jorgecurio

Really interesting use of data extraction....

For developers and managers out there, do you prefer to build your own in-house scrapers or use Scrapy or tools like Mozenda instead? What about import.io and kimono?

I'm asking because lot of developers seem to be adamant against using web scraping tools they didn't develop themselves. Which seems counter productive because you are going into technical debt for an already solved problem.

So developers, what is the perfect web scraping tool you envision?

And it's always a fine balance between people who want to scrape Linkedin to spam people, others looking to do good with the data they scrape, and website owners who get aggressive and threatening when they realize they are getting scraped.

It seems like web scraping is a really shitty business to be in and nobody really wants to pay for it.

I really think Vive has a really interesting niche market at hand by focusing on tracking the player in a fixed box in a room and two sticks to manipulate hands.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWproPHhHd0

Rift is falling behind new upcoming players and the space is definitely heating up...but I just don't think Facebook players are going to be playing Animal Farm or whatever it is they play now on Rift...more likely that Steam and console gamers stands to gain from this competition.

I think that Oculus Rift was the first to start but Sony, HTC, Valve, all these companies with direct access to gamer markets will be poised to grab the torchlight from Rift.

I just have a hard time visualizing Luckey getting lucky twice when VR hardware is vastly improving at speeds that are now starting to outpace the Rift.

I wonder how long until we begin to see haptic devices for all of our senses not just visual but olfactory, tactile, sense of gravity.

Then it's only a matter of time before all these human experiences are digitized and serialized into separate haptic channels and replayed in synchronous format.

Imagine a future where you can experience anything anywhere anytime as if you did these things yourself. Will it be augumented reality with holograms being beamed into a room with ultrasound wave generators simulating tactile sensation?

The race for virtual reality sex is on.

man I am fired up to watch tonights game...like I am fired up for UFC

there should be like a North American Go Nationals or something like that televised on twitch

Anyone putting money down on Sedol? He said it will be either 5-0 or 4-1 in his favor.

Who in their right minds would want China to be the global hegemony when they censor free speech, treat people like they are disposable (Falun Gong body organ harvesting by President Zemin), impose Han Chinese ethnocentric ideologies as superior to the world as did Nazi Germany believed their blood made them pure?

What country in their right mind that enjoys the security and economic prosperity and trade with other democracies, uproot all of these perks in favor of China?

Who thinks like this besides delusional Chinese ultra nationalists and apologists?

United States is not perfect or all good either but fuck me if I'm going to let China become the world hegemony and bully every country like they do in the South China sea?

The world needs United States more than it needs the world.

edit: for those saying falun gong organ harvesting is a conspiracy.

Please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

    Falun Gong is a Chinese qigong discipline involving 
    meditation and a moral philosophy rooted in Buddhist 
    tradition. The practice rose to popularity in the 1990s 
    in China, and by 1998, Chinese government sources 
    estimated that as many as 70 million people had taken up 
    the practice.[23][24] Perceiving that Falun Gong was a 
    potential threat to the Party’s authority and ideology, 
    Communist Party leader Jiang Zemin initiated a 
    nationwide campaign to eradicate the group in July 1999.
    [25]

so much rambling and your comment is becoming harder and harder to read as it fades to blend the background beige color

so I watched this last night and it was an earth shattering moment...like no fucking way sedol gonna get bamboozled by a computer right?

AlphaGo winning was the cherry on top but what was really even more intense was the actual battle in itself. It was like Lee Sedol was playing himself but a version of him that would get better and better each time Sedol attacked. AlphaGo surprisingly chose the right strategy which was to be aggressive right back.

Overall, I could identify with the commentator's excitement and sort of apprehension that the first battle against the Machines have begun and lost the first round.

Lee Sedol must have been taken back at how good AlphaGo is I think he seriously underestimated it because he had a lot of hubris and over confidence going in like 'yeah imma smack the shit out of alphago' and then it after the match is like 'damn gg'.

The biggest ground breaking realization is that deep learning has become so good that it is possible to outperform a human even in previously thought impossible problems....who would've thought a bunch of logic gates fast forward 40 years we have machines that beat us in our own games? 80 years from now what will things look like?

It's a real reckoning and I really feel the drive to learn deep learning just don't know where to start

I am so stoked for this match, Lee Sedol is a child prodigy and a legend....I literally felt as excited as I was going in McGregor vs Diaz before the fight.

I used to play Go when I was a kid on televised matches in Korea during the 90s and have woken up early on saturdays watching every game live on tv. Then I'd go to these Go school after class and there'd be like 30 students studying and fighting.

Go is a hugely appealing game to intuitive people rather than logical people who prefer Chess. Go is an infinitely more complex and at these Pro levels a demigod like Lee Sedol have the same fanatic followings.

Well when you compare the average income of an American vs Chinese which haven't reached even Japan's level, I would say Japan would be a better market for SaaS considering they have the money to pay (or should according to income levels).

Also consider the non existant IP laws or any type of bad actor reducing enforcement mechanisms that exist in North America and Europe, means you are in a much more crowded and competitive market.

You know how I know when to pull my money out from the stock market? When your neighbor tells you to invest money in the stock market. The idea is that there's a big lag between when the smart money have left and when ordinary people start crowding in.

Same with China. Now I'm hearing from friends somehow China is the place to be that gravity is Falun Gong and doesn't exist and China will overtake United States in 10 years, and other extreme optimism that reminds me a lot about past bubbles.

But I'm interested to know if you have any source on SaaS in China.

I am optimistic about China in the long run but not with the current communist government. Only when China is unrestricted from free trade of knowledge, information and expression, only when such basic human rights guaranteed in other developed Western nations are present, can China truly become something worthy to be taken seriously.

Who want's to live in a China even Chinese people don't like or want to stay in? If you haven't noticed all the rich chinese people are getting the fuck out of China, people are so desperate that they are willing to embezzle, corrupt, steal, kill, fuck over anything or anyone. You really expect SV companies to uproot and start a new life in China?

Are China thumpers really this naive?

I think they really downplay how much of a panic/anxiety these type of closed room with no ventiliation with solemn looking people judging your every move.

I could never calm down and think but the interviewers wanted to test how you would code on a whiteboard under duress

> And it's much worse for founders seeking investment, where there are no hard skills to test at all. It's almost purely about being the same class as the investor.

yeah I figured this was how things happened :/

but this is just the reality when you let people feel free to choose and make their own decisions, they are going to find safety in numbers and people similar to them.

This explains the disproportionate lack of African American and Latino Americans in tech and the 'Bamboo Ceiling' that many Asian Americans experience in the corporate and academic world where they cap the number of Asian American applicants in Ivy league schools. Jewish Americans were also capped and barred from attending Ivy league hundred years ago but not anymore so this probably means that change will happen soon (even if it took a fucking century for racist ass mentality to change)

Well, technical interview questions are why I've given up on pursuing a programming career path and I was shocked that employers were still giving out technical interview questions for a product manager role, it didn't matter if I was a software dev years ago. Rote method still trumps real world experience building real commercial software that people will pay you for according to a lot of interviewers....and I've heard about few managers hiring neophiles based on their 'algorithmic' performance on a whiteboard build shit on Node.js, panic when it's far more work necessary and pull the plug on their CMS (reinventing wheels) because PHP is 'slow'...what in the fuck did I just hear you want to rebuild a static CMS website in Node.js because you think it's going to give you wings?

well at least that has been my experience so far trying to get a job and I'm coming up dry every time. I technically have no work experience because I've been holed up writing a big data mining SaaS tool for a few years and since I was self employed it seems to mean jack all for credentials.

I don't know I'm in a bit of a jam. Starting a complex SaaS product from scratch that thousands of people have used is simply useless against a fucking sorting algorithm that will be used heavily on the actual product.

Like I feel like I'm living in a bizarro world sometimes...I have all this experience and knowledge in this one area, building shit and getting people to pay for it, and it's going to waste as I'm half heartedly applying for jobs I know I will not be able to pass the second round of interviews when the technical algorithm questions begin....I'm sure if I wanted to learn more about the different variety of sorting algorithm I would've fucking consulted stackoverflow already....come on man I just wanna solve real world problems with real world product experience not write fucking code on a whiteboard. I'd be happy to architect out an entire stack powering your product in to the future on a white board but fuck man if you want help on your sorting algorithm just google stackoverflow.

my 2 cents.

has anyone been able to use letsencrypt with AWS api gatway? I've been struggling for months. I keep getting https crossed out in red when accessing my aws api gateway endpoint....

I generated certificates for *.mysite.com and when I go to api.mysite.com it throws warning and if you continue the https in the address bar is red and crossed out....

This is speculation but...the company was founded in 2003....13 years ago and no product out yet...I have an awful feeling Holmes felt desperate, took on more than she could chew in order to compensate for the decade she lost, and now all the shortcut taking is catching up to her....

It's starting to look very ugly for what started out as something overreaching, and I think she will fight even harder to keep the house of cards from falling but pretty much this unicorn will be the first to go in 2016.

You know this is what I was thinking. HN is such an arbitary measure to gauge whether it's a vitamin or a painkiller. If one of their other idea suddenly got a ton of upvotes, they might have ended up with a different product.

In my honest opinion, the product really doesn't matter when there's money being thrown around. Any of those previous 'bad' ideas he posted if enough money was raised for it, you bet your ass professors and students began demanding it.

I'm just realizing this more and more that most of the shit we read are exactly that bullshit because the contextual experience is missing. It is only reading the comments and realizing that 'wow I'm not alone and maybe im not crazy' building shit and trying to get people to pay you for it can take a long time a good 24 months which is ironically the point at which I'm thinking of calling it quits a while ago.

Unfortunately, segment.io is a vitamin not a painkiller. The problem that it solves is a 'nice to have' imho.

For instance, at first it seemed like a great idea. One single point to send all your analytics to and then plugin bunch of other 3rd party SaaS. Sort of like Zapier.

But unlike Zapier which is a great pain killer for non technical users, segment.io is sort of a vitamin at best at the problem it solves and the target but hey this is just my take on it.

My comments are being throttled so I have to be picky to which I reply and I think this comment is excellent since it reflects real world case.

Yeah my previous SaaS I launched with beta testers two years ago was a totally misplaced end user targetting. In an effort to "capture" all opportunities I ended up building everything to compete on features alone which increased price sensitivity and led to bloat which made changes harder.

My experience from this was to start from top to bottom, not starting with code. Picking your market, knowing who is using your product and finding copies of him, I tried to do this on my own last year but developing product, website, documentation, tutorial videos, writing blog posts, sales quickly was way more than I can chew.

It's from this point where I clearly know that I focused on the entirely wrong group of customers. It was the naive belief that I could solve business problems with engineering and taking on more technical debt that ultimately led me to feeling burnt out (as you will see from my previous submissions).

1) I totally agree. Beta testers <<<<< paying customer. I've been there trying to aimless wonder the desert in hopes of finding water. It's so simple but I get it now after failing hard for a long time: "Be where your customers can pay you today not tomorrow or when this feature is ready".

2) Ironically this is where I feel the highest confidence but also where I take most caution. You don't know someone until you've worked with them for a while and sometimes I have misplaced expectations....they may not love your product, and not taking it personally....finding people would be quite hard as well and I think that in Vancouver there's a lot less people just striking out doing or hacking things on their own compared to SF probably.

3) 100% agreed.

> Today is day 1. Go get some customers!

I need to figure out how to get paid for the MVP and find people who will do that.

good god, this article is basically me working at a local startup 5 years ago.

When you have someone who only makes decision based on outcomes from a black box process with the counter productive passive aggressive nagging of when will it be done vs. someone who understands the stress,emotions (yeah programmers have them too),art and approximate effort management to avoid burning people out will be a godsend.

You can absolutely become the latter without technical expertise, I would say empathy is the biggest tool of someone who manages programmers.

The cigar smoking hunch back Soviet union styled factory owner who keeps saying he survived the dot com bubble like it was some world war and getting angry when programmers are trying to 'subvert' him by intentionally missing deadlines. I think it's good that these type of industrial revolution era work management culture is slowly eroding.

But yeah the disconnect between those on the front lines everyday with headphones on vs. the schmoozing politicizing manager with 30 years of restaurant experience is not going to be a good cultural fit. Eventually, everyone abandons you, people check glassdoor reviews and then you are finished, you can't hire anyone anymore without some insane turnover.

I paid a guy 20 bucks on fiverr for a 30 second video with an Australian accent and cookie cutter cartoon animation. Rolling your own explainer only makes sense if you can outdo someone on fiverr or you want original content which I think doesn't really matter for explainer videos because the video watcher only cares what the product is, people don't buy products on the video alone but I could be wrong.

I stopped using LinkedIn for the same reasons I stopped using Facebook. It's really hurting to see your friends getting married, getting awesome jobs paying $300,000 to be a cloud engineer or whatever the fuck, or the sheer amount of entrepreneurial/business pornography that LinkedIn peons love to circle jerk.

On top of that the near non-cessant spamming from job recruiters "HEY BRO YOU WANNA JOB BRO PAY REAL GOOD", seeing ex-coworkers humble brag.

It's a cognitive dissonance at best, you expose yourself more to the non stop flow of information, you are going to get burnt out.

After quitting LinkedIn I feel great like there was a huge baggage following me around. With all these crazy shit going on around the world like people getting doxxed and swatted, I just don't feel safe to expose information voluntarily just because all the monkeys are doing it.

Monkey see, monkey do. A human may see what other humans are doing but the higher consciousness will lead to contrarian behaviors.

^ this.

or underwrite really expensive off-line options contract on paper that entitles investors to an equity that they can buy back at huge discounts, I'm talking 99.99% discount to acquire ridiculous amount of shares that will be worth a ton when they IPO or get bought someone else who thinks the equity is worth more in the future.

which state or individuals within those states benefit from attacking Ukraine's infrastructure?

How likely is it that these are the same people that have wreaked havoc in previous years?

Who supports rebellion in Donetsk and beyond?

It's like the emperor wears no clothes for lot of Putin's folloewrs.

A while ago a hiring manager allegedly from Mozilla Vancouver posted a long rant that he went through 60 interviews yet couldn't find a junior dev which was downvoted to oblivion with angry comments. He shortly deleted all of his comments since then but reading this employees comments on slashdot makes me fit together the puzzle pieces....Mozilla has become a trust fund for incompetent people to earn a cheque every month.

Google Chrome has really done a number on the browser market and surpassed the 25% mark for quite some time while Firefox has been dwindling to irrelevance. Failed to even eat into IE marketshare.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...

I don't work with assholes.

how did you come across that opportunity and how did you land the gig?

Reminds me of Vancouver VCs who would tell local technical founders that it would be better if they got hit by a bus so they can flip the company.

Nobody likes to work for sharks and it definitely sounds very aggressive, not the type of people that you would want for long term visioned business startups.

VCs are looking for one thing: return on their capital. They are not your friends.

I seriously don't get this. 20k for equity? You could loan 20,000 and still pay it back at a modest interest rate.

What could you possibly do with 20,000? Buy Adwords? Hire someone for 3 months? Does it lead to more people investing?

Looks like they are just spraying 20k across the board in hopes to find something that sticks.

You could easily get $20,000 to invest by working or even asking your family or friends. Then you would have a far better chance of raising money with a viable business that you won't have to get into bed with someone looking for hockey stick growth that ultimately kills startups.

Mark my words. This is the ethereum killer.

The problem with ethereum is the novelty factor. Everything under the hood is difficult for the average developer to grasp and it's not clear whats going on as it is quite new and work is on going. Another issue is that there seems to be no clear 'voice' from Ethereum and instead you have many people claiming to be an Ethereum expert. It killed all of the hype and excitement I had in December and January.

Why I think this is an ethereum killer is the tech that powers it is very much mature, proven to work quite well and will be easier for developers and users alike.

But more importantly the end result is what matters. This has been in development since 2014, roughly same time as Ethereum but the end result is far more impressive than what Ethereum offers and ironically it is because ZeroNet offers less is what makes it so attractive. For example, using Tor, bitorrent, bitcoin, already existing and well established technologies provide excellent privacy and anonymity. Sure, ethereum might be a much stronger cyrtographic platform but I think accessibility, speed, scalability, adoptibility gained from ZeroNet's setup is what ultimately blows Ethereum out of the water.

The codebase seems super light and accessible too compared to Ethereum.

Anyways, I could be wrong of course but I think ZeroNet could be it. Look how long Tor, BitTorrent, Bitcoin protocols have survived and grown in adoption rates. Ethereum is trying to pull off all three and as a result it's losing developer passion imo. For instance the forums are less active and ironically attracted lot of politically fueled angsty types who believe in conspiracy theories.

I'm starting a surveymonkey competitor to get a piece of the action, if anyone wants to join forces and reap the rewards, please reply and I will contact you.

I envision all of this taking place in the next 10 years.

- twitter hasn't been profitable for the past decade.

- twitter can't turn around, neither can other unicorns.

- wheres the return???

- investors abandon

- twitter announces mass layoff

- Facebook purchases twitter

- Facebook faces same music shortly

- Decentralized Twitter appears!

- Facebook attempts to capture it...it failed!

- Decentralized Twitter uses No Ads, No Tracking.

- It is highly effective!

- Decentralized Facebook appears!

- Cryptoanarchy movement arises

- The biggest wealth equalizer in human history begins.

- Assassination and Weapons market emerges. Decentralized, trustless free for all markets free of law enforcement. Anyone can be touched for the right amount of the single most untraceable anonymous digital medium used to exchange goods and services.

- Governments slowly lose their grip to pockets of cryptoanarchial markets. Government services and jobs are replaced with network contracts executed with zero centralized decision making.

- Anarchy movement settles down as stability is introduced by a decentralized internet.

REMOTE

Looking for just small short-term work.

Capable of producing MVP. Please reply and I will contact you.