jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Surprised not to see a mention of Postmates here. At least in San Francisco I'd consider Postmates to be the front runner for door-to-door delivery services, followed by Door Dash (sort of an Uber v. Lyft dynamic).

I am not a frequent customer of either but I actually do occasional bike deliveries for Postmates (about 5 deliveries a week, on the weekends). Postmates has insane demand, whenever I sign on the deliver my phone is practically exploding with orders, even when they turn on 'blitz' pricing (and it's not cheap to begin with). The product seems simple but I am very impressed with Postmates' logistics.

Postmates basically has a comprehensive listing of not only all the places to buy things in the city (mostly food but not only) but they know the full menu, item by item pricing, if they accept cash/credit, open hours etc. So you can place highly specific orders. Postmates gives each courier a credit card which they load with about how much money you will need for a given delivery on demand so you can pick up an iMac or a burrito through the same process. They also have a 24/7 customer and courier support network. So if I get a flat tire on my way to deliver a sandwich they can actually try to get another Postmate courier nearby to come finish the delivery.

And recently Postmates has started working closely with some restaurants to provide "turbo" jobs, where the restaurant knows the order is for postmates, provides postmates with an ETA for when it will be ready, which means I can get an order saying "Go to XXX restaurant, the sandwich is already prepared and paid for" and pick it up and go. This enables me to get food to most customers about 30-40m after they order it from anywhere in town.

Anyway those are just some things that came to mind. There is a lot more to it (scheduled shifts, tipping, etc). It all goes to show how interesting these seemingly simple ideas are from the inside.
"That leaves companies that depended on that software out of luck. And when startups suffer, so does innovation."

Uhhh except that their existence outright is in itself innovation. Removing their existence cannot reduce innovation since their initial existence furthered it.

cliffs: article is dumb and author is an idiot. at least i think, i had to stop reading the article.
An interesting read; there's something really nice about the way older games do things (like this saved state encoding, or anti-cheat by referring to certain pages in the manual. In this age of cloud save (and I say this having worked on a cloud save product!), we've lost a level of connection here.

I was intrigued as to how one would even figure out the sequence of operations used to encode progress into a 'phone number'; a quick search turned up an in-depth report (http://www.dougbabcock.com/mtpo-passwords.txt) which doesn't appear to be credited in Allan's article. It looks like Doug used a password archive to figure out the steps as an exercise in cracking, which itself sounds jolly fun.
You're typing text into a box. Please concentrate on typing the correct text into the box rather than caring which (basically identical) method of typing said text into said box you are using.

People have been typing text into boxes for about 50 years now.
Actually I'd argue that it's the opposite - all you have to do is take cash cows from both sides (Republican: Defense budget and wars, tax cuts, Democrat: Federal employees, medicare, social security)* and take them out in a field and shoot them in the head. Problem solved.

* Both parties priorities listed in order of lobbying dollars.

With enough hype, the NYT is doing a good job in taking things away from K street. It's what journalism is all about.
If someone ever produces a good book of best practices for sysadm/syseng, please provide examples like these of why it's important to follow these best practices.

Yes, we've all made silly mistakes. But if you're in that design meeting and somebody asks, should we do ABC in case of XYZ, try not to think about how complicated or time consuming it might be to do ABC. Think about the worst case. If not doing it could at some point bring down the whole business, perhaps you should ponder it some more.

Actually, screw a book... Does anyone else want to start some wiki pages their experiences with screw-ups, the causes and the solutions? Does this exist in a comprehensive way and I just haven't found it?
And there is also http://cheat.errtheblog.com/. Good thing about this one is, it is accessible from your command line.
That'd be a punishable offense. No, literally.
The national Mensa site in my country is fraught with spelling and punctuation errors. If someone told me they were a member of Mensa, I would assume that they became a member to tell people like me.

I don't know if there are any benefits for being a member in other countries; I fully endorse finding like-minded people and developing new networks and friendships, but I don't see that happening in the local Mensa environment.
At the moment we have too much going on here to consider any of that, especially if we planned on moving to the US for three months come January.

I could fly up mid-December if YC would be willing to let me pitch then (and then stay on if we make it), but I'm presuming thats not the best time to network -- if there is a good time.
Cailliau recalls that Berners-Lee put forward the name “as a temporary
measure.” They agreed to use it for their revamped proposal for CERN
management, as the proposal could not be delayed any further. “If the
proposal was accepted,” Cailliau said, “we would find a better name.”

Heh. In my experience, this is what almost always happens when you pick a "temporary" name for something.
Despite the facade of University Avenue, Palo Alto is a pretty tame suburban atmosphere. I tend to drive or Caltrain out to San Fran if I want to do something on the weekend.

Then again, if you have someone to hang with, all these awesome Open Space Preserves makes for great hiking/biking. My favorite is Astradero just because its a 5 min drive from my house.
She is also probably getting a full apartment, and notsomuch just a room.
I see - I incorrectly inferred from the parent that the browser used was Chrome.
I think you're confused. "Payroll tax" and "self-employment tax" are both informal ways to refer to the employers portion of social security tax (FICA). It sounds like this guy was paying income tax on it, but not social security or medicare (which is about 15% total for self-employed).

This is an entirely reasonable mistake because that is the correct way to do taxes on unearned income like interest. Only earned income is subject to social security and medicare.
What about El Chapo Guzmán?
The grid was under maximum demand. Heck, I was refreshing realtime statistics.

That was not an unrealistic policy decision. The unrealistic policy decision was leaving it stuck there even after things started to thaw and restore.

The market, as they say, she remains irrational far longer than you stay solvent.
> If they were adequately informed about risks, why shouldn't we be allowed to choose our path?

That's a big if. In reality, they won't be adequately informed - they'll be at best adequately disinformed by the marketing departments of the power companies and third parties popping up around variable-pricing schemes. And to the extent exposing the customers to price variability is beneficial for the suppliers, the market has a nice way of removing the previously available options from the choice pool.

There's a spectrum between "let the people decide for themselves" and "the people will predictably decide to do something stupid and then they'll beg to be bailed out, so perhaps let's not offer that option", and I feel this may fall closer to that second end.
I think if you look at any large website in the travel space, that holds true, it seems to be an especially incestuous industry. When I worked at Tripadvisor (owned by Expedia) we had significant numbers of people in our group from Travelocity.
If you're looking for other apps that do this, try focusbooster: http://www.focusboosterapp.com/

It works Ok for me on Windows, and since it runs on Adobe AIR, apparently works on Mac OS X too.
People are extraordinarily good at learning how to game incentive systems. Even more so when the incentive system is simplified (badges, points, etc.) and the underlying problem is complex (fixing bugs).

The risk you run with any game mechanics system is rewarding those who game the system more than those who dig into the deeper problems. It would be easy to lose motivation to track down a segfault when another guy earned 20 'points' for fixing 20 sufferer typos, for example.

The only way to compensate for this is to have someone actively and intensely assign priorities and estimated difficulties for each bug. Getting this right could take some time and effort, and you still run the risk of undervaluing the little bugs, etc.

I think a better system would be 'now that...' rewards instead of 'if then' rewards. Recognizing someone for their contributions after the fact has been shown to be more motivating in the long term than incentives laid out ahead of time. Public, non-systematic recognition for a job well done goes a long way.
It's a fine idea as long as it's a voluntary system adopted unanimously by an enthusiastic development team. If it's imposed from without on an existing team with existing culture and rituals, it'll likely be a disaster, with game manipulation leading directly to cynicism.

I'm on the outside looking in when it comes to talking about developers, but in my experience developer teams self-organize, coming up with their own mechanisms for positive and negative reinforcement over time. As long as that culture's working, outsiders shouldn't mess with it.

Since every culture is slightly different - one team has a build animal, another has complex rules for the buying of donuts, etc. - building a product that impacts team culture is challenging. Anything you build is going to have to be pretty customizable and flexible in order to attract a decent mass of users. For instance, in a badges-with-bug-tracking system, I'd expect the team to be able to determine which badges are used, define their own badges, upload artwork for their own badges, and perhaps have some voting mechanism around the rewarding of a badge. Even then, it's a tricky thing.
> I tend to be the card carrying non-academic in my circles

I am unfamiliar with your slang. Can you elaborate please?
Fahrenheit 451 opened my eyes about society today. Not sure if it is really "inspirational", but it very well might have you view the world differently.
APIs sorted by complexity (from most hard to learn to easier to learn):

* OpenCL / CUDA
* Pthreads
* MPI
* TBB
* OpenMP
Indeed it is. In addition to making it easy to dilute, it's a good search term to capture and stream a specific audience with.
Or Tumblr with pornography.
Ah, my bad then -- didn't see that at all. :(
Linode has been fabulous, and this is great news. But I've never understood why their storage pricing is so high:

Additional 1 GB Disk Space - (add $2.00/mo)

Additional 2 GB Disk Space - (add $4.00/mo)

Additional 3 GB Disk Space - (add $6.00/mo)

Additional 4 GB Disk Space - (add $8.00/mo)

Additional 5 GB Disk Space - (add $10.00/mo)

Additional 6 GB Disk Space - (add $12.00/mo)

About 20 times higher than Amazon EBS.
> Is there a tool that would let me describe the infrastructure and deploy it on a given cloud provider but also have the ability to deploy the same infrastructure on my local machine (using VMs/docker) for development purposes.

Depending on your concept of "deploy", I can point you to two options, both produced by the company I work for.

If you think in terms of controlling from the VM up, look at BOSH[1]. It's an IaaS deployment / management / update tool which has been used in production for several years.

You create two yaml files: a release manifest (describing the software components of your system) and a deployment manifest (describing the computers and networks of your system and how to map components to them).

This separation means that a single release manifest can be applied to many different actual deployments. At my day job I deploy a large PaaS release into a single virtual machine. My colleagues deploy exactly the same release into AWS with thousands of machines.

Systems defined using BOSH can be deployed to AWS, vSphere, OpenStack or Warden (a containerisation system).

For local development, the Warden backend enables "BOSH lite"[2] -- releasing and deploying into a virtual machine that hosts a local cloud of containers.

If you want to go the next level up to a proper PaaS, you can try Cloud Foundry[3]. It's defined as a BOSH release[4], which is how at my day job my co-workers and I are able to work both locally and at scale on identical software.

In Cloud Foundry we distinguish between stateless (apps) and stateful (services) software, and we provide a simple way to connect them. The easiest way to play with it is to log into Pivotal Web Services. IBM Bluemix is the same software and is also open to the public.

So for example, with Cloud Foundry, if you want ten copies of your app, you do this:

$ cf scale my_app -i 10

And it'll be scaled up to 10 instances.

Need more RAM?

$ cf scale my_app -m 2G

Now each node gets 2Gb.

And so on.

[1] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh

[2] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-lite

[3] http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/

[4] https://github.com/cloudfoundry/cf-release
Fancy listing some then rather than just stating it? Better yet, write a more concrete article than the above and post a link to it.
Sure they can, see e.g. http://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/SocherChenManningNg_NIPS2013.pd... or http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3618v2.pdf.

Check the first paper - when working on this problem researchers from Stanford developed a way to measure the quality of an approach, evaluated the results on 30k+ relation examples from 2 different datasets and compared their algorithm with 4 other algorithms.

The problem with cortical.io or numenta (both commercial companies) is that they don't compare their approaches with existing approaches and don't evaluate them on public datasets. And when people do such comparison existing approaches turn out to be better.

It is totally possible these algorithms are good and they provide something that "traditional" methods don't provide. But this is yet to be shown; for some reason authors decide not to "compete" on a same ground. Instead of "promoting" their methods in scientific community via publications / comparisions with existing approaches they seem to focus on people who have little knowledge of modern machine learning. Also, they use their own terminology and usually refer only to their own papers or to some obscure papers from ten years ago, which doesn't help.
In all fairness, most desk jobs that existed in the 50's and 60's are now heavily consolidated (it now takes one journalist and Google what it used to take 10 to do). And most factory work is either also heavily consolidated or moved overseas.

Would the words "service economy" even make sense back then?
Good article.

When I'm on an unpleasant airplane flight, I commonly remark on how much more desirable a mode of transport it is than, for example, stagecoach, covered wagon, or clipper ship.
Your reasoning has always been the justification for the horrors of re-education camps.
What will be the most interesting to watch about this is the social reprogramming that will go on.

If history is a guide, within 30 years school textbooks will read as if this was just a logical conclusion and was easily reached -- instead of the brutal infighting and confusion that it actually was.

One of the weirdest things I learned as an adult was that science does not progress linearly like they teach in school. Instead people get emotionally attached to ideas, and miracle of miracles, the evidence shows they are correct.

Until the evidence shows they are not. Then it's this long struggle for changing gears, finally ending up in a spot where nobody ever talks about what went on before.

I think the human part of science is at least as interesting as the science itself. Lots of complexity and randomness, yet parts are very predictable. Neat.
Same reason you don't secure your front door with an electronic time lock, armed guards and dogs on patrol: it's not that much of a threat.

In the very unlikely event that my HN password gets sniffed, I'll need to change my username or ask for a password reset. Worst case is someone posts a few derogatory comments under my name. I'll survive! The same password is used on a few other sites where the loss to me would be about the same: not a big deal.
Yes, and they also are hard at work on a Firefox extension that kicks puppies and steals candy from babies.
This isn't a reversal, at least not on the part of scientists. Reporting like this just reinforces the public's idea of "Why should I do what doctor's say? They just change their mind. First it was eggs..." and so on. Seriously, ask your mum.

Scientists have known about insulin sensitivity and why and how weight gain/loss happens for a long time. Bodybuilders and other sportsmen and women listen.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/print-article.aspx?id=139058 is an interesting article on what actually happened. In contrast with the "oh those silly scientists, always changing their mind" headline, that article states 'scientists have known what makes us fat for almost half a century'.
I'm not saying negativity is something bad, but this guy just seems spiteful. It's a brand new product and this guy probably doesn't even need the benefit of it waking him up at a good time. He complained (sorry, repeatedly complained 20 times) about the battery, but despite knowing it only lasts 2 days he refused to charge it after 2 days. I don't get that all.
http://chinese.engadget.com/ is the Chinese sister site of tech blog Engadget. They're probably focused more on gadgets, but may cover other tech news as well.
I think you misunderstood me. I did not ask how they raised $650k. I asked how they used up all this money in 6 months. (Assuming they are shutting down and have no money left)
I agree totally with your disagreement. I am not doing any fundraising, but we are negotiating a couple enterprise sales and I am handling all bug fixes/user support. I have hardly made any progress on planned features. It's just way too much dealing with people and constant email interruptions and trying to be innovative. I am also taking on the businessy stuff as well, while my gainfuly employeed co-founder is free to drop a couple hours a day on code. This is one of the strongest arguments for > 1 founder IMHO.
About.me's stereotypical journey through the hypemachine complete with mysterious codename (PumpkinHead) & oddly well-timed endorsements by tech world all-stars all culminating in a sale to AOL only 4 days after launch feels very slimey and speculative to me. The fact that AOL shelled out amigo-money for what is -- let's be honest here -- the social networking equivalent of bench ads for real estate agents is beyond me, but all of these complaints distract from the biggest glaring annoyance of this whole thing... Why on earth do I need ANOTHER profile page?
The public roam laws only tend to exist in sparsely populated jurisdictions. I think they break down if there are too many people.
Seeing the previous rows of what you entered was always what was appealing about TI-83's to me. I ended up eventually getting a 2 row non-graphing calculator for college and it was absolutely perfect.
I hate dark modes, but I don't actually care what the default is -- as long as I can still set a light mode.
An article about that explains some of the details for a layman was posted yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21633500
Both. Roughly 2/3 of the time I use the GUI version on my desktop; remaining 1/3 of the time I use a terminal frame over SSH, connecting from my "sidearm" to that desktop.

If you use a 256-color-enabled terminal, the terminal version can look almost identical to the GUI version, which is very nice.
> This is just me, a non lawyer, talking. But I kinda feel like the SCOTUS cases you reference were wrongly decided. When CA asserted its public easement over tidal lands it's hard for me to see why a taking from a regular piece of land should be any different than a piece of land that happened to be governed by the Mexican government over a century ago.

Because part of the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo were that Mexicans residing in land ceded to the US at the time would retain certain rights.
Pricing info would be great, free during beta is nice but for my company at least we would need to know the cost upfront.
Thanks :) I'll check them out. I think leaving was a great choice, academia is filled with madness, and I am happier not climbing up the impossible pyramid to professorship. But I am happy to support and work with those with such ambiition since they can do great things!
I read recently (don't recall the source) that Shakespeare may not have coined many of the words attributed to him, but is just the earliest known source, since we have maintained much more of his writing than that of his contemporaries or predecessors.
Apply an ai like this with more detections to a typical instagram „models“ stream and you‘ll see that almost all pictures are altered. This could maybe be a good wakeup call for the young generation which is seeing the bodies as problematic because they are not as perfect as other people on instagram
There's a lot of talk in this thread about what intelligence is. Personally I found the AIXI model from algorithmic information theory a very convincing definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI

I'm surprised it's not more generally accepted as _the_ definition. Note that Markus Hutter the main author is currently working at DeepMind.
Xaw is not suitable for modern applications. Essential features like radio buttons or combo boxes are not present. Text input boxes support almost all Emacs command keys but none a typical desktop user would expect and they don't support Unicode. It's a mess.
Doesn't nim already have autocomplete?
I really like the shapes explanation. It's a much more explicit version of what I was trying to say.
I would say develop for IE7 & Firefox, making sure stuff doesn't break (is visible and somehow workable) in IE6 and Safari. That will cover 99.99 of your future customers.

I guess you are in danger of having more headaches in the future with bleeding-edge raw, not well supported things...
a way more holistic view of campaign reach, I like it!
Of course you can do things like that. Don't sell the cow, sell people a license to keep, pet, and feed the cow, etc. The license stipulates that the cow's milk and calves remain the property of the lessor.

How do you think software licenses work? You don't own any propiertary software, you own the license to use it under certain circumstances. You're renting it really, just with (usually) a one time payment.
What’s your concern, that your listening history will be linked to your personal identity and somehow used against you?

If that’s the case, why not just sign up using a single-use email address, pay via gift cards purchased with cash, and if you’re really concerned, use a VPN?
C++ doesn't implement the D features right.

For example C++20 has constexpr, consteval, constinit, for a less powerful equivalent of D's CTFE.

D use no syntax for this. Things are evaluated in CTFE when they can. The rules are simple, and you can ignore them for the first few years. It's because CTFE is considered a normal thing in D.
They clearly value the free+recommendations+ads stack to drive their business more than adding basic features.
You're right, I forgot about that connection.
I for one love discover weekly and hope they will continue working on improving it. I consider it a core feature :)