skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would suggest you're overcomplicating this by directly comparing Alphabet to a venture fund, which it is not.

> My point was: if you buy Google stock, you're paying Google multiples on top of venture investments' multiples. That's exponentially costlier.

Google's venture investments are negligible compared to Google's overall enterprise value. I doubt they are a real factor in the stock price and in fact, it's possible that you're getting exposure to the venture arm for free.

> The venture investments made by Google have the same liquidity constraints...

You're missing the point. When you invest in Google, you can exit your position at any time.

> ...and you could argue Google's SG&A are much more expensive than 2% management fee (not sure about the performance fees, though).

Google's overhead is associated with a business that generated more than $65 billion in revenue last year. The management fees paid to your friendly neighborhood VC are not.
I can think of other, lower tech, DoS attacks against cars -- which are also not much exploited.
Quick Look Preview Controller in Swift
This isn't really true. Most great developers I know have interest and experience up and down the stack though not expertise in all parts.

Often, those that stay specialized in one layer of the stack are less helpful because they don't see the forest for the trees.

There's an analogy of specialization causing extinction somewhere in here, too...
Not just you.
These kinds of checks take up very little of the overall build-time. Frankly, everything is dwarfed by LLVM optimization passes, which usually takes up about 50% of the time itself.
If they're easy to solve, why hasn't that been done already?
Bucardo replication from Postgres to sqlite and mariadb using pgbench
They're bringing in billions. I don't know what their profits are. But either their profits are huge, or the App Store is ridiculously inefficient in terms of cost, because payment processing and bandwidth just do not cost that much on relative terms.

I'm sure the App Store is breathtakingly expensive in absolute terms. But there's no reason it has to cost anything like 30% of sales. This stuff scales up sub-linearly, not super-linearly.
You haven't met anyone who can work at all levels of the stack, then. There are engineers with a good grasp of the fundamentals, and know how to apply it across the board.
Yup. I want to give a shout-out to 18F who did a really great job with this. This project is really important for two reasons.

1. It brought analytics to the minds of agency communications and policy folks. Having 18F going around adding Google Analytics to as many government websites as possible also opened up lots of other opportunities to help people better understand their users.

2. It's an example of a shared service - one that doesn't require extra procurement, is super reliable, and doesn't require every agency to duplicate work. The sheer size of the government makes the fact that sometimes the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing is understandable - the way we've set up a federal system actually makes this an intentional feature. However, if we reduce rebuilding, either by sharing services or code would be a big win for the budget and for quality.
Review: NOTE 5 vs. NOTE 4
Until they indict James Clapper for perjury and grant Snowden immunity, I refuse to assist the government in any way beyond paying taxes.

http://www.hasjamesclapperbeenindictedyet.com
Thanks. I'd actually be interested in hearing more about their opinion on the book, it'll help with my own development.
My thoughts exactly -- I would much rather be helping raise awareness of government surveillance and developing measures to abate it, instead of giving them even more technological power. The front-end of services like healthcare and immigration can be improved all we want, but that doesn't affect any fundamental change in the way things are done (it's a fancy website, but you'll still be waiting 5-10 years for your green card). I struggle to see why anyone who is technologically savvy would want to do this.
I definitely wouldn't go that far in describing the problem, but yes, there are issues with the model.
Sadly CAN bus doesn't have that option, although I suppose you could put a MITM sort of device which rejected any write packets. Could be an interesting gizmo to market to car makers.
NASA Just Tested the Rocket Engine We'll Use to Visit Mars
Can't you think of it as still being scoped - just more fine grained? Pieces of structs can be borrow checked (what you are using) instead of the whole struct?
so you're saying I've been harrassed when I was happy to get 8 texts and they're still (still!) sitting their unanswered. Glad to know you get to decide that I'm being harassed! Glad to know that you decided I've rejected that person!

By the way I have the same POV as nadya in this thread. I'm not arguing that anything is Okay, just that not answering a text isn't the same as rejecting that person.

The poster upstream who said her phrasing made him think she was leading him on, is right IMO. The screenshot should also say a no.
Audio books has made "reading" a hobby for me. I never thought I was the type that really enjoyed reading a good book. After switching from radio to audio books while driving, traffic has almost become enjoyable (not quite, but you get the idea). I've read so many books the past few years, it's amazing. It feels like it increases your brain's learning rate, or at the very least, it gives you some very interesting topics to talk about.
Ask HN: Possible to Tour Google or Facebook Today?
I'll be in the San Jose area today with my brother and my 8-year-old nephew. If anyone from HN can get us a tour at Google or Facebook please reach out to me. My email is in my profile. We'll be available from 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM and 2:30 to about 5:00. Thank you.
That sounds like the salary of 20 engineers (+ some managers, office managers, and cleaning staff time).
C2 Programming Language
WebCAT – Transport for London
Not really. Maybe on phones.
Tube strike – Web and open data analytics – TfL Digital blog
Wow, that's some great research there. We are actually building a scale for consumers that will allow for body scans in 3D. We hope then to also later integrate morphing algorithms so that you can see how your body would transform if you were to gain extra muscles and fat. Potentially big data could also help.

As for the visceral fat, it's indeed there, but an MRI could probably help off-set such, if you wanted to have a high level of accuracy.

For most I believe outside fat will be most important.
Travel Guide: Visit Nice, France for a Beautiful Time
Earlier post has extensive discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060188
Ah, right. Good point.
Yep, it's a big risk. (See reboot loop.) Nobody has attempted anything that big before....

Otherwise, I don't recall having a Windows Update problem recently -- certainly not this century -- and I haven't seen any malware either.

I'd be willing to bet that the malware problem will be significantly smaller with Microsoft doing the updating than it is at the moment, even though the majority of malware problems on Windows are down to human ignorance.

(I know I can run Windows 7 with no AV at all, and I'm certainly not the only one. I don't recommend it, but I have done it.)
"Customer Service Hijacking" is what I'm going to call this growing practice of people who create accounts that resemble official customer service accounts, then use these to troll complaining customers.

It's reminiscent of crank calling, but involves intercepting incoming customers, which is easier in social media.
Unfortunately most browsers don't have <blink> support anymore
no?

I mean, it would be super nice for your terminal emulator to just automagically filter out escape sequences when you, the user, do not want them and to allow them for programs that you do. a whitelist would work but would be super annoying to actually verify as so many programs output things from so many different inputs. it seems like programs themselves should decide if they need to output arbitrary data and, in cases where they don't, like git, they can filter it.
"YOU CAN GUEST IN ANOTHER LIVESTREAM ZOMG XD"

Yeah, I don't understand the mentality of "but we have xyz feature"! Its rather tacky and I'm not sure if it ever worked. There's a reason why Meerkat has fallen out of favor and its not because of a single feature. Periscope has what "304 million monthly active users" potential users because of Twitter alone. That's hughmongous! Also, the name Meerkat is not fun. Reminds me of a Ferret for some reason.

Facebook has already released live streaming for celebs. Once that catches on, Periscope will be reserved to just another feature that Twitter uses.

No one's going to win. Its just an enhancement of a service that's long due. I do think, however, that the Meerkat boys will be fine. They can just have FB write them a check and be acquired (which I believe was the intent anyway).

Twitter on the other hand, if used wisely, may help their business model since more and more people will be active on their platform because someone's on there acting interesting. (Expect to see 1,000,000 #WSHH tags on Periscope soon.)
Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060188
No gain implying that lockpicking a car and hacking it is of the same level of difficulty.
Then the App Store is for you!

It may, nevertheless, be too expensive for many people. The article author, for example.
Unfortunately, we just lost the person who put together the team who put all that in place in the UK. I hope his replacement is going to be able to take the baton and run with it.
It will be interesting to see Rust and Swift evolve as Swift moves to the server side (at least on Linux). Both are modern languages although each has its own target users.
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2014/01/clapper-ssci/
Both for me.

For good or ill there are books that only exist in dead tree form. I still buy them. I don't entirely miss them to be honest, but for casual reading or it seems super technical things from ages ago, dead tree is where its at.

For recent things though relating to programming, I honestly can't be arsed to use dead tree form. Being able to have updates to books, sync notes/highlights/blah electronic books beat regular books entirely.

In my mind technology just expanded the definition of what a book is.
http://spinroot.com/gerard/pdf/P10.pdf

Here is another interesting read, though again not comprehensive.
Thanks for the info, that's pretty interesting. Are you ever allowed to go back and do another 2 years?
Why didn't Sega just require games to be digitally signed with their key?
What's the barrier to entry like for this?

For example, I've never been particularly great at math.
But what will replace the ninjas and the rock stars?
Sharp eye! We are indeed indebted to the work that the UK has done! They are a couple years more senior (USDS just had it's 1st birthday this Tuesday; GDS is coming up on 3) and while there is much tailoring for each country's unique circumstances, we've certainly benefited from their experience.
Not really if it includes salaries, datacenter space, and support contracts for hardware
Introducing FunSharp
Pretty cool.

Does anyone have recommendations on great books that cover advanced C internals (other than K&R) and/or GNU extensions for C?
He didn't understand the question? I find that really hard to swallow.

> As a result, the Committee itself became complicit in an act of public deception.

Good, let's imprison them all for perjury then, not just Clapper.
I figured performance came into it also. It would be nice to see some performance numbers though.
Also a musician. I have a similar problem - I just get an urge to write music when I hear something new that is really good. When I'm working I make sure to only listen to music I already know really well so it isn't too distracting.
It's a trust issue. They know you get a cut, so they worry it is bad advice motivated by a desire to line your pockets. People get touchier about this on some subjects than others and there are ways to reassure your readers that, no, you are promoting these products in specific because you really believe in them, not just as a cheap shill.

If you do not really believe in them, it is probably a poor monetization scheme. If you lose the trust of your audience, people will stop reading your stuff. If you have an audience, you can look for other ways to monetize. If you drive off your audience, you won't have a thing of value to offer to begin with. Think long and hard about how to respect your audience.
True, and they probably aren't. So which do you think is harder?
Because the solution precludes the emergence of the multimillion dollar market called "The Internet of Things".
Yes, it's a scope, but not a lexical scope, hence the name :)

I believe that 'borrowing part of a struct' is a different extension to the system, actually, though maybe they'll be put together. I haven't been involved in the pre-RFC myself.
Take my money!
Paying for the review process is not a feature!

While it might be argued that it doesn't work as well as it should, or that it shouldn't be forced, it's certainly a feature. It's a mechanism that improves user confidence in unknown apps, making them more likely to make a purchase when they are uncertain. No different than having your business certified under some ISO standard, which also costs money, but is essential to getting some clients.
> I'm trying to get REDACTED to "modernize" to REDACTED

Loose lips sink ships, doc.
You should address that question to the headline writer at the Guardian, who snipped the woe-as-me comment from the interview. It does have an attention grabbing wording.
> [citation needed]

Look it up.
The language and entity recognition are using custom stuff that isn't part of any standard libs. For instance, in a query like "whats a good happy hour place in the mission?" - nothing is capitalized and all of the standard libs out there can't deal with it.

For building blocks - it's a combination - mixture of word2vec for feature vectors, and some parts of spaCy (though still experimental).
Thank you for your service!

There's a ton happening here. From http://www.nextgov.com/defense/2015/04/dod-start-its-own-dig...: "The new team is already working to transfer electronic health records to the Department of Veterans Affairs from DOD."
on a massively popular platform

And that's part of what you're paying for.
Most stuff is small stuff. The small stuff matters. It adds up over time.
Instead of skipping the breakfast, try not to eat after sun-set. Trust me, you'll love the difference you'll see after a few months.

Disclaimer: I'm following this principle every single day from past 2 years.
Interesting and probably merits further examination. They did mention that the findings only speak to short term results and of course the most important bit is at the end of the article:

> "Ultimately, Hall cautions against using the study to determine what diet to follow.

> "Rather than expecting a specific metabolic advantage for choosing one diet over another for losing body fat, it is better to choose a diet that is healthy for you and one that you can stick to for long periods of time, ideally permanently," he says.
A Beginner’s Guide to the Ember Run Loop
The Most Common Childbirth Practice in America Is Unnecessary and Dangerous
I've never seen a standup be useful.

Last year we built a team that was in constant communication threat the day, via slack and bug reports/statuses. We had ad-hoc conversations regularly. We all knew what was going on and what was being worked on.

And yet we were forced to have a standup every morning where we tried to summarize what we were working on for non-technical "managers" who always would have the wrong impression- either something that was hard was trivial and why weren't woe working faster on it, or someone would rattle off a bunch of trivial things and they would think they were working heard.

Technically competent management would be in the slack and watching the issues and not need a standup at all. A jira report is all you really need.

Just make a bug status that is "blocked" if your system doesn't already have one.

Then of course In all the companies I've worked at in the last 10 years that had standup, invariably there was some sort of management type (you can tell them because their job is having meetings, not getting things done) who wouldn't mind droning on for 20 minutes while standing. They don't care that they are standing.

I think the standup has become some sort of cargo cult relic from the days before slack and is maintained because it lets managers who don't understand technology feel like they are making their reports report every day.

Now a sprint meeting, once a week or once every 2 weeks... that's more useful.
Forget Coding Creating an Identity Is a Pain
> when raw speed is required and the edit-compile-run cycle of binary extension modules is too heavy

This is a compelling pitch in my opinion, but can anybody explain to me where Lua would be better than, say, Numpy, or Numba for that matter, for computationally expensive tasks?

What are the use cases for this that well-known and really fast Python extensions do not already cater for?
How to Create a CocoaPod
Hi Stefan,

Glad to see someone doing this. I am assuming the process goes like this:

1. Segment the video first - upload them to cloud.

2. Let Map-Reduce do the transcoding on the individual segments.

3. Fetch the segments back at a place.

4. Create the manifest file listing the individual segment.

Is that roughly correct?

Since you are doing this on GCE, I am assuming you are not using GPUs, only CPUs, right?

Transcoding aside, how are you serving the video, where do you store it and which CDN do you use?
Good point. Guardian is like Buzzfeed and HuffingtonPost with their attention grabbing titles.
I agree. I am working as a solo-founder and think about this issue a lot. The way I see it, the time spent "networking" to find a co-founder is time wasted when compared to working on your product/customers.

I say it with first-hand experience. I spent a few months going to every possible tech event in my city and had no luck. Finding a good co-founder is not easy. It's almost like trying to find a partner to marry but every second is time against you because no real work getting done.

I'd rather build and get enough traction to the point where you can hire/attract some talent.
I think this is a classic problem with alternate music platforms in the Internet age. With all the services based around and using the prevailing media industry (Pandora, Spotify, iTunes), which all happen to be "good enough" to the average user, how does one convince said user to try alternate methods/services and alternate artists? I think it's a very hard line to try and encourage the populace to cross themselves if they don't already want to do it. It involves a bit of a genuine philosophical stance on how artists should get paid and how distribution should work and most people just don't care that much to look into it.
It would absolutely be huge! Writing some ARM firmware in Rust wasn't as straightforward as it could be.
I'm not an expert (by any stretch of the imagination) on federal hiring policy, but my appointment is 2 years, with the opportunity to extend another 2 years. No clue what happens after that.
I'm not certain about the exact intricacies of the Schedule A hiring authority so I may be corrected by someone later - but my understanding is that this would not be possible to be rehired under the same hiring authority. People have joked about doing both a Schedule A and an Intermittent Consultant[0], which would allow you to do 4 years (2x2) - as we've just hit our 1st birthday, no one has tried it yet!

[0] There are some slight differences in how pay, retirement, and some other benefits are distributed, so they are mostly but not entirely interchangeable.
It's expensive in an absolute sense, but that's what happens when you pay people to work on something. Salaries and benefits add up really quickly.

By a rough estimate, a fully loaded developer costs at least $200-250k/year, counting salary, benefits and incidental expenses (ie supplies, offices... etc). So a team of 12 people would cost ~$3M/year and have $1M/year left over for all their other business expenses.

The government might end up paying somewhat less per person, but they'd also need additional people to deal with bureaucracy, coordinate with other agencies, deal with state governments and so on, so they likely want more than 12 people running a system like this.
The /value/ of "discrete software" has always been close to zero. Just a few megabytes of disk space.

The value of software creation is something else, though, and ages ago the one was tied directly to the other.

But even that wasn't truly the case. Shareware gave away part of the software for free, and relied on goodwill from the users for them to pay for the rest rather than sharing the full versions.

As you've pointed out, continuous services are another area where money can be made, but then the software isn't the value proposition, just the enabler of those services.
Indian style Eating with your Hands
Microsoft Not Holding Up Promise to Extend Office 2016 Preview
Microsoft has released Office 2016 for Mac as a subscription service and is planning on releasing it as a one time purchase in September.

According to this blog post they planned to extend the ending of preview that was allowing users to run Office 2016 for free until October: https://blogs.office.com/2015/07/22/your-top-10-questions-about-office-2016-for-mac-answered/

Sounds perfect, this way people who don't want to sign up for Office as a SaaS can still use it and then pay for the software when it is released...

Unfortunately, many users have found that they never got around to extending the preview. According to one user that got in touch with Microsoft support, that blog post on Microsoft's official blog was inaccurate: https://s3.amazonaws.com/interesting-screenshots-wlm/Screen+Shot+2015-08-03+at+11.23.09+PM.png

Currently Mac users that had upgraded to Office 2016 are forced to either pay for a Microsoft Office Online subscription, or pray they can dig up the old CDs to reinstall Office 2011 which was released FIVE YEARS AGO
I have multiple readers, including a Kindle DX and a Sony PRS-505 (still works like new!).

Print books are still awesome though, and I just pulled a few off the shelf for re-reading. But now there is freedom of balance. We have a whole carload of books on its way to the Good Will. There isn't an inherent reason to simply hold on to them anymore. So now we can keep what we want to keep; and let the rest be digital (which is easier to archive anyway).

I can't see being extreme either way. My Kindle DX works great for technical books; and I can keep another copy ready for viewing on the computer while I'm coding. My little Sony will show whatever fiction/non-fiction I throw at it (after conversion) and the battery is somehow still healthy. I'm looking to get a used Nook Glow though; as I'm tired of providing my own light.

But I'll still stop in the book store and browse the fiction. It's not only easier that digital browsing, but more fun.
Big congratulations to Dan! He's put in a ton of work, especially with the amazing documentation. I'm excited to be using this.
It's not an impressive number, but I think it's reasonable, because they have to guarantee very high uptime for a user base that consists of the entire US population (~330 million). Using the salary numbers quoted elsewhere in this thread, if they are accurate: ~150,000 per employee, actual cost per employee of 250,000 after benefits and costs, that's about 16 full time employees. So 10 programmers, 2 bosses, 1 boss assistant, 1 office manager, 2 sysadmins? Or perhaps a whole cubicle farm of telephone tech support, at much lower pay?