasons because I won’t have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and comments and I'll try to do the same in my answers!
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284
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Title: Hi HN,<p>I'm Anu, the Co-Founder and CEO of NextDrop Technologies (<a href="https://nextdrop.co" rel="nofollow">https://nextdrop.co</a>). We are a water marketplace for urban India- we connect water buyers with suppliers.<p>There are 400M people living in Indian cities today, but only 200M of them get reliable access to the public utility water. The other half have to buy private water, often from water trucks!<p>Water buyers have a problem because surprisingly, people are paying more for their water than for electricity. My friend who lives on the outskirts of Bangalore, India (a major urban city) paid $50 for water and $40 for electricity last month. The price of water has tripled in the last decade and is on track to continue. What’s worse is that since water is getting so expensive and scarce, water trucks are starting to source water from dodgy sources like highly polluted surface water and really deep wells.<p>Water suppliers have a problem because they service demand as it comes in. They lose money due to bad scheduling and inefficient truck utilization. Many people think that all water suppliers are part of a “water mafia”, but the interesting trend we are noticing is that there are a lot of micro entrepreneurs popping up in the last few years who have their own water source, buy a truck, and start selling water.<p>Our marketplace fixes the problems for both water buyers and suppliers. By installing our smart metering devices into consumers water storage tanks and transmitting data to our platform, we can predict when someone is running low on water and schedule a delivery. We track the the water from the filling source to the delivery using GPS, giving users confidence they received clean water. Qualified water suppliers make more money and buyers get clean water and transparency into pricing.<p>We just launched this summer and are piloting with 3 apartment complexes with 11,000 people. We have devices installed and transmitting data to our platform. By next month, we should have enough water data to start automating water deliveries.<p>We'll be around to answer questions and discuss water management and are excited to hear your feedback and experience in this area!
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114
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Title: 70MillionJobs, the first for-profit recruitment platform for 70 million Americans with criminal records, is seeking a CTO/Co-Founder to help build the business.<p>We just completed YC (S17), and when we launched on HN a couple of weeks ago, we received nearly 2000 up votes, along with an incredible amount of great suggestions and support. (I can't tell you how personally gratifying it was.)
While we have a perfectly functioning MVP job board (70MillionJobs.com), this product does not come close to being a market fit for our very unique users. Despite that, we have several million applicants in our pipeline, and have begun working with some large, national employers.
We received a great response at Demo Day and Investor Day, and have nearly completed our Seed Round with some good investors.
Full Disclosure: getting involved may not be the most advisable career move: my first CTO learned that his wife had cancer shortly after our acceptance into YC. My second CTO's family was involved in a terrible auto accident just prior to our interview for the summer batch.
I need someone with whom the mission resonates (helping people who desperately could use a hand), as well as ready to own everything technical large and small. Significant equity and a living wage are on the table. I am leaning towards operating the business in Oakland, but that's negotiable.
Please contact me ([email protected]) or share with whomever you think is great. Help me build a big company and save a lot of lives along the way.
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41
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Title: For some reason vulnerabilities in node packages and ruby gems are not commonly assigned CVE IDs (pip packagea, for example, get CVEs and it's easy to follow).<p>How do you guys keep your packages secure? I am aware of the commercial services that solve this issue (snyk, nodesecurity) but I am looking for a free solution
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71
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Title: Hi HN,<p>For a robotics problem I have, I needed to determine the minimum distance between a point and an ellipse.<p>Existing stack overflow answers suggest using root finders to solve a quartic equation or specialised iterative methods that have instabilities.<p>https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22959698/distance-from-given-point-to-given-ellipse<p>One paper suggests using an initial guess on the ellipse as a root of the quartic, using the guess to simplify it to a cubic, and then solving it. The result is a fast converging stable algorithm, but solving the cubic and choosing the correct root is gross.<p>I've come up with a method that relies on maths that most programmers would not be familiar with, but the implementation boils down to 14 lines of python. It converges quickly (3 iterations) and is completely robust (no divergences or divide by zeros).<p>This is the first time I've been sitting on an algo that I genuinely believe to be novel. The robotics is a side project and work doesn't lay claim to IP outside of work.<p>I intend to write up a blog post tomorrow, but if you were in my shoes what would you do?<p>Thanks
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80
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Title: If so, what kind of work did you have? How was it? Do you have any tips or suggestions?
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83
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Title: What maths must be understood to enable pursuit of either of the above fields? are there any seminal texts/courses/content which should be consumed before starting?
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628
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Title: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job (as opposed to it being a tedious grind for money)? If so, what do you do and what are your working conditions?
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94
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Title: Taking a look below at price, you can see that 1 bitcoin is worth around $4400 US dollars.<p>https://www.coindesk.com/price/<p>I remember a time when they were giving out free bitcoin at hackathons and conferences etc.<p>For a casual outsider and a passive market speculator, whats going on with bitcoin and maybe the rest of cryptocurrencies, what are they seeing that we can't?<p>And any clues as to whats with the recent surge in East Asian interest of bitcoin?<p>https://www.coindesk.com/annyeong-bitcoin-south-korea-canada-changing-crypto-market/<p>Note that I've tried googling but a lot of the urls are before May 2017 and are trying to explain about Bitcoin's peak at ~$2000 which is not helpful much.
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42
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Title: Following just happened: An hour before lunch I googled and visited websites that sell bicycles. I also visited Amazon during this research. I then bought a bike from one of the manufacturers' websites. A few hours later I browse facebook and see ads to this manufacturers' bikes in my newsfeed, via an Amazon sponsored ad.<p>I use one browser (Safari) for facebook exclusively, and browsed the bikes / Amazon / made the purchase on Chrome. I have different email addresses for facebook, amazon and, well, google.
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178
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Title: I'm wondering if there is anything I can do to make it better. I'm still early in my career and don't have a huge network, but still feel like there might be something missing.<p>https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesmp98/
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63
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Title: When I was 23, I used to be totally comfortable cranking out Javascript UIs like there was no tomorrow. These days I'm approaching 33 and I can barely force myself to look at code for more than 20 seconds without mentally panicking.<p>I don't know how I got here. I think it's a combination of many things, such as 1) a demanding family life 2) web development getting more complex in general 3) more stressful work environment 4) physical discomfort like RSI getting worse 5) just getting older & brain getting foggier.<p>I don't think learning in my off hours is an option because my day job is so mentally draining. It takes all of my brainpower just to work from 9 to 5, and then I have nothing left over after that.<p>I am talking to my manager about reducing my responsibilities but really I've been feeling this way for over a year, just trying to hang in there. But it's only getting worse as the months go by.
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103
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Title: What sites/platforms do you consider best and trustworthy? Why?
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42
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Title: I've noticed that articles mentioning climate and climate change that make it to the front page end up being flagged.<p>I think this is <i>probably</i> fair, because discussions about such articles invariably end up being political and don't end up contributing very positively to HN.<p>I certainly <i>have</i> thoughts and opinions on this topic, but upon reflection I realize they're not especially well informed. They're mainly based on what I've read in popular media, and I'm hoping I can do better than that.<p>So I'd like to approach it from another direction. If I want to get some raw climate data for myself, and analyze it using R or Python, what would be a good starting point?<p>Are there specific data sets that I should focus on? Are there any well known papers that I should read?
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108
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Title: Hi HN!<p>I've collected lots of material, techniques and methods over the past few years on mindfulness and applied it to my own (hacker) brain.<p>My question(s)<p>- what mindfulness techniques do you use?
- do you find the mindfulness material out there a bit hippie?
- what apps/hacks do you use?
- do you know of any books specifically for hackers/programmers/techies?<p>Cheers!
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50
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Title: We launched an API for custom hostnames today. A simple HTTP post with a hostname gets a temp hostname with CNAME/a record instructions, as soon as DNS is setup we issue SSL and start accepting traffic for that hostname. It's the quickest way we know of to provision custom hostnames: <a href="https://fly.io/mix/custom-hostnames/" rel="nofollow">https://fly.io/mix/custom-hostnames/</a><p>When we started building Fly, we figured it was too late to "make SSL easy and the customers will come". Lets Encrypt changed the world, and we knew many companies rolling their own SSL support with nginx, Traefik, etc, etc. It seemed like a solved problem.<p>It turns out that SSL is still a pain, particularly companies with lots of hostnames pointed at them ... anyone hosting apps/content on behalf of their own customers. Distributing certificates, keeping them renewed, and — most of all‚ making https fast is still hard. Devs can solve the basic problem in a week or so with a proxy, but then it sits, and no one feels very comfy with untouched infrastructure. And it's usually something distracting devs from more important work that's core to their own customers.<p>So this is our way of solving that problem. We can handle any number of hostnames for applications, devs can spend more timeon what makes their apps special. It's a relatively "simple" use of what we've built, but solves a really fundamental problem for a many companies. It's the most fun thing we've discovered this year.<p>So, if you're building an app, and serve stuff on behalf of your users, we can make your life easier:<p><a href="https://fly.io/mix/custom-hostnames/" rel="nofollow">https://fly.io/mix/custom-hostnames/</a>
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90
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Title: Do you do any mentoring outside of work? If so, how did you get started?
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113
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Title: Please state what your mentoring, your location, your name (optional), and your email, like this:<p>Business Development | London | Jane Q. | [email protected]
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103
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Title: It seems this question hasn't been asked for some time, so I'd be interested hear what new (and old) ideas have come up.
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292
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Title: Please lead with either SEEKING WORK or SEEKING FREELANCER,
your location, and whether remote work is a possibility.
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56
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Title: Please lead with the location of the position and include the keywords
REMOTE, INTERNS and/or VISA when the corresponding sort of candidate is welcome.
When remote work is not an option, include ONSITE. If it isn't a household name,
please explain what your company does.<p>Submitters: please only post if you personally are part of the hiring company—no
recruiting firms or job boards.<p>Readers: please only email submitters if you personally are interested in the
job—no recruiters or sales calls.<p>You can also use kristopolous' console script to search the thread:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10313519</a>.
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573
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Title: CrashPlan woes continue.<p>I have not been able to back up to CrashPlan in Sydney for nearly 5 days.<p>Even worse - YOU CANNOT RESTORE! When logging in to their site, you get the message "Unable to login to server".<p>How can a backup service leave their customers in the lurch for so long?<p>Suggest to all that have been screwed by their recent decision to kill their Home product, get the hell out of there as soon as you can.<p>The best I could get out of support was:<p>Hello,<p>Thank you for contacting Code42 Support!<p>Unfortunately, it appears there has been a problem with the server you mentioned (ECA-SYD) going down. Your files are still perfectly safe, but it's taking us a lot longer than usual to get the server back up and running. I do not have an ETA for a fix just yet, but I will let you know once I have more information.<p>You're certainly not the first person I've talked to who's having issues with this server, and I'm doing everything I can to bring more attention to the problem.<p>Please let us know if you have any additional questions or concerns, and I'll be more than happy to help!<p>Thanks,
Redacted
Code42 Support
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49
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Title: I'm looking for best developer blogs for inspiration
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302
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Title: It's ok to "forget" what you read (https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/its-okay-to-forget-what-you-read-f4ef1c34cc01) as books update our mental models or how we perceive the world. What books have made the biggest impact on your mental models?
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692
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Title: I've recently started a project using Java. From a technical perspective and after careful analysis of alternative technologies, for what I am doing it currently is the right choice.<p>But with the Google-Oracle lawsuit, Oracle laying off the Sun team, and my professional experience, I really have to convince myself building anything on top of a technology stack where they are such a powerful player.<p>I understand that OpenJDK is GPLed with class path exception, but is that enough? Could Oracle somehow sabotage OpenJDK into oblivion? What's the most probable steps Google, IBM and RedHat could take if Oracle pulls the plug on Java, or worse, plays some dirty legal tricks?<p>I know my concerns are vague but I wonder if people who know better could share their thoughts?
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155
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Title: I want to become a better developer and ideally get more into artificial neural networks also. Looking for audiobooks mainly, as I've found most podcasts quite light on substance. Any recommendations from the HN crowd?
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200
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Title: Elon Musk, Putin, Mark Z are these guys just overblowing AI? Current developments in AI are no where close to cause WW-III.
Why are these leaders frightening people with claims that AI can cause WW-III or ruin the world?
On top of that media is going frenzy over any single statements or tweets by these leaders.<p>I have never seen Andrew Ng or Andrej Karpathy making such claims.<p>State of the art AI can only do very specialized things in limited scope e.g ASR, NLP,Image recognition, game play etc.<p>What am I missing?<p>Sources :
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/04/elon-musk-says-global-race-for-ai-will-be-most-likely-cause-of-ww3.html<p>https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/24/mark-zuckerberg-elon-musks-doomsday-ai-predictions-are-irresponsible.html<p>http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/25/technology/elon-musk-mark-zuckerberg-ai-artificial-intelligence/index.html<p>https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/4/16251226/russia-ai-putin-rule-the-world
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48
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Title: Looking for tips, ideas, and actual detailed instructions for creating a programming language. No specific target or runtime. Just want to try my hand at it and leverage my API design experience.
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239
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Title: Learning frameworks and platforms through udemy and pluralsight.
Side projects on github.
What did you do to get a response back from jobs you've submitted an application to?
Did you apply to junior roles when you were a senior in the other stack?
Thank you.
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178
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Title: So we recently concluded YC Startup School where we got some GCP credits. Just 2 months after, Google decided to close our billing account, at this time we had just over $2,400 remaining.<p>On reaching out to the Google Billing Team, they came up with several excuses including us using one of their top infrastructure which took all our credits. Of course that was a lie, we showed them our dashboard and services we had running. They then admitted it was an issue at their end.<p>Even till now, we only have 2 Compute Instances and 2 SQL instances.<p>After reaching out to the team severally to no avail, one eventually came back and claimed their Support Manager says they have to close the case as there's nothing they could further do on the matter. I asked, tell us what happened to the remaining credits, why was the account closed? Why was all our servers shut down?<p>All these questions and many others were not answered by the Team. Its over a month, they still can't figure our how Account got closed and what to do in our case.<p>We reached out to the GCP Slack group where we met this very helpful guy from Google. See his comment:<p>"Couldn’t agree more. Not just worrying, it’s unacceptable. The underlying issue is making sure that you are the real owner of the account, which is challenging when the account was deleted. The people who can confirm it have been unresponsive. I’m trying to figure out who they are exactly to message them personally (not through a ticketing system) and see if I can get an answer.
I would be frustrated, too. We are failing you on this one, big time"<p>I implore you to take care when using GCP. Its clearly not mature and support has been really horrible. We have all communications archived and would be more than happy to share with anyone.<p>Anyone had a similar experience, please share! Don't be evil indeed!
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86
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Title: Hi guys,
So after spending some time exploring serverless practices (Lambda in particular), a few questions popped into my mind which i’d love to get some more experienced views. The development guidelines seem to be quite straightforward for some simple stuff to do and the given sample code demonstrate it nicely. Yet - what happens when the overall application isn’t as simple and requires more than 15 lines of code? Building the design and logic of the app shouldn’t be that hard, yet making sure that it actually works is what worries me more…
What are the given practices to test, debug, troubleshoot and iterate with the code i write in Lambda? The best i came up with is traces and log collection (most common), wrappers for the code in Lambda to collect more metrics and SAM local which should allow you to run stuff locally (but then, how to simulate the real context and the flow of the app)... are these really enough to test code in Lambda? Are there any other options around? Are there any other outstanding issues in developing for for Lambda?
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51
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Title: Hi Guys,
I have over 12 years of expertise in a particular domain. Now I recently switched to another company in a new domain (based on some overlapping technical skills and good recommendations from my past colleagues) as the jobs were far to come by in my old area of expertise. But, I'm finding it really hard to adjust in the new one.<p>The biggest challenges I'm facing are :<p>1. Looking at my years of experience my colleagues expect an expert level of performance. But being new to the domain, I've not been able to meet their expectations.<p>2. I've tried looking for non-tech roles PM, TL etc., hoping to leverage my management/leadership skills, but my senior management aren't buying it.<p>3. I feel isolated in meetings where everyone around me are talking the technology and I just take notes or stay silent mostly.<p>4. When I see guys half my experience are miles ahead of me in terms of the tech skills in the new area, I wonder if I even have a chance catching up ?<p>Any suggestions / advice is welcome and highly appreciated. Thanks in advance !
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389
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Title: What websites, apps, tools, videos have you decided on to teach your children programming? Are you using only online resources, or also traditional classroom setting? What do you like about the apps and tools you are using, and what could be improved?
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Title: Hi HN!<p>We are the co-founders of Lyrebird (<a href="https://lyrebird.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://lyrebird.ai/</a>) and PhD students in AI at University of Montreal. We are building speech synthesis technologies to improve the way we communicate with computers. Right now, our key innovation is that we can copy the voice of someone else and make it say anything. The tech is still at its early stage but we believe that it is eventually going to make possible a wide range of new applications such as:<p>- reading loud text messages with the voice of the sender,<p>- reading audiobooks with the voice of your choice,<p>- giving a personalized digital voice to people who lost their voice due to a disease,<p>- allowing video game makers to have more customized dialogs generated on the fly, or avatars of their players,<p>- allowing movie makers to freeze the voice of their actors so that they can still use it if the actor ages or dies.<p>Yesterday we launched a beta version of our voice-cloning software: anyone can record one minute of audio and get a digital voice that sounds like them.<p>We know that many on HN are concerned about potential misuses surrounding these technologies and we share your concern. We write further on our ethical stance on this page: <a href="https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/" rel="nofollow">https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/</a>.<p>Our blogpost about the launch: <a href="https://lyrebird.ai/blog/create-your-voice-avatar" rel="nofollow">https://lyrebird.ai/blog/create-your-voice-avatar</a> that features the first video combining generated audio and generated elements of the video.<p>There was a thread about us on HN when we launched our website four months ago (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182262" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182262</a>) but at that time, no one could test our software yet and we did not really answer any question of the community. So this time we are ready for questions and would love some feedback!
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Title: A few weeks ago, I was getting no sleep. I was putting overtime every week working third shift and it was terrible for my mental health. Now I'm working three different jobs and going to school, all of which are flexible, but I still tend to oversleep during the day. I wake up at a decent time, but feel extremely sluggish and tired and often don't get up till early afternoon. On top of this, I'm a horrible procrastinator. Altogether this has cost me a good bit of money and is looking like it could cost me a job. What can I do to help remedy these issues?
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Title: Here's the long and short of it:<p>My brother in law requested I write an app for him, and in return I only asked him to pay the $25 registration fee to open a developer account with google. I was happy to develop the app for him. I am a student and it was great practice.<p>The problem arrives when he has fraud issues on his card, and so mistakenly issues a chargeback for the google registration fees amidst the confusion and immediately closed his account completely, so there is no possibility of reversing the chargeback.<p>Well this one little mistake has REALLY made my life difficult, and may in fact result in a lifetime ban from developing android apps, which would be devastating because I am studying Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University and I LOVE to develop apps and code.<p>Google terminated my developer account, suspended my google payments account (which prevented the purchase of a class textbook I needed), and even deactivated my email account for this. It took me a week to successfully get my payments account and email account back up.<p>I have filed an appeal for the termination 3 times in the last 3 weeks, all with NO RESPONSE WHATSOEVER. I've attempted to contact Google, with no success. It is impossible to get a hold of anyone who actually deals with developer account reinstatement, and I cannot find ANY resources to determine a way to provide documentation that proves the termination was made in error.<p>I have done absolutely nothing wrong and yet it is looking like I may be banned from doing something I love for the rest of my life (not to mention having no apps to add to my portfolio).<p>Somebody please help me resolve this issue, this little mistake (not even my own) has been a complete nightmare, and Google seems to be completely indifferent and utterly unhelpful.<p>If anybody knows any way to help, please do so! I would be eternally grateful!
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Title: I keep checking hackernews every now and then be it at work or when I am at home. I come here at least 10-15 times a day. Is that normal ?
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Title: I'm making a coloring book of data structures and algorithms for programmers and students. So far I have a prototype page for a sorting algorithm (albeit a rather simple one).<p>Here the Selection Sort coloring pages you can print.
<a href="https://coderscoloringbook.com/selectionsort" rel="nofollow">https://coderscoloringbook.com/selectionsort</a><p>And here is how I colored mine.
<a href="https://coderscoloringbook.com/selectionsortcolored" rel="nofollow">https://coderscoloringbook.com/selectionsortcolored</a><p>A coloring book is not quite enough to teach algorithms on its own, but I really get a lot from visual reinforcement of what I learn from books/lectures.<p>Do you think having coloring pages like this could be a helpful addition to the usual studying approach of textbooks, lectures and online coding practice?<p>Or is it just a fun little break from coding without too much educational value?
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523
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Title: Now that Firefox's UI is becoming more and more like Chrome's, why should anyone continue to use Firefox?<p>I'm thinking the reasons might have something to do with:<p><pre><code> - Lower memory usage compared to Chrome [1]
- Increasingly more of it being written in a fast and memory-safe language, Rust [2]
- Not belonging to a for-profit company [3]
</code></pre>
Would also be nice to know what plans Mozilla has for Firefox in the longer term. Once Firefox becomes a near Chrome clone written in Rust, what comes next?<p>[1] - https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/firefox-uses-less-memory-chrome-edge-safari/<p>[2] - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation<p>[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla
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Title: Functional and object-oriented styles of programming dominate programming languages today. Are you using a language that has neither of these features? If so, what is the language and why do you use it?<p>Or are you using an FP or OOP language but rarely use the FP or OOP features? If so, why?
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Title: There are many posts here about people making money off side projects or businesses they manage on their own, but it seems like almost all of them are selling a product or a service.
I'm wondering if anyone is making substantial money from a site that just generates content (and isn't selling a service/product) ?
(Looking for examples of people doing this on their own, not big companies running news/content sites)
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Title: Title question.<p>When I say desktop usage, I mainly mean a full fledged browser. For everything else I mostly have a fully cli workflow.<p>This comes out of me tinkering with more "exotic" OSes like GNU/Hurd and Plan 9. I've had fun with the Hurd and would like to learn more by running my day to day on it; however, the hardware support and tooling is unfortunately just too anemic to reasonable do this.<p>Is this kind of thing even possible at the moment? Are there reasons to <i>not</i> want a desktop running some microkernel OS? Am I being unknowingly unreasonable in wanting this?<p>Thanks!
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Title: I've received a written offer from a BigCo that I've accepted, and we've now proceeded to the background check stage.<p>They've contracted with a third party to perform a background check, and part of the employment verification step requires previous salaries and dates of employment. I have an issue with providing my salary history as I've received large increases last time I switched and this time as well (>40%), and I'm concerned they'll lower my agreed-upon salary after seeing the results of the report (as I seriously doubt it's a binary yes/no from the third-party).<p>Since I have not previously disclosed my salary history during the interview process, my plan is to bend the rules of allowable characters in the salary field to provide a null value and supply heavily redacted W-2s / paystubs as supporting documentation (in lieu of allowing them to contact my previous employers directly).<p>I'm wondering--Is this a sound plan? Would you do something different? Am I being overly-cautious with information I perceive to be confidential and irrelevant in my background check given I already have an accepted offer?
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Title: I'm a long time Reddit advertiser. I've also written the top ranked post on Google for "Reddit Ads." Reddit liked the post so much that they feature on a case study on their site.<p>I used to be able to drive $10 CPAs from Reddit ads.<p>It was a simple process. You pick a subreddit that fits well w/ your product and run an ad in that subreddit. It would only appear in that subreddit.<p>For example, I run a jerky club, so I would advertise in the r/jerky subreddit and people would see my ad in r/jerky and sign up for a subscription. My ad would only appear in the r/jerky subreddit.<p>It was perfect contextual advertising. Redditors see relevant ads, Reddit gets ad revenue, and the advertiser gets ROI.<p>Now, Reddit has changed their system secretly so they can boost their ad revenue and reduce advertiser ROI. CPAs now cost me $100+ on their platform.<p>Here's what they've done.<p>Now when I tell Reddit that I want to run an ad in r/jerky, instead of ONLY running the ad in the r/jerky subreddit, they run the ad to any user who's ever visited r/jerky or subscribed to it. Of note, they don't tell the advertiser about this change anywhere on their new platform.<p>So now my jerky club ad can appear on the front page for ANY Reddit user who's ever visited r/ jerky or subscribed to the subreddit. The ad can appear any place on Reddit totally out of context.<p>This drastically reduces the ROI for the advertiser and it gives Reddit the ability to sell many more impressions.<p>Total deception on the part of Reddit.<p>Disappointed.<p>Maybe someone from Reddit can chime in on this because it's very frustrating.
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Title: Each AI should use up a pretty significant resource of the server running the AI. How do the games possibly manage so many of them? Most education on AI is how to make them smarter, not how to make them cheaper. There has to be well known tips and tricks about scaling AI. What are they?
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Title: - Which exchanges are the best
- How should I secure my coins once I've bought them?
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Title: HN, this is something that I've always been interested in: Why isn't there a modern piece of software akin to Microsoft’s Access? I know there are plenty of issues in scaling these kind of systems, and that these kind of platforms can feel clunky and unwieldy but I still find it surprising that there isn’t a simple platform for creating CRUD apps. It doesn’t seem like an unachievable goal to me: you need the ability to create forms, design database tables, manage user permissions, manage data workflow (ie: send an sms if <condition>, seek approval from <user role> for <action>), and view/search data. I’m certain these features would be useful for all kinds of business scenarios where building, maintaining, and hosting a custom solution isn’t worthwhile, or would be unideal compared to using a standardised tool. Are there tools in this space that I’m missing? If not, why isn’t this being pursued? Eagerly looking forward to your thoughts.
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Title: YC16 company Legalist is paying for you to sue Equifax in small claims court. We'll get you a complaint, filing fees, instructions.<p>http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170914005511/en/Legalist-Pay-Data-Breach-Victims-Sue-Equifax<p>https://www.legalist.com/equifax/
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Title: I've been looking for the perfect backpack for a few weeks now and really I am going nowhere. So many options, so fewer reviews, and no answer.<p>I am currently carrying a cheap backpack every day for the past years and now I want to buy one of a better quality.<p>What I (think I) need is:<p>- A small backpack. To fit a 13'' laptop. I would be happy if it could fit a bigger one too but I want the backpack to be slim, light and relatively small. 15'' backpacks tend to be big. I want a small backpack.<p>- Usually, I carry a 13'' MBP laptop, a shirt and a few gadgets like a powerbank, cables, etc. And ofc IDs, business cards, and smaller stuff.<p>- Good quality, to handle the sweat on the back and not be easily scratched, get dirt etc. I will use it every day going to and coming back from the office and after work, I may still do a walk before going back home. I do have another bigger backpack for traveling but this one I want for everyday use.<p>- Nice to have an easily accessible pocket without getting the backpack off my shoulders to put a key, a wallet, a phone etc.<p>Regarding budget, I would say between 80$-120$.<p>Have you used a backpack that fits that description? Some other recommendation/advice?
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42
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Title: Taking bets on whether status page begins to reflect actual status before the problem is fixed.
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82
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Title: If I you were given a billion dollars to disrupt Facebook, how would you go about it?<p>Clarification: Your objective is to get enough FB users onto your platform over a 2-3 year time frame that more or less will lead to FB's obsolescence. This is intentionally vague to encourage creativity and also question what it is that keeps FB users on the platform in the first place.
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Title: I'm interested in writing a utility to assist with scheduling un-conferences. Lets take the following situation for an example:<p>* 4 conference rooms across 4 time slots, for a total of 16 talks.<p>* 30 proposed talks<p>* 60 total participants<p>Each user would be given 4(?)votes, un-ranked. (collection of the votes is a separate topic) Voting is not secret, and we don't need mathematically precise results. The goal is just to minimize conflicts.<p>The algorithm would have the following data to work with:<p>* List of talks with the following properties:<p><pre><code> * presenter participant ID
* the participant ID for each user that voted for the talk
</code></pre>
I'd like to come up with an algorithm that does the following:<p>* fills all time slots with the highest voted topics<p>* attempts to avoid overlapping votes for any particular given user in a given time slot<p>* attempt to not schedule a presenter's talk during a talk they are interested in.<p>* Sugar on top: implement ranked preferences<p>My question: where do I start to research the algorithms that will be helpful? I know this is a huge project, but I have a year to work on it. I'm also not overly concerned with performance, but would like to keep it from being exponential.<p>Thank you for any references you can provide!
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Title: Hello HN,<p>A company I've recently had the opportunity to interview has a small engineering team consisting of "best friends". My first reaction is that this seems to be a red flag because of the way in which friends interact with each other isn't always professional. How would one deal with working on a team consisting of friends where you're not part of the friend group?<p>Also, can anyone relate to this type of culture, and if so, what did you think, and how did you react?
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Title: I'm looking for a digital watch that has functionality like an hourly chime, alarm clock, and reminders. When looking purely at functionality, I have no trouble finding this, but there are some aspects of regular watches that I don't want to give up either.<p>Functionality-wise: I want to hold on to the long battery life of regular watches. It doesn't need to last a year on a charge, but longer than a month would be nice.<p>In terms of style: a lot of the watches are designed to look expensive. I'm talking about things like glossy screens, fancy modern designs, and metallic bodies. These are things I want to avoid. I like the retro designs of the watches listed here[1], for example, with black, plastic bodies, and low-resolution screens.<p>Basically, I'm looking for a computer watch, which was the precursor to smartwatches. Is anything akin in that vein still being produced?<p>1. https://www.pcmag.com/feature/265834/12-ultra-nerdy-watches-of-yore
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Title: I got fed up with the news reader apps out there so I decided to make my own. Its a simple concept where it tracks all your favorite news sources for new posts and the social shares it received. Then it ranks it HN/Reddit style using social shares as upvotes. It's not meant to be alternative to HN, just a focused way to track your favorite sources. Please try it out and let me know what do you think,<p><a href="http://telescope.surf/" rel="nofollow">http://telescope.surf/</a><p>Note: you can do 'Add to Homescreen' on mobile to make it as an app.<p>Please leave a feedback or any feature wishlist you may have.<p>Thanks!
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Title: I'm Luciano, co-founder and CTO of ScopeAI (<a href="https://www.getscopeai.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getscopeai.com/</a>). We’ve built a product that automates the process of extracting and communicating user insights to product and operation teams. To extract product insights, we integrate with support channels such as Zendesk, Intercom and desk.com and use NLP to automatically tag, categorize and cluster support tickets.<p>Customer support teams currently spend hours manually tagging customer support tickets to track trends in user feedback. The process is inefficient, lacks consistency and is reported retrospectively. This process typically fails to capture the granular insights requested by product and operation teams.<p>Natalie, our CEO is a former UX researcher. In that world, the process for extracting trends from user interviews was completely manual. It involved codifying the conversations and counting how frequently certain feedback was mentioned. It was definitely difficult to scale. We recognized that there needed to be a better way of extracting trends from unstructured data and started working on ScopeAI!<p>Some things we’ve learned/be happy to discuss further:<p>-Our process for extracting key phrases from tickets - currently done through a custom pipeline built using spaCy<p>-How we connect similar phrases - currently using a word2vec model trained on both GloVe vectors and text from tickets in our system<p>-How we assign broader categories and sentiment analysis using Tensor Flow<p>Here's an example of an insight we'd extract:<p>There were 67 requests for subscription cancellations for company x during the month of July:<p>• 24 requests “slow service”<p>• 19 requests “I have another account with y company”<p>• 8 requests “login issues”<p>Knowing this is really valuable for this company because they can make better decisions - in this case, making the software faster became a much higher priority.<p>Happy to answer questions and looking forward to hearing any feedback!
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