jmngomes

Not sure if they're working in web development, it seems that a "career" in finance is more likely for most recent STEM graduates:

"Catherine Rampell found that in 2006, just before the financial crisis, 25% of graduating seniors at Harvard University, 24% at Yale, and a whopping 46% at Princeton were starting their careers in financial services."

in https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-rent-seekin...

That happened to me too, they charged me for an IP address that I never got the opportunity to attach to a vServer (because there were no physical instances to spin the vServer on)

...providing that they can actually and predictably supply the servers.

My experience with Scaleway was essentially this: they advertise that you can have virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and created a virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over three days, the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.

Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to start the server until it works".

So, they'll sell you a vServer but can't guarantee when you'll be able to spin up the machine.

For me, it was a terrible experience, and Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.

Won't ublock [1] solve that by blocking that kind of scripts from loading?

[1] https://www.ublock.org/

I think you mean "regulation is necessary in the digital advertising space".

Advertising has already been regulated for a long time, and for the same reason: scams, misinformation, and outright fraud.

The main issue is that the same standards that have been applied to TV, radio and print have not yet come to the digital world. That probably explains how ridden the industry is of shady practices...

Maybe it's different where you live, but my experience is that the only people that can afford to not fear the IRS are precisely the "politicians and their buddies"...it wouldn't surprise me at all to see task forces being formed just to identify under-reporting via Bitcoin and issue threatening letters (e.g. pay what is due or say goodbye to any assets you have) to whoever comes up on that list.

No one is suggesting that the business should be built on Paypal. We're talking about a phase where the company is trying to land its first 14 customers or so.

Is it not viable using a personal Paypal account at this stage?

It'll be immensely easier to get a proper investor if you can generate enough sales to break even (i.e. to pay for your costs), because that's an important step to demonstrating viability and avoiding the "too early" argument.

So, given what you already know, how many customers do you need to generate enough revenue to pay for costs, i.e. what slice of the market should you address? Define that segment of the market, e.g. "kindergarten teachers in London" and devise the tactics to get them on your "Buy now" screen, and then to get them to click the "Pay now" button.

Sales strategy really depends on what space your business is in (especially B2B or B2C), but a basic first step could be something like "I'll create a Google Ads campaign for that target, measure how they respond to the landing page and integrate Intercom so I can discover/answer their questions when they reach the website". You'll learn new things about what customers think of your service - pricing, features, etc - that will help you define the next step.

If you haven't received a payment, I'd focus on converting those 14 prospects into paying customers and learning why they have or haven't purchased. Then, if you're a B2C business, focus on increasing that number x10, i.e. get to 100 paying customers, then 1000, until you break even. This is when an investor, in my mind, will be useful: to accelerate growth, and for that you need some sort of growth beforehand (which will also be your main argument when negotiating an investment).

When you are at this point, your premise will be "I'll use this money to hire a senior sales executive specializing in X to devise a proper sales strategy, and/or a senior marketing person to devise and run marketing campaigns").

>> "An angel investor would be able to assist you with company registration, however you can also do it yourself through an agency."

Although this is true, I would seriously advise the founder to get his own (trustworthy) lawyer assist him through the process, as with everything related to incorporating the company (ownership and investment structure).

I agree with your previous post, even though the product's name is eventually related to a concept on the same field (snowflake data models) it doesn't seem like a very good choice of branding. I work for one of their customers and only now do I see their website on Google's top results; namely because they also don't have a .com for the brand name.

Even though this is less relevant in a B2B context, because research is usually more thorough, it's still a warning sign in terms of branding when you have a different brand that could be confused with yours: https://snowflakesoftware.com/about/ (as posted by another user, strangely downvoted)

Also, snowflake data models are actually not very common (or appropriate/useful) in data warehouse/mart environments, as they tend to be harder to understand and use on a self-service approach, and require more joins between datasets/tables, unlike dimensional models.

A snowflake schema is a data modelling concept, not directly related to ETL (which is the process of moving and transforming data from/to a data model, which can be "dimensional", a "snowflake" on less common approaches, among others)

Here's a helpful link to understand their success: https://blog.fivetran.com/warehouse-benchmark-dce9f4c529c1

Essentially, their product is (at least) on par with major competitors like Google and AWS, no small feat for a young company.

Also curious about this, and would add OpenTSDB to that list.

>> two vCPUs (not one)

Two Intel Avoton cores, quite inferior to the Xeons that power Hetzner's vCPU. (assuming they are in stock)

I wrote this in detail on another reply, but Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.

Me neither. I upvoted it.

Scaleway's "customer support" forums will give you a good grasp of what you're in for if you buy their service.

I'll quote a different customer's opinion (on those forums) that summarizes my experience using their service: "Whenever I've tried to use Scaleway for something serious, I regretted bitterly".

My experience was essentially this: Scaleway advertises that you can have virtual servers with up to 10 150GB SSD volumes, so I signed up and created a virtual server with two 150GB volumes. After several attempts over three days, the server wouldn't start at all; it never actually started.

Scaleway's support told me that "it's because there are no available nodes matching your configuration." and "If our stock is low then there is more chance that the only free nodes are "default" ones, with 200GB available only". The solution, according to their support, would be to "keep trying to start the server until it works".

To add to this, Scaleway started billing me for the (unused) volumes attached to a server that cannot be started because, according to their support, they didn't have the resources to provide it.

So, I certainly didn't feel assured that they are able to provide what is advertised on their website (virtual servers with up to 10 ssd volumes). My key takeaway from this experience was that if you have a platform on Scaleway and you need to add servers to cope with growth/features, they may not have the capacity/stock to provide it. Even if you have only 1 server, which was my case, they may be unable to say when you'll be able to start the server on a physical instance.

Thank you, that wasn't clear from my previous interactions.

It would be great to have an EOL warning at least a few months before a service line is discontinued, just to provide enough time for customers to move critical/production workloads to another infrastructure provider.

I was just speaking with their customer support about this and it appears (if I understood correctly) that this offering will be replacing the current CX line, which has a lot of SSD space at a competitive price (unlike the new offering). Since I really need the SSD offered by the current/previous CX line (it was the #1 reason that made me move to Heztner) it seems that I'll have to find a new cloud provider...

My experience with Hetzner is/was great, but as a customer it's impossible to rely on a service provider that extinguishes a whole service line in a few months and forces me to move a whole infrastructure at a whim...

Hence my use of the word "eventually".

"It's very basic but you can use the model as a benchmark" is actually the pitch you get from AWS.

Similar to Amazon's ML: https://aws.amazon.com/aml/details/

Eventually useful for building a very basic model to serve as a benchmark for a real model.

'a Lockheed vice president a “digital transformation” arising from recent computing capabilities and design tools had made hypersonic development possible.'

The "digital transformation" part alone gives this up as vaporware...

I didn't cite any because - correct me if I'm wrong - the issue of how bad posture affects the human skeleton is a solved problem, i.e. it's basic common knowledge that can easily be found online or discussed with a medical doctor.

I don't think it's necessary to go all the way and research citations to disprove claims that are just challenging basic common sense without any argument in their support, e.g. I don't really go to great lengths to use data to disprove claims related to astrology.

There are widely available sources and studies on the subject of how bad posture is destructive to the human skeleton...

One thing that has always impressed me: how did Spotify obtain licenses for such a massive, international catalog of popular (and often, rare) music.

Can anyone shed some light, e.g. who led this effort, what made it possible?

My point was that gender equality is far from a solved problem in Europe (unlike the previous post claimed in "just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago."). To me, what actually sounds ridiculous is to dismiss the problem by saying it "results from choices" when you have evidence (data on the website I linked) that demonstrates that - all things equal (experience, geography, etc) - women globally make less money, namely in STEM jobs, than their male counterparts.

"Men and women are equal under the law" in Europe, but the reality is far from text in law, unlike what was previously said.

>> Saudi Arabia viewed cleaning as women's work, sure, just like nearly every country in Europe 100 years ago.

Gender equality is still a big problem in Europe, actually: https://www.oecd.org/inequality.htm#gender

Because the knowledge required to fix, update or port these programs is almost completely owned by the programmers that developed them, who are in the process of retiring or are unwilling to share knowledge for (justified) fear of losing their job.

Regarding "how complex can these programs be", these programs run core operations for banks and insurance companies, so you can probably imagine the amount of hidden business logic and technical hacks that have stacked up over decades of operation and changes. This will not surface in requirements gathering meetings without A LOT of blood, sweat and tears. The alternative would be to reenginer the company's processes before the building the software to support them, but that would mean a lot of change and that tends to be harder than most software engineering endeavours.

Not only are these programs complex (projects to re-implement them from scratch in J2EE would certainly be measured in years), but they are mission critical and the organization cannot afford to live without them or something 100% equivalent.

There was a lengthy discussion about this on HN some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12096250

Well, it's an embeddable comment system that doesn't track its users, unlike major "players" like Disqus or Facebook.

If you're struggling to grasp the importance of plug-ins for commentators, there's a good explanation of their relevance in the article.

Actually, their work seems to be focused on dispelling the common disbelief in these kind of applications for technology.

From the abstract: "Additionally, given that companies and governments are increasingly using computer vision algorithms to detect people’s intimate traits, our findings expose a threat to the privacy and safety of gay men and women."

Acknowledging that data analysis can create obstacles to freedom or serious social problems is a necessary step to preventing or addressing these issues, but public opinion is far from being there yet...