skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
However there are still plenty of people congregating

But not in the same way.

I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.

HN is kinda useless from a "developing friendships" point of view because it's topic hopping, not just open for daily rambling discussions. Reddit is even worse off because you can't have a meaningful community of 300 million people.

We've definitely lost something. I think it'll come back, but we have to engineer it—the past won't circle back on its own with the current barrage of centralized-only, for-private-profit only, fast-flux, buzzfeed-adhd-driven discussion platforms being shoved down our keyboards.
Yes Mandrill or SendGrid it can only done via API calls which is why I built a small tool I guess the bigger question is it spammy? and will anyone else use it? Trying to decide if I should make is public or maybe open source it more towards public offering with a one time fee
Does the motivation matter when we're talking about whether it establishes sufficient justification for searching someone's car? After a clear flaw is pointed out, a response of "We didn't mean to ruin the statistical power of this test" wouldn't do much to restore my confidence in its results.
I don't really grok what this means - WebAssembly, .NET, and the JVM are runtimes, how does Rust compiling to them lead to a future that doesn't require a runtime?
The benefit I guess is that it acts like any other webpage. If I click on a link to a pdf, that pdf replaces the page I was looking at. If I click on a link in the pdf, the target of the link replaces the current page. I can have them open in Firefox tabs just like every other thing I look at online.
hodwik: It seems we've exhausted the max depth of the comments, so I'll reply here.

I think you're a bit older than me, I never really experienced the BBS-days for example. Nonetheless, I agree completely. I remember especially a gaming forum in my language that I used to hang out on for years, where I knew 80% of posters, knew who was the trolls and who was the pros and we'd meet up for pizza every now and then etcetera. I miss those days. I see the forum is still up, but at some point it was overrun with users and the old sense of some kind of fellowship died out.
No, it's just one of the stupid questions companies ask their employees. I think it could be fun to give them their own medicine sometimes.
> It's unfortunate that they make a living off open source software created by a lead Linux developer but they act like Linux doesn't even exist.

They do contribute back; they’ve done plenty of contributions to Git. Also, GitHub tools are really useless when you’re used to vanilla git.
I very rarely use git bisect, but the times I have were pretty fun.

And yes, it requires the type of commit history that I find not many people have the discipline to produce.
what platforms in 2015 only have a c compiler (and not, for example, an assembler)
I tried to push the hashtag a coupla years ago but it didn't take off. https://plus.google.com/111502940353406919728/posts/DKDCbDGr... Note however that everyone immediately chimed in with examples they'd been subjected to.
All of the above.

Mesh should have been a thing by now. Better late than never. (I hope.)
brson isn't being sarcastic. He's the driving force behind getting to that goal.

(I personally wonder if the MIR work mentioned elsewhere in this thread would allow for creating a simple compile-to-C backend without too much effort.)
Or, you know, you could ACTUALLY read the article:

> The first update is being pushed out today, and the company said that other Android handset manufacturers are planning to follow suit and provide monthly updates to carriers.

Says right in the article that LG and Samsung are on board for monthly security patches as well. What's your little percentage rating at now?

Nexus 4 is receiving updates, it is just about 3 years old now.
Your statements are correct but you are still missing the point.
> is there a situation in which you would buy CircleCI to go alongside it?

Well, we were using circleci for a while until the switch to gitlab-ci just recently. Biggest problem was that the circleci runners lose the local docker cache, which meant that unnecessary large chunks of time were spent redoing docker container builds, slowing everything down in our workflow. Note that we run unit tests in docker containers, and to speed things up it would be useful to run unit tests in parallel on multiple separate machines, in addition to preserving the local docker cache on each runner machine.
Actually people are already talking face-to-face.

It's still a bit expensive at the moment though, as it requires smartphones with a decent front camera and fast connectivity, but early results are encouraging.
For a different take on this problem see NVC: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

Also note the crucial symmetry, besides trying to ask X, it is also important to hear X even if Y is spoken.
> SSL support for gh-pages on custom domains is lacking

How could they do that? You’re responsible for your own domain, you have to buy an SSL certificate by yourself.
An equivalent in Python is

>>> Entry = namedtuple("Entry", "id description amount")

>>> Entry(*line.split(','))

Entry(id='1', description='an entry', amount='99')
IBM Watson to Gain Ability to “See” with Planned Acquisition of Merge Healthcare
I can't help but say I refuse to work with PDF files. I will email and do a ton of meetings and one on ones to explain that PDF is a container and that the format inside the container is the battle. Just give me the plain format and if it cost the company money it is worth it.
The weirdos and ideas are still there, just drowned out by the masses.

So, just like real life? Not helpful at all.

The Internet was an introvert's dream. Then the popular extroverted high school kids took over our entire Internet media and platforms. We've lost empires to the people who were destined to rule the world anyway. Turns out it's easier to rule introverts online than to rule real life populations who can fight back.
Like they do in Cuba? http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1...
Honey sales aren't your only revenue source. You can also charge farms for transporting your bees there and pollinating their crops. And I believe the article said this price point is also increasing.
Er, no. A coin flip would punish more innocent people. This is an argument of specificity, not sensitivity. The "screening" test, the "sensitive" test, was when the officer decided to involve Lex.
No, this is not dichotomous-- There are at least five parties experiencing various degrees of harm: victims of crime, law enforcement, actually guilty criminals, falsely accused criminals, and the general public.

The actually hard part is divining the difference between actually guilty criminals and falsely accused criminals. That's the only valid reason for the justice system to act in this space. And that's also exactly what this extra knowledge clarifies.

We can always go full-retard with the utilitarianism. If you're going to allow injustice to happen to the few to the benefit the many, why even bother prosecute anyone for anything? Shut the farce down.

Or perhaps we could remove the bubble wrap that we allow government to hide behind and hold law enforcement directly accountable for its harm to the public and to the falsely accused. We don't have to play moral dominoes.
They have a sales funnel that you fell out of. It's a really common, and apparently effective type of funnel. By whatever measures they are using, they're probably better off without you.

I also miss the old web, where articles were just text dominating a page, but it seems to be dying. I have devoted some thought to what to do about it, but I've come up dry so far
I usually use "pdftotext -layout" and write python or perl code to handle the table extraction.

If I need more detailed formatting information, I use "pdftohtml -xml -fullfontname" and process the resulting xml.
Lots of databases are configured to do both. The tables store what we normally think of as "the data" and the log stores the changes. Tables are like the HEAD in git etc and the transaction log is like the chain of commits.

In principle you could just query the transaction log for every change to your data and compute the final state every time. Obviously this would be onerous so in normal operation we just use the latest state.

When things go wrong the transaction log is useful for understanding why and also rewinding/replaying the database to the correct state.

Some databases ship these transaction logs around between replicas to keep them all in sync.

The work presented here is an interesting application of the same basic mechanism to keep different flavours of datastores in sync.

Recently we very briefly explored the idea of using this mechanism to implement partial replication for partitioned reporting data stores. Unfortunately our current platform SQL Azure doesn't grant access to the transaction log directly. (Which on balance this is a good thing because it's handling all the replications etc)
But when you HAVE found a framework bug, it's both delicious and infuriating.
would love to see example codes accompanied with the examples, which seem a bit outdated.

what this needs is a fully working app that is modern and source to accompany it.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of python, and has a big potential in the web if done right.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/08/03/1419828112.full...

This is the early release version.
> I personally find it a little bit irritating that Github wants to promote "open-source/free-software", but haven't open sourced their own tools/product.

They have 100+ open-source repos: https://github.com/github
They also contribute a lot back to Git.
No, that’s the thing: A lot of european small companies don’t care much about growth. That’s the exact thing.

And this mindset of "it works well enough" now meets with the US mindset of wasting resources, of eternal, aggressive growth, of pure capitalism.

Obviously, that doesn't work well.
I think this has already been accomplished by http://getshru.com/
Yeah, fixing that is a very high priority for us atm.

So assuming we fixed that, would you buy it (considering esp that GitLab CI exists and you already use GitLab)?
In the BBS days, the bar was higher to getting online. Some technical knowledge was required, and there were extra costs. I'd like to know the modern day equivalent.

I would be interested in seeing some sort of mesh network become popular, completely separate from "The Internet", with completely different protocols and paradigms, that you could access and participate in, just by sticking an antenna on your roof, plugging in some kind of adapter, and running some software.

Or perhaps you could utilize existing Wifi hardware and run a completely different set of protocols on it.
>I used to know people's lives from IRC and ICQ. I remember chatting online for hours. I was interested in their lives and they were interested in mine, and not just in the current vapid "HN cares inordinately about young successful people and old rich people because it gets you in their good graces" sort of way. Now I can't get anybody to return a direct iMessage in less than 3 hours to 2 days and that's from people I already know.

I still use IRC and don't have this problem at all. I've even been in the same IRC channels for nearly 5-6 years now. These random strangers from around the globe know more about me and my interests than my own family.
Mastering the Product Demo
You're referring to neonicotinoids. Let's stipulate that neonicotinoids are in fact the root cause of CCD, which is defined as the increase in overwintering colony losses.

Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture. Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than other pesticides.

Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.
I thought, based on the title, this is something similar to Music to Code by - http://mtcb.pwop.com/
"Programming languages never die"

There have been literally thousands of programming languages over the years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages ) and I can't imagine that more than a handful (which most people itt can name) have survived from the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
You're probably

a) part of groups that have now grown up and merged into the collective internet and diluted

b) need to find new groups that interest you

For my part, there's huge thriving communities of like-minded nerds all over the place, you just have to look outside of popular places.

Pouet, atariage, msx.org, nectarine radio, tons of messageboards, hell; my local neighborhood messageboard is full of crazy internet weirdos of my type.

HN and some very narrow reddits are kind of cliche, but they work also.

I keep saying it here, but there's absolutely nothing to stop old-style internet communities from springing up again, except that the draw of megasites like reddit and facebook seem to steal all the mindshare. Heck, even IRC is still around. Heck telnet BBSs are still around http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html

Just set up the community you want, run it your way, don't compromise and run it like a hobbyist should. The advertise it on other like-minded places (heck, setup a web-ring!) and you're off!
There's a proof in Bitcoin's paper that shows the probability of someone catching up with the main chain. That's actual real data that we can measure. Of course nothing's 100% true in the real-world, but with PoW you get very real numbers on the probability of someone catching up, which decreases drastically after each confirmation.

On the other hand with PoS I still haven't seen any data whatsoever. I asked a simple question: since there's no cost for someone to simulate a chain, what's stopping peers from doing this? I know there are checkpoints and things like Nxt don't allow deep reorgs, but for new users joining the network it means you need to point them to trusted parties that can give them this information: they can't trust the chain independently.
No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article that everyone should read, it's illuminating.

"""
Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably.
I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue.
Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists.
"""
I'm so happy this wasn't about chromosomes.

At least, I hope it isn't. :-)

...I'll see myself out.
> These days, I don't know a single person on the internet

Getting to know people is a function of spending time with them. As you get older, you spend less time socializing on the internet.

The internet, especially a forum, is a really time-consuming and inefficient way to socialize. You meet more of a person saying "hi" to their face than you do after months of reading their posts online.

When I was a teen stuck at home with the family and school, I had time for that back when the internet and games were an escape and a way to have some control over my social life. It's me that's changed, not the internet.
I keep thinking this same thing myself, and have tried to work the IRL-angle, but when you're an adult no one really wants to meet you.

Up until the early 00s, I used to hang out at a coffee/cigarette bar where I knew just about every single person who walked through the door, and people would sit there for hours and hours talking to strangers about very interesting stuff, while drinking insane amounts of coffee and chain smoking.

If those sorts of places still exist, I have no idea where they are.
Very well said, especially the last paragraph.

One wonders if we have the procedures we do because it gives a thin veneer of scientific respectability over a system that might otherwise appear biased, racist & otherwise distasteful even if it's statistically valuable.
Yes, but I'd wager they would fail rapidly.

For actual hard problems that require top talent (in opposition to your normal 'rockstars wanted'), a startup would need:

A. Enough talent among the founders to make a demo good enough to get enough investment to get the talent to make the product

or

B. Enough starting capital to make a demo to get investment to get the talent
Scaling up an API proxy in OCaml
It sounds like what you're looking for is Business Intelligence. There are a couple of cloud tools like Chartio, Tableau, Looker, etc that provide similar functionality.
This is especially bad when you are posting in a Q and A forum like Stack Overflow and I see it happen constantly to myself and others. A year down the line if I search how to solve X problem I may not even want the same end result as the OP of the SO post and then nobody has even solved the original problem, just suggested alternatives that are useless for me. If I make a post, someone will inevitably close it as a duplicate of that question. Very frustrating.
Yodlee Tracks Bank Cards, Sells Data to Investors
If you actually think that you solve a problem, talking about #4 is getting way ahead of yourself. I've spent way more time trying to figure out your product than any user ever would and, if you asked me to explain it, the best I could come up with is, "someone you have never heard of will send you emails about something."

I understand that there is too much material for me to read and I know that discovery is a problem, but if you're concerned about customer acquisition, you need to prove to me that your solution is better than my solution. Therein lies my point about paying attention to fundamentals.

Sorry to pick on one writer, but one of your mailing lists is advertised as, "a collection of new tech ventures that are worthwhile watching." Another is described as "News from accelerator world." Not only do those contain pretty severe grammatical errors, but they don't exactly make for a compelling call to action. Why would I subscribe to lists curated by people who can't even craft compelling intros? I know that writing intros is hard, but poor intros don't exactly fill me with trust about the quality of the links I will receive!

If this project does what I think it does, you're going to run head on into a chicken or egg problem. Nobody will subscribe unless you have amazing content to send out. But nobody smart enough to consistently send out amazing content will spend time crafting amazing content unless there are users there.

Once again, focus on the absolute basics before you start thinking too far outside of the box. In this case, you need some extremely compelling content on your first page and that content needs to be so good that I can't imagine leaving without signing up.
Community-led tooling for F# in Visual Studio
I use emacs and one org mode file per project so it tracks kind of well as long as my research produces notes.

As a proper Emacs user I also do my e-mailing there and my e-mail is in a git repository. Whenever I feel like I haven't got much done in a day I can usually verify that I it was because I spend like half a day writing e-mails instead of coding.

One of the more surprising stats I have found out about myself is that I regulary spend about 5% project time writing git commit messages.

I actually find the most value of wakatime that I can keep track of that I don't work too much on the "wrong" projects. Wakatime has helped me hold off things I should not focus on that much.

Wakatime has at least somewhat reduced my imposter syndrome tendencies because I can use it to disprove the feeling that I'm not getting things done because it tells me that I got things done even if it was not the things I originally had plan to get done.
I don't follow you. The "prior probability" isn't just the baseline probability that a randomly chosen car will contain drugs. The drug dog is called in by an officer who believes that the specific car he's pulled over contains drugs.

So the article is correct as written. About four out of every 10 roadside searches conducted on the basis of a dog alert are groundless. This outcome is nearly indistinguishable from a coin flip conducted by the officer who has already flagged the car as a suspect vehicle.
On Being Good : The Ronco Principle
The example I've always used is "How do I remove the blade guard from a chainsaw?" In response to which you should very carefully find out what they're really trying to do. Unless you want their next question to be "what kind of knot makes the best tourniquet?", or perhaps "what's the fastest way to dissolve human bones?"
pdf.js does a lot less, just how I like it. I can view PDFs and not have a constant stream of critical vulnerabilities to worry about.

Did you know Acrobat supports viewing 3D models in PDFs? Not even kidding[1]. It has an unnecessarily huge attack surface.

I will never use that and I work in engineering at a factory.

[1] For example, http://help.actify.com/download/attachments/6651965/SF_expor...
Choosing between false positive and false negatives has a lot to do with the consequences. If you miss a drug dealer on a screening test, you missed the chance to catch the bad guy. Depending on the drug and social dynamics, this could be fairly benign (pot) or lethal (cocaine, meth, benzos, opioids). You've also communicated to the bad guy that he can get away with it. Which, given what we know of male behaviour, suggests he will push more drug more brazenly next time.