skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't see these products as all that compelling.

Much the same reactions pop up after every batch [1], including the "sign of YC decline" comment elsewhere in this thread. Maybe they're right, but we won't know for a few years.

There's one big factor here for sure though: nascent things seem trivial, so it's easy to dismiss them. That's the null hypothesis about dismissals—most are fully explained by it. It's also the #1 problem of early-stage investing. pg has written about this a ton, most memorably (to me) at [2].

Little things are easy to belittle. Their value is hard to see, their triviality is obvious, and the vast majority turn out worthless anyhow. If your goal is to be right as often as possible, it's a sure bet. But startup investing is all about detecting that hard-to-see value, and for that it would be a bad sign if these reactions didn't pop up after every batch.

I do wish the HN discussions could be a little more varied, though; at our worst (or maybe our median) we mostly emit versions of "No wireless, less space than a nomad, lame." But this may not be possible. Dismissals have statistics if not economics on their side, "wait and see" is not a compelling message board argument, and the discussions invariably have incomplete information—launch stories don't come with the complete vision and plans of the startup nor the thought process behind the investment.

The habit of looking for ways that things could work instead of reasons they probably won't is too rare to hold its own in a public discussion. That's sad, though, because it's so intimately related to the creative process, and if there's one thing I could change about HN's culture it would certainly be to enrich it with more of that.

1. https://twitter.com/sama/status/595993931906551808

2. http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html
Relevant: The thermodynamic arrow would reverse during a contracting phase of the Universe or inside black holes.

http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.32.248... (S. W. Hawking, 1985 <- Just so you know it isn't a crackpot writing this. It isn't a widely accepted view though)
I looked up Matt Frank (mentioned in the article) and I see that he's now working in Finance. Surprise, surprise! :D
Interesting read, but there's one fairly major shift the author missed: the transition away from long-form printed books into bite-sized, often free/ad-supported online content.

In the charge-by-the-piece print publishing world, the economics don't work for anything smaller than a hundred pages or so, which means you need to get a single author to write a lot (= a book) or compile together a bunch of stuff from different authors (= magazines, anthologies, etc). We take this as granted, but a hundred years ago smaller works were still common: Marx's Communist Manifesto was a 30-page pamphlet.

In the online world, this is no longer a concern. Much of my print reading has been replaced by following blogs, many of them on "serious" topics, where even the longest post is rarely longer than a single book chapter. And whereas it was previously quite difficult for an unknown to get accepted into a magazine, much less a book, it's now an everyday occurrence for an aggregator like HN to pick up a piece and get tens of thousands of readers for it. This parallels what we're seeing in music and film: the barrier to entry has been drastically lowered, but the effort/skill/luck needed to make money off it has gone up to compensate.
A New Aristocracy [pdf]
Modafinil is world's first safe 'smart drug'
The market as a whole is getting purpotedly pushed to hire minorities. Apparently. Is it working(in the tech sector)? Or, are they just making the white guys resentful and so making it harder in the long run?

Not sure. But I don't think it's helping.
This guy turned his failure on 'Shark Tank' into $28m from Richard Branson
For anyone interested, Eater did a great job profiling them and their factory [1]. Sun Noodle pretty much owns the entire NYC ramen scene (with the notable exception of Ippudo). They also sell their noodles & kits at Whole Foods and Japanese grocery stores.

[1] http://www.eater.com/2014/7/22/6184305/inside-sun-noodle-the...
Noodle-slicing robots already exist in China:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukNkCnNJuR8
I am a bit confused.

This only represents server side right?

You are still not expected to leave the working directory in the Dropbox folder?

Reason i ask - Dropbox's client is very inefficient when it comes to small files.
People actually wanted to use those things, though, even though they sounded silly and small. That's why they were able to grow into something larger. Microsoft's customers weren't thinking, "well, Altair Basic isn't that useful, but you can't judge them by the scope of their MVP -- Microsoft told their investors they'll build a whole OS someday."
Yup. Though it's not like it's hard to find samples and compare them. Source: I write typesetting software.
well glyphicons have been removed, didn't even notice it in the docs.
Shutdownify github page now leads to 404. You would think they should know better than that. Stay classy, S9Y.
I am taking this course as it is a prerequisite to the subjects of compilers and computational complexity theory.

Has anyone used Sipser's text with this course? I found Sipser's textbook a great introduction to this field and thinking of complementing this course with the book.
And of course there are no other bugs.
A light-weight forensic analysis of the AshleyMadison Hack
Exactly. And it would be more popular in countries with higher labour costs (e.g., Australia).
This is a remote helper meant to interact with a git repo hosted on Dropbox - it runs entirely on the client side - there's no special git-specific code that the Dropbox servers run.

Correct, you're not expected to leave the working directory in a Dropbox folder. In fact, that's a bad idea (for the reasons explained in the blog post / readme).

It's also recommended to selective sync out the repository directory so the desktop client doesn't touch the files at all.
> People seem to have different thresholds for overriding their intuitive thinking processes with a more rational, algorithmic, reflective process. But that may well be innate to them, some people are more rationally-oriented than others. I'm not too sure what there is "to learn from them".

It may even be that the people doing the extra analysis are the irrational ones. The time required to get the right answer can cost more than the value of the right answer: https://xkcd.com/1445/
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10082565
I stand corrected. Looking at https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/zones?hl=en, it seems that GCE has multiple zones in the same locale (region). I might have confused with Google's internal setup, which during my tenure there, was heavy on using replication across locales, up to systems like Megastore and the 200ms synchronously replicated commit.
I'd be happy if he made the source open once you have bought it, but you can't redistribute.
My understanding is that part of the appeal of this chip is the power consumption. 100mW is sounds pretty stingy to me, but I'm not terribly knowledgeable either. So I think they're trading off capability for power consumption by implementing a spiking net rather than a convolutional.
That sounds tautological to me, but maybe I'm not following your argument. I do sense a bit of hindsight in it, though. The initial market for Altair BASIC was as small as it gets.
Statistical Anomaly Detection
I think the 'live' part of streaming might introduce a high noise factor.

What if the programmer could finish a programming session and then go back and see exactly what they have done and reflect on it? What if they could highlight just the interesting parts and leave the uninteresting parts on the cutting room floor? What if they could supply a reflective narrative describing how and why the code evolved? I think these types of experiences would provide more valuable learning experiences than the typical live code stream.

This is what I am trying to accomplish with my project called Storyteller:

http://www.storytellersoftware.com

There is a longer video demo here:

https://vimeo.com/97711978

(Earlier in the life of the project I also emphasized the tool as a version control tool/replacement but I am backing away from that for the time being)
I'm working on the inverse of Yelp, appropriately called Pley. Instead of a public service where users rate local companies, it's a private service where local companies rate their users. The only ones who would be allowed access are the owners and workers of service oriented companies.

It's meant to be a joke and to have something of mine I can actually throw up on github, but I plan on making it actually work anyway, just out of curiosity.
Exploring the virtual reality conjecture [pdf]
Why not just use BitBucket? It's free and reliable and is meant as a repository manager. And trusted like GitHub, but BitBucket also gives you unlimited public AND private repos. Did I mention free?
I think the point is that being employable (even for your own projects) is preferable to the alternative. Indeed having valuable skills is generally better than having money.
That's funny, because I had to read it again too.
The book by Peter Linz for Theory of Computation (https://books.google.co.in/books/about/An_Introduction_to_Fo...)
is also a good text.
This cool research (just like Watson) seems like a loss-leader for selling consulting services which tailor the tech to very narrow, specific AI purposes. They're all breathlessly announced as though revolutionary, but none seem generalizable. Still, investing in so many small bets increases their exposure to a big win in the long run...
Ask HN: Developing a Skillset for Contracting in Europe
I'm a Python developer with a Linux background looking to develop my resume over the next 1.5 years prior to a move to Europe. I'm interested in what advice you could offer.

I'm at a point where I could invest in DevOps and infrastructure skills or go heavily into programming. I've been a developer for 4 years and self describe as intermediate. What I'm looking for is the kind of skillset that would give me mobility throughout Europe so I can travel slowly and focus on seeing new things and living.

I've done a lot of web app backend work, some sysadmin work and really need to step up my knowledge in both depth and breadth. The question is into what? I absolutely hate frontend web work and am frequently bored in web dev.
Seriously, facebook is a federal agents, stalkers and pedophiles dreams come true.
Beware that merely knowing about biases isn't enough to correct them, and yet it may be enough to be overconfident in one's ability to avoid them. As you say, it's easy to not think about things very carefully as it takes less effort.
I thought it gave you only 5 private repos?
Wait. Who in the hell releases something on multiple platforms without testing those platforms a single time?! O_o Multiple platform support has always, ALWAYS, required additional work on every project I've ever worked on. Often significant amounts.
No, that's what you get with the GitHub student account (free for any student with a .edu/school email). BitBucket offers unlimited repositories for free.
WordPress 4.3: What's New
The $800M Family Selling Art Degrees and False Hopes
For a few pennies more (or less) a month you can use AWS CodeCommit. https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/pricing/
Or rather, the new phone would burn jet fuel even more.. That's the main problem, we shouldn't be coding for saturation of resources. It's ridiculous how wasteful apps are these days.
I started with Heroku because it was so fast to get started. The documentation is very good and there are a lot of features that have allowed me to spend more time on building our app as opposed to doing devops/sysadmin. Some things I can do with one command: zero downtime deploy, rollback a release, add/remove dynos, provision a database. The list goes on. I've had several aha moments. My first rollback was a pretty big deal. I had a bunch of dynos running (12 or so) and I pushed a bad deploy. With one command, I was running the previous (working) version of the app. Actually, it was more like a "phew" moment.

Everyone here is right about the costs. It's very expensive. Especially compared to AWS and DO. But how much is your time worth to you? If I have to spend an extra $300 a month on hosting, that's fine--as long as I'm saving more than, say, 3 hours of time not doing sys admin. The dynos are expensive, but you don't have to provision machines and setup autoscaling groups. The database is expensive, but backups and upgrades take only minutes. The addons are all expensive, but... you get the idea.

I've run into limitations of Heroku and we now use AWS as well. I really like AWS, but it's a lot more work. The documentation takes more effort to read, initial setup is more complicated (AMI, IAM roles, Elastic IP, key pairs, etc). AWS is cheaper and the product is great and it does things Heroku can't, but I spend much more time on it.
The Hollerith Machine
Not news. Snapchat has what's important: Panama canals of recurrent eyeballs. They can roll out freemium, ads and ecosystem platform apps and monetize easily. They'd rather grow a bit before tinkering too much and putting off users. Value add things can be tacked on AliBaba-style.

PS: Startups, code a valuable add-on for SnapChat and be sure to engage them early to avoid crossed-signals. That's how to make a few million in short-order (just be sure that the "golden handcuffs" terms are minimal).
Have you made a decision? If not and you'd still like some help email me at samuel at thelittleyes.com and let's setup a time to chat. I coach folks through these kinds of decisions for a living. I'll give you the HN special, no charge for the first hour, and I think we'll probably be able to get you the clarity you need in an hour.
Also runs on a console from seven Moore's Law doublings ago, 720p@30. Though maybe not at the equivalent of medium?
I prefer it that way. Last thing a front-end framework needs is a bunch of legacy cruft, and they're going to continue supporting v3.

The migration doesn't seem like a tall order: http://v4-alpha.getbootstrap.com/migration/ though my v3 projects are going to stay on v3 until it's time for a complete UI redesign.
The main advantages of hand-writing for me (and I noticed this a lot when I was going through The Artists Way), was that it slowed me way down (my mind would try to race past how fast I could write but I would have to remain present), and also that I would entirely focused on the task, because Facebook or another website wasn't just a click away.
The author has a nice essay on why input ought to be better, given all the resources we have available now. He has some good points. Then he shows off his app, and it's full of fields to be filled in. It also supports scribbled notes, or "ink as a type", as "The Power of PenPoint" called it back in 1991. Bricklin is still thinking "spreadsheet", but with a fancier GUI.

We can do better than that today. Far better.

First, the business apparently needs to collect some basic info about a car - license number, odometer reading, make and model, and color. Their form has 12 blanks of routine data to be filled in. The employee is using a device with a camera. So point the camera at the VIN plate or door sticker and read it. Machine reading of text is easily good enough to do that today, especially if you take a few images while the camera is looking at the VIN plate. That gives you not just the VIN, but all the make and model info, plus, if you have dealer access to vehicle data, info on any recalls, maintenance history, and other important things a service writer needs to know.

Show the tablet's camera the license plate and dashboard with the odometer reading, and let it record that data too. If this is an existing customer, you already have their personal info. If not, take an image of their driver's license or credit card and get it from there. You've now filled out most of the form without a single keystroke or scribble.

The only human input required is the customer complaint. That could be taken as audio and video, then transcribed automatically, with stills of the key points displayed and marked up, with comments by the service writer. The transcribed text could even be compressed to the essentials with something like the summarizer that used to be in Microsoft Word, specialized for talking about cars.

Some of the vehicle mechanical info, such as "Idle speed (RPM)" and such should be collected from the test device the service technician plugs into the OBD port. Parts replaced can be collected by showing the bar-coded boxes the parts come in to a camera, or maybe the parts themselves if there's a good recognizer for them.

Auto repair is a good field in which to deploy such technology. Cars have known structure and lots of stored info. Doing this for doctors and cops will be harder, but will have a big payoff.
iPhone 6S Aluminum Bend Test
What are you suggesting? That companies be required to invest a portion of their earnings in r&d or be delisted?

Market efficiency leads to a massive burgeoning of wealth - for investors, producers and consumers. Look at everything around you. All produced by market efficiency ruthlessly killing off poorly managed, run or outdated products and companies.

The siren song of 'dem markets done me wrong' is a pleasant place to submit to - nothing soothes the soul like a blame-figure to pin the ills of the world on - but I would suggest thinking it through a bit further.

For a start, hedge funds have nothing to do with conglomerates acquiring businesses and failing to understand that business.
Incubator for Aerospace Entrepreneurs
It's a good sign for Tesla that the charge stations are so popular. Sure it might be a pain for now but if consumers like them so much the charge stations could become a compelling product differentiator for a long time to come.
It's not really a question, more of a command, and it's a terrible one at that, simply because it is so vague. I often will just ask the interviewer "what are you most interested in hearing about?" and that generally will lead to a more specific question from them, such as "tell me about your most recent project or job" or "What do you find interesting?" or something to that effect.

I'm a firm believer that an interview is a two-way process, and that if you don't feel a question is a good one, helping the interviewer rephrase/reframe it so you can have a more fruitful conversation.
There is already more art than can be consumed in a lifetime. I think at this point, some people really do buy art to support high status artists.
You might also consider our GitLab.com, unlimited repo's and unlimited collaborators, unlike BitBucket.
I don't think that the `n` in the case of malloc would always be relevant to the semantics of the query. In that case, it would still be appropriate to refer to it as constant time.

For instance, you don't typically look at the size of the literals in the query when evaluating query complexity. If it's really unbounded, you probably shouldn't use a relational database.
Why did you post this comment using the account that posted the story, then delete it and post it with another account, then delete that and make a new account to post it?
BitBucket limits you to 5 unique collaborators over all your private repositories. Maybe that's what you were thinking of?
Stingray: 3D Game Engine and Design Visualization
You do realize that your comment could be about Uber itself, right? Cabs have existed forever too.
He's right. Pretend you have 100PB. Write code for that. It'll work for 100MB but have terrible overheads.
Lightweight is an understatement. Listing of files and a bit of metadata extraction plus some simplistic analysis of passwords in the database. Clickbait at its finest.
The buzz around NoSQL is you don't have to worry about scaling the database. There are many, many more options now for e.g. multi-master, sharding, no-downtime copy-on-write migrations, etc., but just the idea of being able to run a tiny subset of queries or writes without having to worry about running out of resource capacity is a HUGE plus.
Strange that your comment was downvoted. A quick bit of research on sites like Alexa shows that Techcrunch has 10x as many visitors as Pando, so why should they expect equal treatment?
Dropbox Now Lets You Drag and Drop URLs to Share Webpages
Looks great! Very elegant design. Probably the thing I liked most was the reading mode, that was a really good idea.
No admin touched this story.
ST3 is still being developed, if slowly. If you use it, I'd encourage you to buy it.
Software That Learns to Drift Could Teach Autonomous Cars
Indeed, so many articles posted really are rambling. This one isn't.
I don't think this is correct. You can have a relational, columnar-stored key-value map that stores any values you want. Bonus: it's super easy to make these kinds of updates ACID. Of course, if you're maxing out the storage space, you're gonna have a rough time with indexes unless you take the EXACT SAME approach as you would with NoSQL.

I don't think there are any "inherent" problems to relational or NoSQL databases, but there are many tradeoffs. The tradeoff of NoSQL databases is that complexity gets very, very difficult to pull off in a distributed fashion. So throw 99% of the indices out the window, dumb your queries down, and cache any joins or scans as much as possible. The upside, I guess, is that the "schema" is pretty irrelevant if it's not your primary key (or secondary, in some databases). But, you lose joins, schemas, subqueries, orderings, many types of transactions, etc, etc, and a lot of "free" stuff that is really only "free" for small numbers of rows per table or strong assumptions about the data.

EDIT: Clarification, spelling.
I've never done that or seen anyone do it, personally
Should students learn coding? Students, schools disagree, poll finds
Missed a huge chance to take on law schools for their absurd price structure. They have been increasing tuition at break neck speed, even as lawyer salaries have shrunk since the recession.

/bitter ass lawyer who's working at 1 am to pay dem SOFI bills.
Blatantly false numbers in this article calls into question anything that the journalist said. Really sad, terrible fact-checking in this one. The population of SZ in 1979 was 30,000 not 300,000...that's an order of magnitude difference...you're talking about a tiny fishing village with no infrastructure becoming a world bastion of manufacturing. It's not hundreds of factories besides Foxconn, it's THOUSANDS. Did the author even go to Shenzhen? Back in the, "good old days," of 2007 when China was really cheap, wages were $7 per hour...you could rip on Shenzhen and compare wages to western countries...now it's up to over $20/day in a lot of places from what I have seen...scarily close to American minimum wage. If you want that $7/day wage you've got to go to inland China. I really don't think this author did his research, the article reads like it was rushed through and it seems like they just read a bunch of outdated articles on the topic and regurgitated them under the vice brand.
This is a good question, I'd like to hear what people think. Not for the sake of sojourning through Europe, but I feel the answers could easily apply to someone wanting to work remotely period.