anandkulkarni

Brilliant!

well done!

I did much of my PhD work on high-dimensional tetrahedral complexes (so-called simplicial complexes), and somehow was unaware of this lovely and quite intuitive result.

Thanks, John Cook!

When I TA'd computability & complexity as a graduate student, I always loved giving this proof of Godel's Theorem as an easy corollary of the Halting Problem as a homework assignment.

It's beautiful, elegant, and easy to understand. I was introduced to the proof by a note in Sipser's text.

Thanks for sharing, Stefan. Lots to be proud of in what Starsky achieved, and factors outside your control at work at the end.

Excited to see what you do next.

I wouldn't set up a corporation until you have either a reasonable amount of cash coming in or someone ready to give you a check. After that, I'd start with an LLC in your home state, unless you think there's a chance you'll take outside investment. If you do, conversion to a Delaware C-corp costs around $10K in legal fees.

Well! As it happens, around the time of this article I was working as a summer research student in Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, carrying out a search for supernovae as part of Saul Perlmutter's Supernova Cosmology group.

When astrophysicists work on this activity, they use (no surprise) computer vision. The lab's software automated the process these nova hunters ran manually: we subtracted two images of every segment of the night sky taken on different dates to see if any new bright objects appeared in the difference. If so, it's possibly a supernovae!

Because there are so many stars out there you can use this method to predictably discover large numbers of supernovae when you need to study them. They called the project the Nearby Supernova Factory ( https://snfactory.lbl.gov/ ); as far as I know this is still the preferred method.

I enjoyed it, but you should allow me to disable random HackerNews links. That's not the purpose of the extension.

Congrats, Randall and team!

You can try https://www.hellokip.com/, an app for finding and managing your therapist.

Kevin Fu and team at UMich's security & privacy group provided the most plausible explanation for what's going on here. https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reve...

Thanks! I'll get these updated.

I put together a browseable set of example high-quality landing pages here, ranging from startups to larger companies:

https://design.crowdbotics.com

These examples were originally selected by Kesler Tanner over at the Stanford Institute of Design. They represent what's going on as of mid-2017 in landing page design. The one shift that I've seen since this collection was last updated is the migration to bolder, more contrast-heavy color palettes that make use of more illustrations. Intercom and Dropbox's current sites are good examples here.

We've got a number of blockchain developers in our team and rent out their time to interested parties, so we see a number of these options come up.

There are a few different business models possible:

* When ICOs are issued, tokens are sold in exchange for other currency (typically BTC, ETH, or fiat currency like USD). The reason is to have more-established forms of money available to pay developers working on the technology, so this means you can actually pay people conventional cash (in the short term).

* In the long term, most protocol developers monetize via software built on top of the underlying technology or powering the underlying technology. BlockCypher is one example (https://www.blockcypher.com/) You can offer pro versions if folks run them internally for a fee.

* It's also common to offer consulting/human services related to technology you developed. (https://gem.co/ is a good example)

* Decentralized protocols don't mean you can't take a cut of transactions – they mean everyone has a chance to take a cut of transactions! Most blockchains call these "miners" and open it up to everyone, but the initial protocol developer may also set up/offer a pool to take advantage of this process. This happens quite often with industrial/commercial blockchain used by larger industry groups.

* More generally, technology running on open protocols can be centralized/proprietary even if the underlying tech is open – the same rules apply. TCP/IP and HTTP are open and decentralized, but we have plenty of money-making businesses here on the web!

Enjoying this theme. Thanks for sharing. Makes HN more fun!

DeepMind developed a number of core research innovations in deep learning that I'd consider quantum leaps, prior to their acquisition by Google. ie: https://deepmind.com/research/publications/neural-turing-mac...

I'm doing the related National Novel Generation Month, which is a hackeresque twist to generate novels computationally.

https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/

https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2017/issues/60

We were among the first companies to use this product at Crowdbotics, and our company couldn't be happier. This is a phenomenal step forward for folks looking to bake social awareness into their company's corporate DNA from day one. I'll mention also that the process was almost totally frictionless and Clerky's support was (as usual) phenomenal.

Go Chris & Darby!

At Crowdbotics you are required to be working on at least one side project, either for fun or for profit, at all times. You own it.

I've referred a few folks to Kip who were looking for a therapist after struggling to find one elsewhere (in one case, I downloaded the app on their phone and just sent the person to the first meeting). So far, they're reporting positive things about the app and the experience.

One of the interesting things that Kip solves is discovery: it seems like they have a roster of prequalified therapists who follow evidence-based strategies. That's pretty interesting – the basic process of finding a qualified therapist who's a good fit via the usual methods (Google, asking people) isn't easy.

I recommend founders end customer discovery interviews by asking for a purchase (or a preorder/letter of intent, depending on the situation). This is the most immediate way to testing whether a customer's really willing to pay.

Lots of digital agencies do this for you, but splashy agency launches aren't usually how startups get off the ground (with a few exceptions). They're how bigger companies release new products because they have ample brand awareness and budget.

The conventional wisdom in the last ten years for new startup products are that you should open discussions with initial customers yourself.

This kind of early customer development lets you prove your hypotheses around the product having demand before investing in expensive promotional spending.

Chrome extensions are just another interface to a web app. They're easy to reproduce by another hacker, but most people won't bother reverse-engineering an extension just to get it for free. You'll probably sell product to people who don't know how to do that, anyway.

If you're concerned about it, then just make sure the IP doesn't live entirely in the extension itself with a simple third-party authentication & payment system.

There are more than a few companies set up like this already. SalesLoft started as a paid Chrome extension!

Shoot me an email (see profile). Happy to share details. Most come from emerging economies rather than Western Europe, but not all.

I run a large contract developer team that's globally distributed. The short answer is that US law permits hiring international contractors who are not subject to US jurisdiction provided they file a W8-BEN executed by that contractor certifying their tax exempt status. These contractors are responsible for paying taxes under their own countries' laws as part of a mutual tax treaty with the US.

Feel free to email me with questions. If you'd rather just hire one of our remote developers and not deal with the paperwork yourself, that's another option. We manage contracts with clients as a US company to insulate them from needing to set up 1-1 relationships with devs.

Nice work! You argued that you were never hungry on your diet. Was that due to the emotional stress you were under, or were the snacks really enough?

In the final calculation, employees are the ones who are toiling day-in and day-out for the company's well being – in a real way, the company's future depends on them more than the investors. It can be more valuable to have them invested long-term in the company's success, point for point, than an investor.

Another way to think about it is like this: if an investor told you tomorrow they'd no longer contribute to the company, versus your first engineer, which would be more damaging? The investor's money is already in the bank, whereas the engineer will cost time and money to replace, as well as disrupting the ongoing development.

Interesting project and a good lesson in why careful data tracking is so valuable. Thanks for sharing and congrats on the traction!

If you're open to remote staffers, you can get this done for $30-$50/hr. PM me if you want referrals.

I suspect this is often used as shorthand as a measurement of progress because it's announced publicly and has some (imperfect) correlation to traction across all companies who receive it.

If you were to define a new standard milestone for "success", what would it be? Revenue, for B2B companies, and active user growth rate for B2C?