jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Before anyone starts thinking this stuff is super-innovative and new, let me tell you what's really going on here: Facebook wants to make Messenger into a platform in the same way the big Asian chat apps are. Things like Weixin/WeChat or LINE. I mean, just look at the most recent additions to Messenger:

- Stickers. These grew in popularity starting in Asian apps. [0]

- Using Messenger for payments [1] and to send money to each other [2] have been in WeChat since at least last year.

- Offering "official accounts" for businesses to "chat" with customers. [3] Yep, that's there too.

- And of course, sharing of messages with rich-media content from other apps. [4] To give an example, with WeChat you can pop open QQMusic (a music streaming app) and share a song with your friend that they can play and stream without leaving WeChat.

All of these features were pioneered in Asia. They're either trying to bring the innovations westward in the hopes that they can build a similar platform, or they're defending against the possibility that foreign apps like this will expand and take over their marketshare.

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of thing was the reason they split Messenger from the main Facebook app in the first place.

[0] http://www.wechat.com/en/features.html#emoticons

[1] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-adds-payment-support-for-b...

[2] https://www.techinasia.com/wechat-allows-money-transfers-bet...

[3] http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-busi...

[4] http://dev.wechat.com/wechatapi/messages-moments
I loved Foucault's Pendulum, really liked The Island Of The Day Before, and quite liked The Name of the Rose. I have been meaning to get round to reading Baudolino for fifteen years.
... which makes me wonder why Anonymous hasn't already done this. If only for the lulz.
Excellent point re: control. But remember that control has a lot more to it than the 50-plus-one-share; there's also board composition and protective provisions, which are usually much more important.

I do like the "burn the boats" idea though. My cofounder and I (my first company; we had a 50/50 split) were very clear with each other that our most likely source of failure was not getting along, and would often remind each other of that when nerves started to fray.
But brands must be built on something, right? That's why google, facebook, twitter exist. It's a mutual relationship, facebook cannot go on screwing users, developers, advertisers, etc. for ever. At the moment, facebook's support gets an F- from me in all departments: user support, advertiser support, FB credits support, platform developers support.

Unfortunately, as long as facebook keeps growing without going public, their staff is kept busy with other things, like calculating their stock's valuations.
Great article. I particularly liked the points about filtering out undesirable and unprofitable customers. Some clients really are just wrong, and far more trouble than their business is worth.
I'm more in the "thought provoking and agree" camp. I'm not sure that of the potential downsides to Dan's strategy, a significant impact to the success of the company would be among them.

The idea _does_ get too much value here - I'd definitely put that at zero. But in my startup experiences, the CEO _does_ have to deal with a lot more annoying shit, and put her name on the line far more than anyone else, and should get the credit for doing so.

Further, I'm more in the Zappo's camp here - if a minority shareholder wants to bolt, I could not be happier. Leaving a company is always a hard decision, and if they're not cut out, AND they've come to that conclusion on their own, then FANTASTIC. I don't think that having 50% equity makes ANYONE more likely to stick around - you either have it in your DNA or you don't.
It's like a reverse of the iShoot story that caused everyone to run out and make free lite versions of their apps several years ago. Different market (productivity Vs. game, early app store Vs. current app store) but it's still interesting.
I think one of the attorneys involved is the wife of Lift's (scala web framework) creator
It definitely looks nice

Does it?

I have always considered the poor execution of the backlight an embarrassment to the otherwise very polished exterior.

The light-bleed is uneven. It gets the job done, but I'm sure apple could do better if they wanted.

[1] http://allnewmac.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/7e79c_macbook_p...
[2] http://mygadgetnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Alienware...
[3] http://www.thinkdigit.com/FCKeditor/uploads/alienware%20hand...
[4] http://farm1.static.flickr.com/92/211947046_c3c234a2da.jpg
What’s wrong with Cloudflare? They’re not an ad company, are they?
I would imagine he would say, "after 580 years and that's it. Where are the flying horse and buggies?"
The UK is definitely not a cheap place to live even if you discount London.
Kudos! I find this work fascinating.

There are moments that I'm tempted to go down a similar organizational road because I'm curious about the possible lessons from the data aggregation, but I usually pass because the payoff didn't seem large enough.

So that makes me want to ask: Have you learned much from the data? or is it more about organization/keeping control of life?
Yes, they would gain mass from feeding but not get 40% bigger while still in that binary configuration. So it seems these BHs start out bigger than previously assumed.
Every source-portable program has that anyway though, typically either with a bunch of ifdefs, or by linking to an abstraction like boost::filesystem.

The change here would basically be that all versions of it would have to be compiled into the same binary, with a runtime switch.
this one was nice:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/pub/ods/surface/so...

(but wow, I can't think this intricate machine will get very dirty)

Is this a color calibration photo?

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/pub/ods/surface/so...
Dollars have the backing of the US military.
Look more like US agents to me.

Only rarely I encounter the St Petersburg FSB Trollfarm, and then they were immediately recognizable as such.
I agree that equanimity is important, but a more significant factor that differentiates success from failure is succeeding.
I thought that the mindset of a boss paying equity instead of salary is "Haha! Sucker!"
Hey Siri, order more tide.
It would get dirty, it would be another thing to clean.
Hint: "this department" refers to the department under discussion, i.e. DoD. If GP had said "this agency", this odd tangent might have made sense.

[EDIT: also you seem to have edited your comment 3 times in less than 5 minutes, without mentioning the fact. Some people consider this rude.]
I've pretty much decided on getting one (the 4GB RAM version) if it gets positive reviews. The work I do in Visual Studio is fairly limited- not nearly the size you are alluding to- and I'm pretty heavy OneNote user which I am pretty stoked about to try out with the optional pen. If I could play the odd indie game on it that's even better.
Anwar al-Alwaki suggests you check your tenses.
e-governance = e-redtape in India
True, I guess I imagined it more as building a shopping list throughout the day/week and ordering once at the end of the day, not separate orders for every button click.
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You'll probably have to do it with the kids - a few weeks isn't enough to immerse yourself in culture. You'll just end up swimming around in the western bubble. Live an alternative life style with your kids, show them the world isn't a scary place. Hell, move to Europe! Just some ideas.
the whois also has nameservers pointing to their webhost:
webhostingplan.com.au

You could try sending the webhost a DMCA takedown notice notifying them that 1whp.com is displaying your copyrighted content. Although any host that displays Adwords (with a "Dont forget to check out the competition before deciding on us :)" message that probably violates Google's TOS) is pretty spammy themselves, and they appear to be Australian so probably aren't too fussed about US copyright legislation.

Or remove the splog's reason for existence by sending the DMCA takedown notice to Google...
If you have a defined, detailed, iterated, field-tested business model before you start coding, then you have more than just an idea, by definition.
I've been following his advice as well and getting great results. As my over can't get that hot (max 550f) I have found I get the best results if I do a 1 hour rise after preparation and then put them in the fridge for 2 days. Then I make sure to let the dough get back to room temp prior to baking.
I don't think there is a war on truth. What we are seeing is fundamentally economic. If you can't make money reporting, only activists pushing an agenda will remain. This leads to a justified decline in trust.
That's scary. How did he find out? And were the masks manufactured after last year's shortage, or before?
I often hear that journalists are living in a bubble, but this article has many examples of obnoxious arrogance.

quote from opening:

> we should also recognize this for what it is: one more glaring data point showing that powerful people no longer think they need the mainstream press, especially critical and ethical outlets like the Washington Post.

quote from closing:

> All I know is that there is only one way the press maintains its power in society: by metaphorically putting the heads of powerful people on pikes. If the Post and all the other respectable media outlets lose their ability to do that, powerful people will, by extension, stop caring what the well-informed segment of the public thinks.

--------

Listen, we are used that we are IMPORTANT, that we must be listened to.

Given that the media in US is as divided as the politics, I'm happy that press loses their ability to control the narrative. As of today we clearly see (just look at recent frontpage discussions about Slate Star Codex, Jetbrains or a bit older Supermicro) that for rare gems there's too much activism, propaganda and hit pieces.
Powerful and influential people never like to get negative or critical press coverage, but it comes with the job. The only thing that surprised me was the almost Trumpian level of sensitivity Scott Alexander demonstrated when he got his first bad press. As a semi-frequent codex reader, I have been super disappointed.
Karl Popper called it "scientism".

Popper, K. (1978). Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica, 339-355.
Oh I know, I can’t write for shit, so did something rhetorically lazy.
I was imagining "Cave Jackson" as an African-American NFL superstar and he's wearing his football uniform (complete with helmet and padding) while making that speech.
Your second point might be dangerous - your salt values are no longer random but heavily biased and knowing that all salt values share some common bits might provide a new attack vector.
One caveat with using ping is that ISPs can very easily prioritize that traffic, so you could see results from ping that you might not see in your application.
wireless and fiber? that's like putting ice cubes in wine
Actually, AFAIU, you can define simple inductive types via church literals. However, you can't define induction principle for them. However, without induction principles, you can't prove anything useful.
There was no bad rap in the thread until btreecat decided to be an ass. The only other subthread mentioning startssl is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8904105 which only notes that as far as he can see letsencrypt is similar to startssl's delivery/validation process and seems to be vulnerable to mitm.
There is no difference between having closed component and one with couple of years lag when I need to fix some critical bug in it to release my app today.
Wow, blast from the past. Reminds me of how we "outsmarted" our admins at the school back then to get around the limitations they put up.

OLE[1] and MS Office were very valuable allies back then ;)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
I'd prefer plain style without shadows.
Does ML have any logic programming capabilities beyond algebraic pattern matching?
We don't have a good enough model because the goals of economic theory are political, not explanatory.

Economic 'explanations' exist to privilege certain actors through pseudo-rational justifications for personal benefit, not to predict economic reality.

If you look objectively at economic models, you'll see that all the mainstream models are uniformly hopeless at predicting the future, and some of the most highly placed analysts have absolutely no insight into future events - not just in defiance of theory, but often in defiance of simple common sense.

See e.g.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30699476

This is characteristic of a pseudoscience, not a real science.

The only way to profit from this is to buy government policy and to fix the markets - something the bigger players are well aware of, and have been doing enthusiastically for decades now.
While I agree with you, it is best to be on the safe side. The damage from having a wrong website unencrypted could be massive vs. cost of simply encrypting everything. Demanding 100% encryption is an extra layer to protect against human mistakes.
I struggle with the way in which no high level officials have even acknowledged that the leaks (by Manning and by Snowden) might have revealed some excesses or abuses that ought to be corrected.

How could any leader feel no obligation to address the core issues, or even to acknowledge they exist?

It's unlikely Snowden or Manning will be pardoned, and unlikely we'll see anything other than the most superficial reforms.

I think the bottom line is that in a state that relies heavily on propaganda, the truth is very dangerous, and we'll see an increasing amount of information become classified and stricter and stricter punishments for leakers.

IMHO the most noteworthy aspect of the info Manning leaked was that much of the classified info was simply "bad news" that contradicted the government's contrived story about what was going on in the wars.
Is anything “featured”? People post what they are interested in; people discuss and upvote what they are interested in. Ipso facto, amiright?
Nice! I've been using Evernote for a while now. I have a MacBook Pro I use for work, but I use Linux at home. After using both the web client (because that's my only option in Linux except Wine) and the native OS X client, it's clear that the Web Client is lacking.

I'm looking forward to an open source alternative.
I'm suspicious of products that are heavily promoted. If anything, I'm doing the ad purchaser a favour by not having their blinking ads shoved down my throat.

Pretty much any form of animation on a page causes me to stop reading it, until I can find some way of eliminating it. Too many ads are animated to risk going without an adblocker, flash blocking and disabling of autoplay etc.

And it's not just ads. It's currently fashionable to have all sorts of slide overs as you near the end of an article. Those cause me to stop reading too, until I've killed the elements that caused the slide over. Similarly with floating page headers (vertical space is at a premium), floating social button menus, etc.

And of course, then there's custom fonts. For years, I viewed the web with custom font downloading disabled, until the near ubiquity of FontAwesome forced me to concede. But I still run a plugin to disable font choices, and will run pages through a Readable bookmarklet if the designer has prioritized style over legibility.

I don't really see the relationship between me and site publishers as a social contract. It's much more hostile than that. They try to ram an incredible amount of crap into my sensory input, and I defend myself from their assault every way I can.
That sounds very useful. How did you do it? Could you share it?

Did you create an algorithm that would smooth polygons the same way going clockwise or counter-clockwise so that the shared boundaries would be simplified the same way? Or did your algorithm take into account the entire topology?
But the first of your examples is cleaner not because of any inherent advantage of list-comprehension syntax but because in Python the syntactic cost of turning an expression into an anonymous function is so high. In other words, you're comparing (cognitive cost of comprehension + low cost of expression) against (cognitive cost of map + high cost of promoting an expression to an anonymous function).

Don't blame map for Python's tax on expression-promotion. ;-)
Precisely. If you want long-term support, don't use Android in the first place.
If caffeine is bad for you, why does nearly every study that looks in to tea or coffee drinking find that it reduces all-cause mortality?
What are some examples of policies that would be detrimental to casual contributors?
This is really awesome -- FFmpeg's filter_complex is powerful and appropriately named "complex" lol.

I built and sold a company built largely around FFmpeg and this type of tool would've been really useful for understanding how FFmpeg's filter chain works. If you're interested in some non-trivial OSS examples, check out https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-gl-transition and https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-concat.

One non-obvious piece of advice I have for developers delving into ffmpeg's filter_complex is to try and keep the filter graphs as short and simple as possible. Creating complex filter graphs programmatically (as ffcms does in this case) is super powerful, but I've also found in practice that larger filter graphs often lead to random, impossible to debug errors. This could be due to anything from some combination of VM resource constraints, internal ffmpeg leaks that compound at scale, etc etc.

My advice is to think carefully about what you want to use ffmpeg for. It's excellent at transcoding and doing minor filter graphs but trying to get too crazy with complex filter graphs will lead you down a dark path that imho ffmpeg wasn't really meant for. If you can break up your complex filter effects into smaller, isolated ffmpeg commands it may be slightly slower but your rendering pipeline will be significantly more robust.
Have you considered it takes a while for cases to filter up or down? Incompetence is usually a better candidate than malice. It could be they'll report it a few days from now, or that these cases were found and reported a few days prior to the 20th and were folded into earlier reportings. For instance, if the cases were identified and reported on the 18th, and the notice was posted on the 20th, that would remain consistent.

Stop with the unfounded speculation and fearmongering.
This is really cool! Any plans for a Windows version?
WSJ, only recently owned by News Corp, and the acquisition hasn't been without grumbling from the staff. It's not like Mossberg is a long-term Murdoch hack.

I'm sure Mossberg has FU.. well, if not money, then the ability to walk and easily get work elsewhere, if he were being pressured. I doubt he'd sell out his credibility for the recently arrived News Corp brass.
I think it would have been less of a problem if they had allowed him to be present while they were searching his hardware.
Would it seem right that the mold for casting a tin soldier would have the same detail as the tin soldier cast?
The most complex part of Web SQL effectively amounted to "Whatever SQLite implemented"

Which is one of the most tested, most utilized, most known pieces of code used among modern software. Saying "reference it" is entirely rational. And really the ludicrous notion that documenting its behaviors is unfathomably difficult is so asinine that it demolishes that line of argument

The proposal wasn't to standardize on the SQLite implementation, it was to reverse engineer it and write a standards document from its behavior.

No one (including the maintainers of the Webkit-based implementations that had WebSQL) thought that was a good idea, but there weren't any good other proposals. Unlike WebSQL, IndexDB does have consensus amongst browser vendors. Microsoft haven't implemented it in IE9 yet, but are planning to support it [1]. IE9 does already support HTML5 localStorage, which is closely related to IndexDB (that close relationship is one of the reasons why IndexDB makes more sense to me that WebSQL)

As far as the NoSQL thing is concerned, I think it's interesting to note that IndexDB's semantics closely match those of BerkeleyDB, which started life in 1991. Work first started on IndexDB in 2006 [2], long before the term NoSQL was invented.

tldr; The SQLite software was never going to be the standard, rather one would be reverse engineered from it, and IndexDB predated (by far) the current trend towards "NoSQL" databases.

[1]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/09/working-with-t...
[2]: http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/IndexedDB/
I'm sorry but it should be obvious that while Facebook's success might have involved genius, it certainly didn't unique programming genius. Zuck didn't create a real time flight optimizer, an ultra-fast RISK chip or anything of the sort. He created a decent web app. He was no more a genius programmer than Bill Gates (who also might been both a programmer and a genius FWIW but not a genius programmer).

What he created was a decent web app that began superbly positioned and then expertly skippered it into the true golden market position.

The genius ranged from business to social to UI with programming ability being a distant if important factor.

And that in many ways does contradict the 1000 hour thesis - he could have had experience in building great web apps beforehand. He could not have gotten experience building billion dollar companies before hand - but he did well (however much I might find Facebook unfortunate on various levels).
How could Facebook be so much higher in terms of satisfaction? Maybe it's too casual?!?
I can't see any circumstance under which we would chase away paying customers. Benchmarks are awesome, but keeping customers happy is better than awesome.
slightly relevant:

To protect his privacy and that of his clients, Mitnick encrypts all the confidential data on his laptops, transmits it over the Internet for storage on servers in the U.S., and wipes it from the computer before returning from any international trips, just in case officials decide to search or seize his equipment. He also encrypts his hard drive. And now, he says he is going to keep a "clone" of his MacBook at home so he will have an exact duplicate of it if it is ever seized.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10054569-83.html