skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The ad companies have, IMO, brought it on themselves.

Flash ads, Java ads, ads with auto-playing sound, popups that interupt the UX, insane analytics deliverables that can increase total page payload and runtime by multiples of the original page size - they are the problem.

I work for a company that makes much of its revenue off of advertising, so this issue is near-and-dear to my heart. As ad blocking has increased in popularity, the networks' response is to impose even more intrusive, resource-intensive, user-hostile requirements on their ad deliverables, and it's only been getting worse. Browsing ad-supported sites is so painful these days because the advertising networks are no longer a relatively minimal ride-along with the parent page - they're practically their own webapp that gets injected along with the host content. Instrumentation shows payload times 4-5x larger than the host page, and total load times can be 10-20x greater than just the host page.

The problem is that ad networks don't feel the pain of increased payload sizes, user-hostile deliverables, degraded UX, and user frustration. There is no feedback mechanism with which to economically punish the bad ads and reward the good ads. The lifetime of an ad unit is so relatively short that there's no incentive to develop a quality deliverable, or to fix problems unless a publisher's development team notices a specific unit and can call out specific problems with it (which generally only happens when the ad is doing something like, I dunno, crashing the entire tab).

I have exactly zero sympathy for the advertising industry's AdBlock problem - it's a problem they've wrought of their own doing. If you want to fix it, there has to be a hard focus on ads that don't actively make it harder for users to get and ingest publishers' content. Reduce deliverable sizes, get rid of long transitive dependency chains (scripts loading scripts loading scripts loading scripts is awful), get rid of stuff that is constantly causing network overhead (viewability trackers are easily the worst offenders here), aggressively police against flash/java ads, police against ads that autoplay audio, ban ads that pre-load video (I have instrumentation on ads which load thirty megabytes of video before the user ever interacts with them), minimize reflows and DOM manipulation - tl;dr, stop being so incredibly user hostile.

Ads are, as far as users are concerned, malware that is painful enough that they'll seek out ways to avoid it rather than just tolerating it. That's the ad networks' problem, and nobody else's.
What about muskets? Was the peasantry prohibited from owning firearms?
They have been produced, but x86's dominance has always been about fungibility and idiot-proofness while maintaining acceptable performance. It's never been the fastest possible or cheapest possible architecture; it's the architecture whose success has been built upon hiding all the complicated bits behind the curtains, so that software people can worry about software and not hardware.

There actually are some performance upsides to that too. It allows the chip architects to radically change the underpinnings of the chip with impunity, doing whatever works best on the current process node and using the latest advancements from computing research.
I tend to err on the side of caution with stuff like this, for instance when inheriting a code-base I assume the previous author actually knew what he/she was doing. But sometimes (not often) that can work against you as well. For instance when after spending sufficient time with said codebase you realize the original writer was entirely out of their depth and this was likely the first time they'd attempted to write something this complex.

But more often than not it is the presumption of intelligence that pays off.
As others have pointed out, this is a pretty misleading headline, there is no MVP at all. just a silly landing page to gauge interest.

Maybe this is why we have so many useless start-ups? some guy makes a landing page, sends it to his friends, they sign up cause they feel obligated to, he robs his parents investment accounts, calls then 'angels' and away we go....
Or maybe they are ;) How to find out? For some people, the only way to confirm is to try and be tested.
Disarming: Sword breakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrying_dagger
I'm very skeptical about this as an actual phenomenon, but it's been used as the premise of a fairly interesting SF novel: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/TERANESIA/TERANESIA...
Isn't a search (or querying of data) analogous to this one which landed weev in prison?

1) Generate list of possibly valid numbers
2) Query service to determine something
3) Get prosecuted
4) Go to jail

Just wondering...
Do these sorts of articles just scream worshipping false idols, and I say that as a skeptic of religion who keeps seeing human groups behave in dumb ways warned against in ancient times? Seriously. Find your own way? Stop worshipping YC or we all stagnate?
I read this and honestly thought that it's kind of bizarre that he seemingly "randomly" came out with this post. My first impression was that it was a publicity stunt by Verisign.

Nonetheless, Paul's point about naming is a good one. You have to have a good name. But, I see no evidence (and he didn't provide any) why the name has to be associated with a .COM domain. His only 'evidence' that he mentions is the fact that "100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name." This doesn't mean that 94% of the top 50 are right (in owning the .com).
I mean, shouldn't he be blacklisted? He's evidently willing to betray positions of trust for the right incentives, and it's easy enough for the DoJ to blackmail a felon. You can't trust him to do security work when the federal security establishment is at least a passive adversary.
How does your model make sense of such statements as "we should have more freedom of speech"? If what should happen is defined by what's already law, then isn't the law by definition already what should be?
A lot of people seem to be unaware that companies survive by satisficing. That is, you don't have to do everything "right" to succeed in business. You just have to do most things well enough to not fail (don't break the law, don't forget to file your paperwork, pay your bills, etc.), and a few (one?) things outstandingly enough to win customers.

We've been brought up in school to think we have to get nearly every answer right on the test in order to get a good grade (and get more than half of the answers right just to not flunk out). In the real world, getting one right answer, and not screwing the rest up too badly is often enough (and sometimes only barely achievable!).

So maybe your competitor did something "stupid" because they're stupid, or maybe it's because that thing doesn't actually matter that much, and they're focused on doing something else incredibly well instead.
"It doesn't matter if they are exact for a given person so long as the labels are consistent. They are sufficiently consistent."

You argue this with literally no data, and all available data says the opposite.

The people charged at the FDA with coming up with the mechanism for these labels disagree with you, and have found 30-50% variance for a ton of foods.

"I'm curious - have you tried losing weight, and is this from personal experience? "

I can lose weight fine (and i'm actually at a normal BMI, FWIW :P), and i don't violate the laws of thermodynamics.

However, counting calories from labels was the most useless thing i could ever do.

I literally burned 1500+ calories in exercise a day, and ate less than 1500 calories by nutrition label calculations, and did not lose weight. I tried a variety of different foods/etc. I'm a scientific guy, i have logs of data :P
I didn't cheat, kid myself, whatever.

It turns out, for various medical reasons i won't get into, i am not in the "vast majority" for whom these labels are targeted, and so the numbers on them are simply wrong by about 20-30% for me (this is factual, and was actually part of a controlled study). The out calculation was accurate enough (IE the exercise part of it). But as you can imagine, when trying to lose weight, 20-30% in variance matters a lot.

You can argue "i'm outside the norm", but i suspect, based on what i saw, that i am not.
"...the place is a dump and its people are ignorant and crude."

Really quite shocking how you didn't make more friends here, with such a sunny disposition and open-mindedness.
members of a subculture gain a perceived glamour, which incentivizes outsiders to come in for superficial reasons

It has a real cost to the original members, in terms of their loss of immediate credibility. You see a guy with sailor tattoos. Did he serve in the Fleet, does that speak to his work ethic and skill with a chart or a diesel engine? Or does he work in advertising and drink soy lattes? You see a girl with thick-rimmed glasses. Is she an old-skool assembly hacker, or did she just think they would look cute with her "vintage" dress? It means the genuine people, who have paid their dues, need to prove themselves over and over again to everyone they meet. That is why everyone hates hipsters.
This philosophy is one of the cornerstones of my engineering practice. IFF you can describe why something is there - without using shortcuts/crutches like 'their dumb' - then we may be able to consider changing it. Otherwise, it's dangerous and risky to fool with it. Too many times did I see something absurd and paint myself into a corner trying to 'fix' it, when there really was a bizarre edge case that this covered. (And in plants, you usually only find these edge cases after enormously expensive production loss events!)

And it's a fantastic principle in general, since it's like the technical equivalent of the Principle of Charity.

( http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html )
I disagree. To realistically sell ads directly to advertisers (or agencies) you have to be big enough to support a dedicated ad sales staff. And even if you have exceptionally valuable ad space, you have to be garnering enough impressions to make talking to you worth the advertiser's time. It would be impossible for many of the ad-supported websites and blogs I enjoy to earn dollar one from this approach.
and still backwards incompatible with XMPP? greeeat
Looks interesting, but the Script Injection, SQL Injection and Server Code Injection sections need a lot more samples to be remotely useful.
> Pidgin and Adium do not support (transferrable) chat history and do not show messages when I'm offline, which is a huge usability hit.

This times a million. GChat (now "hangouts"), though their XMPP interface, attempts to send new messages only to the "active" client, which means that if you try to use Pidgin or Adium (I used both myself for a number of years; they're fantastic applications) or any other XMPP client, you'll lose messages in Adium/Pidgin for a few minutes whenever you move the mouse cursor in gmail or peek at messages in the hangouts phone app. You'll never see those messages in Adium/Pidgin, and there's no way (afaik) to tell that you're not getting messages, either; it's like they don't exist.

Google, however, sends all the messages to its own clients; you never miss messages there. And so, to me, this smells like a clever (and intentional) strategy to cripple third-party clients.
> Technically, the onus is on the air carriers to use their passenger manifests to report back to DHS, who tracks it all centrally. You can imagine how well that works.

Well, aside from any compliance problems, its quite possible (and legal!) to leave the US by means other than air travel. (And, to respond to the link you provided, also quite possible and legal to do so by means other than commercial air or sea travel.)
8 lessons from a SaaS startup in the 3rd world
You say it makes you 'cringe', yet you offer no substantial argument to why you are fearful of their hypothesis. Saying things like "BS" and "WTF" is a weak attempt at hacking biases, and usually attributed to dissonance. I don't accept biased arguments as truths. Quite the contrary, I see them as indicators of an unresolved argument.

I'm not afraid of their hypothesis and I welcome the truth, however weird it may be.
I'm just a tiny bit older, and I thought I noticed some age discrimination last year. Do you both still have all your scalp hair?
We're using Delphix too. Complements an approach like this, doesn't replace it. We use Liquibase to support the schema-as-code concept; it's enforced by no one outside Sr. DBAs being able to make such changes directly in anything other than Dev (lower-than-QA) environments.

Delphix is terrific for having production-like data in your test environments ("like," because you'd better be masking sensitive information from prod before it gets written in test.

The issue we've had with Delphix is performance. It absolutely pounds on the storage system, and tends to suck up all available bandwidth and CPU that's made available to it. If you resource it properly, it's amazing.
So everything is transferred through the Demonsew 'router'? And by everything I mean all searches and file transfers?
Calculator Construction Set (1982)
"I don't understand it" is an admission of ignorance, not wise authority justifying condemnation. Few seem to understand this.

If you can't concoct a strong* argument favoring the opposing view, you don't understand the issue well enough.

*Edit: as suggested, it's "strong" argument, not necessarily "convincing". If you can make a convincing argument for the other side but not for your own, perhaps you need reconsider your stance.
Same. It took 2 months to get a Macbook Pro; it took a month to get a monitor (and the CTO himself walked over to buy it); and I ended up bringing my own keyboard and mouse and mouse pad and headphones. I'll end up bringing in my own monitor to dual monitor and buy my own thunderbolt->dvi cable. It's far easier than trying to negotiate expensing and having to justify it.
My limiting factor is internet up speed of a piddly 120KB/s max. It's not useful or what I would consider broadband... at all. oh well.
If you've been self-employed, you'll have had tons of paperwork, tax returns, invoices, clients to obtain references from, and possibly could get to a prospective employer through your personal network. The key is to plan ahead.
Firearms were expensive for a very long period of time. I doubt the peasantry would be able to afford it. Japanese did use muskets in war... but "peasant weapons" were typically simple farming tools (hoe, kama, kunai etc. etc.)
Show HN: Fluget – Flurry Analytics today widget for iOS. Thoughts?
How quickly would the 707 drop in altitude while doing a barrel roll? And did he need a minimum speed to be able to successfully do it (sort of like an escape velocity)?
Kind of funny you mention Detroit. My in-laws just moved out of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I mentioned to them the edgy art studios around when they moved into Brooklyn. Their comment was that the artists have been moving to Detroit for several years because the gentrification in Williamsburg makes it impossible for them to live.

From everything I've been reading, Detroit has become THE place to live now if you like more edgy, but affordable, neighborhoods.

(EDIT: grammar)
I definitely agree; hence the open-sourceness. :)

I only added what was off the top of my head for those sections; this list will consistently be updated.
Just ignore any marketing claims they make about security. It's no more or less secure than any other platform like Hangouts.

It received a lot of heavy duty criticism when initially launched because security was at the time its primary selling point. It looks like they've at least partially pivoted away from that and now are focusing on making what appears to be a smoother, faster Hangouts.
hope you don't mind -- I've shared this quote publically on my diaspora page. I can link you if you would like.
Become a Data Scientist in 8 Steps
Thanks for writing this. I was going to write something similar, but you captured this better than I would have anyway.
I came across PG because he wrote some battlefront story about using lisp in the early days of dotcom[0]. Probably found a link to that on some emacs site or channel.

Come to think about it, I've only heard the HN crowd praise him. Oh, well, and he does it himself.

What HN does do is give me a steady stream of content to consume. Articles about physics followed by code demos followed by ethnographies.

Shit, have I really been spending time in a pro-money, anti-woman poser circle-wank fest just for the free links?

I wonder what's up on mefi today...

0: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Running. I logged 1600+ miles in 2014. I'll be closer to 2000 in 2015. I'm 48. Started running again (I ran some in high school and a little after college) when I turned 40. I weigh less than I did in high school. It keeps me motivated. Keeps me sharp.
I recommend you check out StevenBlack's Amalgamated hosts file: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Currently the hosts files from the following locations are amalgamated:
MVPs.org Hosts file at http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm, updated monthly, or thereabouts.
Dan Pollock at http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ updated regularly.
Malware Domain List at http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/, updated regularly.
Peter Lowe at http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/, updated regularly.
hpHosts at http://hosts-file.net/, updated regularly
My own small list in raw form here.
This sounds like an instance of the fundamental attribution error [1]. It's a known human cognitive bias to blame others' failings on internal characteristics while seeing your own situation as more of a product of external influences.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
> I think people would be greatly surprised to find out a calorie is not simply a calorie as is often suggested and that sugar has a lot more impact on obesity than fats.

I would be throughly shocked considering everything I have read is to the contrary. The much more likely issue is the soda drinker would feel compelled to eat/drink something sugary after a short period where as the person eating almonds would be satisfied. Interestingly you touch on this with your rat experiment and then somehow come to the conclusion "calorie is not a calorie".

In the end a calorie is a calorie in terms of the potential to expand your waistline, but a calorie is not a calorie in terms of putting the fork down and feeling satisfied. Maybe I misunderstood and that was your point.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/is-a-calorie-a-calorie.htm...

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/79/5/899S.full
How Google Invented an Amazing Datacenter Network Only They Could Create
Also don't miss Fabien's in-depth Quake 3 code review:

http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php
I for one wish Slack was the new standard messaging app for everything and everyone.
59 business lessons from a crappy online monopoly game
> If Coke funds 1000 studies ... media will be full of stories

That is a problem with the (non-scientific) media and not the scientific process or press.
I was at Google in 2011 and I remember the internal flame wars you triggered about performance reviews. You mis-characterized the process internally then, and you mischaracterize it now.

Perhaps you were on a dysfunctional team, or had a particularly bad manager, but this is most certainly not the general case.

Stack ranking was not mandatory, but the perf UI certainly let you stack rank your peers if you wanted. I never did and management never cared. There was certainly no curve, and managers did not have to create low performers by quota.

If there's one complaint I had about the Google perf system was that it rewarded popularity and networking perhaps more than competence and effectiveness.
Wouldn't it make more sense to define building blocks and automatically generate all sensible combinations? Otherwise I don't think this list can be managed by hand, especially not in a volunteer project.
Everything Is Broken
Silicon Valley billionaires have proved repeatedly that they are nothing more than overgrown teenagers. I hope that they do achieve interstellar colonization. This planet will be better without them.
The extreme means people are using to keep their pets alive
Most of my friends actually moved to Skype because of this.
I wish they'd stop guzzling battery on iOS. On my iPhone, the two top background activity apps are Facebook and Hangouts, neither of which (sadly) I can actually get rid of since I use the first for work (seriously...) and the second to be reachable to Android users.
So? If I apply for a work visa and get denied, am I forbidden to spend some holidays in the US as well? If that's the case, the application form for the ETSA should include a question "have you recently applied for a work permit before this application?" and if the answer is yes, reject it, saving hassle for everybody involved.
While that's entirely true, it's also true that any code covering an obscure corner case ought to document that corner case and why the code is needed. And similarly, any policy or law should be completely clear about what problem it wants to solve. That would make it far easier to maintain.
Whoa! Thank you for this. I stopped using pidgin because of this and couldn't sort out what was causing me to miss IMs.
Does anyone else find that, the awfully slow, Hangouts app (on Mac?) randomly open every minimized window? If it wasn't integrated with gmail and we didn't have everyone in the company already using it, Hangouts would be the first product I'd move away from.
"I really wouldn't have expected that sort of reaction on this forum ahead of time. It's a bit disappointing."

You have presented literally no evidence to support your argument, which boils down to "it's close enough, if everyone just did hard work and tried harder instead of being fat and lazy, they'd lose weight, and anyone who says otherwise is just being fat and lazy".

I am neither fat nor lazy (I'm actually probably one of the most in-shape adults you'll meet). I can literally prove that your argument is wrong for me.

Instead, what i see is "oh, well, it's sad everyone but me is wrong". With no evidence to back this up.
If I put this into my company's tests, we'd end up with no users... I have a lot of work ahead of me. :/
> It doesn't matter if they are exact for a given person so long as the labels are consistent. They are sufficiently consistent.

AFAIK, the main reasons that the calorie counts are not accurate for all people is variations in absorption for particular nutrients due to metabolic variations. These variations between people are specific to particular categories of nutrients (some are at the level of macronutrients -- particularly that I've heard of, differences in general fat or carbohydrate metabolism -- some more narrow.)

This would make the top-line calorie counts (or, more precisely, the relationship between top-line calorie counts of different products) inconsistent as well, in that for a person with absorption different than that targeted by the labeling, product A with 500 Cal and product B with 600 Cal might not merely provide different Calorie counts than 500/600 to that person, but product B might provide less Calories than product A, depending on the specific nutrient composition of those calories.
> We’ve been obsessively fixing bugs and speeding up message delivery to make Hangouts faster and more reliable.

Well, that would be quite a feat if they managed to make it less reliable. The latest version I tried to use was ridiculously buggy, crashing, couldn't join a conversation etc. I was so boggled by how bad it was (Google's app, on Google's OS) I even forgot to be angry for a while
I've been using Trillian Pro for this for many years, and it's worth every penny. My history is always in sync between my Windows, OSX, and iOS devices, and Trillian's desktop interface is so much better than Gmail's chat interface.