skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
35 years ago I was getting into coding for the first time on Commodore Pets and ZX81. I read about The Last One [1] in the computing press in 1981 and thought that maybe the world won't need programmers. Well, the world needs programmers more than ever, since demand for software is only increasing. It's nice to hear that the dream of user generated systems is still alive. We've had many iterations, from the The Last One, through Hypercard, Fabrik, Scratch. It's a powerful vision, which is why people keep chasing it. But it can only address well defined niches. Of course we have had a very powerful end user software authoring system for some time. It uses a visual, grid based, functional programming system and has powerful database and charting features. It's called Excel.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1293278/what-became-of-th...
Sure, my remark wasn't meant to dismiss aphyr blog. I completely agree that there is a big problem, and calling it corrupted seems valid to me as well.

It was more of a sidenote about orms and transactions in general.
I've been thinking about voice interfaces for home automation lately as I've been tinkering with my HA setup, so let me slightly highjack this topic: does anyone have an idea of how to set up a system where you don't have to talk directly into a microphone to get a computer to do stuff? Most current applications (e.g. voxcommando) take care of the 'speech recognition' part just fine, but I don't want to have to go hunt for my phone to turn on the light - I just want to say 'computer turn on light' and have it 'hear' me all the time. But I don't want mics in every corner either, of course.

So a sensitive mic per room, preferably one I could put deploy in severval ways (just put it down, hang at the wall, powered from mains or batteries, ...) that would send whatever it picks up to a central processing server seems the way to go.

Do such things exist? And beyond the hardware, how does one tackle e.g. the privacy problem of having everything you say recorded all the time? I'd love to have a way to say 'computer lights off' when I'm in bed just before I go to sleep, but for obvious reasons I'm hesitant to open myself up to the possibility that any dude with a high-gain antenna would be able to listen in on any sound made there...
Yeah, it's pretty clear that OP missed the point, especially in that his recommended solution is to use lock hints. They really should just update their documentation.
"I use to work in pharma research (at the data acquisition and analysis side, blinded from treatment) and the fact that pharmas are able to start clinical trials and then shut them down without reporting result is a problem."

This Cherry Picking should become a felony? Spit out the data you have on hand, even if incomplete? Give the results of the studies to the FDA, or make whatever data you have available to the scientific community at large?

Why don't they make this information available; because usually the study didn't prove their hypothesis, and they need to start another study hoping the data just might magically change? And with the right 3rd party researchers, in the right foreign countries--poof the data magically seems to turn around? And the company has a new money maker?
Copy-pasted straight from the article, the emphasis is not mine.
Just curious - why can't the organizers of these startup weekends have some kind of legal agreement to protect all parties, especially developers as they seem to be the ones who get screwed most of the time?
I think the AI should do more than just correlate some verbs. It should also be capable of understanding concepts like. If I give the following:
"John and I are brothers. My mother has a brother named James. "
And we ask:
"What is the name of my uncle?"
The initial results are great but in my humble opinion the big quest is to make computer learn concepts.
In Canada, a distinction is made because the fees on debit are much lower (comparable to cash handling costs) and the banks have put tremendous marketing efforts in pushing for debit cards and branding them "Interac."

That said, the cards themselves use exactly the same technology, look the same and debit cards are usually Maestro/Cirrus or Visa/Plus compatible so we can do debit transactions in europe.

The online version of debit however has yet to catch on.
Making the Most of LinkedIn: In the Trenches Episode 10
Data Center Computers: Modern Challenges in CPU Design
High Availability Galera Clusters for Indonesia’s Top ECommerce Payment Gateway
Maybe not in the startup world, but because of the popularity of LAMP and the ubiquity of Windows, a lot of people use WAMP (e.g. via XAMPP) as a local development stack.

It's important to be aware of our own cognitive biases: while Linux is the de-facto standard on the server side and the startup scene is dominated by MBPs and its variants (with a good helping of Linux again, though often in VMs), this only represents a tiny fraction of developers. Dark Matter Developers are a thing.
Meet Review App – new open source app to improve code review processes
Personally I wouldn't want to receive my salary in a currency whose value, relative to the money I have to use everywhere, fluctuates wildly all the time.
I think these two events in the last 65 years count as "fiery crash landings":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Note the latter created an uneducated generation, and as of late we've been learning a lot more people were slaughtered than was generally thought.

Moving forward past the Gang of Four, it's hard to see how this experiment won't end in tears:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

Where it's strictly enforced, it results in what's called 4-2-1, where 4 grandparents are supported by 2 parents (as long as they can) are supported by 1 child. That, the lack of a general social safety net, and the general government policy of financial repression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_repression) appears to be short circuiting a lot of what I presume The Economist article is talking about, for many people are desperately trying to save for their and their elders' old age instead of spending like "normal" consumers. E.g. one reason for the property and other bubbles, which held out the promise of better investment returns.
An even bigger problem in our industry is that, somehow, a lot of us think we are unworthy, lowly enablers of "the business"'s genius ideas. Enabling tirelessly, preferably over a weekend, for a 0.005% share of the company

Grow a pair, people.

BTW, I treat all human beings (coders or not) with equal respect, but I also learned to avoid the "Billy"s of this word like the plague.
Is this what life is, now? We make supplications to the largest corporation we think will help us? We're sliding back into feudalism.
So basically the only example you can come up with is illicit commerce? Guess we should also consider Tide detergent a currency. http://nymag.com/news/features/tide-detergent-drugs-2013-1/
Given that a huge number of transactions will be near 1-2 euros, the average cost in terms of percent could really be 0.8%. Not that I've seen the numbers mind you.
Evolution is a result, not a method. Nothing ever evolves to do anything.
-x is already in there, which is the short version of --proxy...
If at all possible don't do a startup with people you don't really like.

My advice to Bobby would be to stay connected with the developers he bonded with over the event and see if there is another idea they could work together on -- at least then the weekend isn't a waste of time.
It's hard to agree on that, because I'm not a US citizen. Anyway what NASA / EU space programs are doing is far more significant for humanity ( IMHO ) than what Facebook Oculus and Snapchat are trying to achieve, so it looks really unfair.
From TFA

"You will receive a perpetual fallback license once you pay for a year up front or 12 consecutive months."

This is good news - they've listened to their customers and alleviated the key concern - losing access.
Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Ups by 29% (2010)
This seems like a decent compromise, though I'd have preferred it if the version available on the fallback perpetual license was the one that was available on the last day of the subscription rather than the first - since now (if I'm understanding correctly), the model forces you onto a fixed old version of the software if you stop payment. I guess it's better than not having access to the IDE at all though.

Also, this might simply be a coincidence - but it is Friday afternoon. I know I've read some PR-related articles advising the release of bad news on a Friday..
Advice for not getting overwhelmed by feedback
This always pops up when we have audits performed; Solutionary in particular seems to just go by version number with ssh, and doesn't seem to recognize that RHEL has backported numerous fixes into it's RPMs.
See Amazon echo
Do you consume gold and silver?
I made one of these my cover image on Facebook and called it The Ice Mountains of Pluto, which is a Golden Age Science Fiction story title if I ever heard one. But this isn't SF! It's a real photo! That was taken by an atomic powered robot! Amazing...
Address randomization defense does not protect against stagefright exploits
I mostly agree with you (UAF is more interesting but more difficult that bound checking), but I would nitpick on details:

- yes you can opt-in and opt-out on a case-by-case basis in Rust for bound checking but can you globally remove checks and globally force checks?

- as for UAF protection being non local, a true UAF protection true but a 99% solution such as overwriting the data with know garbage on free (0xDEADBEEF) and ensuring that the allocator doesn't reuse virtual addresses may be good enough in practice, no?
But yes it's probably too expensive to release with such configuration..
Daily vesting schedule :P
Agreed. OP should have seen this coming from a mile away but instead he got tricked into doing a weekend of freelance work.
The Library Freedom Project
I just wonder what the effect of having a tool like this available would be. Most websites don't use paywalls because of a combination of two factors:

a) they don't believe it to be a good business model.

b) they don't want to put the effort into implementing such a system themselves.

c) they believe paywalls hurt the open web.

If google solves b, we will see a lot more websites putting up paywalls. How is that good for the open web?

I understand the article is trying to say "if Google doesn't do it, someone else will, and if that happens the open web will die even faster". But the assumption that someone will do it and that paywalls will become the standard at some point is still just that: an assumption. I don't think an assumption is good enough for a company that values the open web (assuming Google values the open web) to sacrifice part of it because it would be better than if someone else did it.
You obviously sound like you're interested! Why not fork the repo, contribute? :) It's a great demo project, and I love seeing these on HN.

OP - Instead of linking directly to en/Stanford Parser etc, you should get together a list of dependencies people need to run your application. Usually as easy as 'pip install pattern' (for the 'ImportError: No module named en') which is `import pattern.en` :-)

I like it! It's nearly 2am so better catch some sleep, but I'm definitely going to have a look further tomorrow.
Isn't the fun of writing NES software basically doing it like guys would have done in the 80s? If you want to do something modern why even target a platform that hasn't been manufactured for decades?
From 8 to over 450 Customers in Less Than 96 Hours...and how I did it!
Patentsview
Disappearing? You better think twice, everything is recorded publicly.
Show HN: Challenging the concept of the URL by making it carry the content
The post said he/she wanted to turn it off because they were too cold, which seems a strange response. Surely what they wanted was to adjust the thermostat temperature?
I was intrigued by the initial transcript, but disappointed that it was edited (lightly). For the question "Why did Mary cheer?" the screenshot showed that the simple AI literally answered "because IT be HER FIRST TIME WINNING". This is correct, but the author edited it into a correct sentence for us.

I think it is too much to call this "capable of basic reading comprehension". Surely, "simple sentence parser can answer reading comprehension questions" would be more correct?

I mean it is quite an accomplishment, but there is no understanding here. In some natural languages with less inflection or change in word order, for example, you could answer any "why" questions with the regex /($question_string) because (.+?)\./ against some source corpus, and then $2 will contain your answer. It doesn't work with English due to slight changes in word order, but surely it would be too much to state that this regex is capable of basic reading comprehension in languages it does work in.... If I'm allowed to massage the question the way the author massaged the output, look at this fine result:

http://ideone.com/84QSHC (output at bottom)

Would you say that 14-line Perl program is capable of basic reading comprehension? I wouldn't!
Nice, this is a work in progress of a book on building general purpose AIs. I worked with Ben at Intelligenesis/Webmind and years later I brought him in as a consultant on a medical AI project. To say that he is full of interesting ideas is an understatement.

A little off topic, but after the recent news of a deep neural network trained in a day to play expert level chess, I am starting to believe that Hinton's hack to train many level networks actually has some promise for general AI. Another few clever optimization hacks and faster/cheaper hardware might be enough.
Previous attempts at scientific management of housing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
Online Poker players targeted by card watching malware
> SET SESSION TRANSACTION ISOLATION LEVEL SERIALIZABLE

doesn't get much clearer?
Couldn't help it either. Their margins must be amazing.
That's quite common within Europe, where a ticket from Warsaw to Zurich can be significantly cheaper than into the other direction.

In this case it makes a modicum of sense. Chalk it up to differences in purchasing power.

I waited a few days, and re-ticketed again, and the price dropped from $1690 to $1463 - so that's also odd.

Not really. Airline pricing is very much based on mathematical models. When the system determines that the flight won't be sold for $1690 it lowers the price.

The trick is to fill every seat on the plane as expensively as possible, but not to leave any empty seats. Check out this article for details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_management .

In principle: There is no product going stale faster than an empty seat on a plane after the doors close.
This is familiar it happens to most people eventually when the BBC discusses an issue that one actually knows something about. Their independence since the Iraq war fallout has been seriously weakened.
I know exactly what I'm talking about and am aware of the deprecation. I'm talking historically i.e. when people wanted managed long-running workflow hosting, monitoring and WCF correlation on the cheap instead of fishing out for Biztalk orchestration style integrations and licenses they jumped on that bandwagon.

People are stuck with it now, deprecation or not.
I don't live anywhere else, so I can't really speak to that.
I understood that the 0.4% deal meant that at the end, they would together decide what happens with the project. Parties who decided to go forward and create a company would give out 0.4% to the members of the team that would not go forward in exchange for their week-end contribution.

>John explained that he’d spoken with Startup Weekend organizers and was told that contracts aren’t allowed from the event, so he asked for a handshake deal. Billy said he was happy with a handshake deal, and quickly moved the conversation forward without any handshaking actually taking place.

I did misunderstand that paragraph. I thought that as "contract were not allowed from the event" the "Handshake Deal" must have been something different, like they would be all equal partners for example.

If the handshake deal means "we all agree to 0.4% equity if we do no further work" it means at least that, Billy should have mentioned the 0.4% in the message about the company being 50/50 with his friend.

Also, the idea was from Billy but the winning Startup Weekend project was a joint effort, not something Billy hired Bobby, John, Brad, Jason (team paladin), Josh, Clay, Hayden, and another John to do for him.

I think the feeling of betrayal from Bobby is that the company was founded, with a third party, assuming to use the assets he and his friends worked on, _without them being involved in the process in any way_.

The way things should have worked out for him to be happy would have been is if after the end of the Startup week end they had mutually agreed on what to do going forward. Instead, Billy moved forward and then asked the devs if they wanted to join his company that he created.
Why new employees are hired?
If it makes you feel better to knock the author down a peg, by all means.

But don't equate the two. The author built software and expected professional discussion about a business opportunity. Billy attempted to take everything using his 'existing' incorporation that was against the rules.

These actions are not equal, and the author highlights that there were plenty of warning indicators he should have, but did not pay attention to.
Why are you ending every sentence with a question mark? It makes you sound unsure?
In general, it can take between 7 and 14 days to fully recover.
Source: http://mentalhealthdaily.com/2014/03/25/caffeine-withdrawal-...
> offensive not oppressive

What?! I mean 'oppressive language' as that phrase is used in various systems of communications modeling, such as NVC and Active Listening. Why are you saying that I mean something else?

> he's as shady as he claims Billy to be

This is, at best, a tu quoque fallacy. Why are you doing damage control?

At the end of the day, this isn't even about Bobby and Billy, but about all the Bobbies and Billies you meet in the tech scene generally.
Ditch your ORM
I am a mechanical engineer and lots of my friends have a thesis where appendix 3 is a bunch of printed MATLAB code. Of course in this case it doesn't matter because no one will ever read it.
Spilling coffee on your desk has never been more catastrophic
Wow, is that really how you read your parent? I thought his meaning was crystal clear. Why just assume he doesn't understand evolution?
Words do not offend me per se, but to me such utterances are a huge warning flag - they indicate a certain personality that I usually do not wish to associate myself with
In the part that can be accessed (2nd link) they mention it's a within-subject setup so yeah "with all 5 subjects simultaneously" is correct.
within-subject basically means each subject gets all the treatments as opposed to between-subject which is the typical A/B-test setup.
I really appreciate your excellent insight here, thank you.
> I don't really understand the concept of this Startup Weekend.

Very few Startup Weekend companies last more than a few weeks after the event ends - it's rare that they turn into a 'real company'. I (and many other people) view it as an opportunity to meet new people, toss around ideas, work on an interesting project for a weekend, and solve problems that you wouldn't otherwise be exposed to.

> People come with ideas, volunteers work their asses off to make it happen, then the idea guy gets all that stuff for free as well as a monetary award for having had the best volunteers donate their code to him?

I've done numerous Startup Weekends, and the usual result is that winning teams split the prizes. Team members can continue building it if they want to, but usually teams just go their separate ways.

When you grow to a certain size, there are bound to be some unhappy stories. I think Startup Weekend is an awesome event, although I can understand why it wouldn't appeal to some people.
> That's the reason they recommended to use a payment gateway that implements all those local payment solutions. For example, in Germany you loose a lot of customers if you don't offer direct debit (ELV) as many don't own a credit card (and don't want to).

I can't imagine wanting to give out my bank details to allow direct debit of my account to every online retailer I do business with. Weird.
On the other hand, I do sort of believe that the work that Oculus and other VR companies are doing is going to help the first manned mission to Mars keep from going insane.

Oh man, I would love to try VR in zero-G. I wonder if the visual ground reference would take over for the lack of vestibular ground reference? ZOMG! There is science to be done!
> Because of this MySQL change being backwards incompatible, it also broke restoring backups.

No matter how you paint it, if MySQL isn't able to restore a backup created with the backup utility of the same version, then this is MySQL's fault.

It is absolutely not acceptable for a backup utility to run through but produce something that then cannot be restored. I would have expected mysqldump to blow up or even better, the newer daemon to not start up if it sees a schema that it doesn't support any more.
Try Japan. Credit cards won't be accepted half the places you go and only a small percentage of ATMs will allow you to withdraw money from a foreign account at all.
The Bioethics Dilemma
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10233410
I've thought this forever; there should be one service with a few levels of content:

(*) free/public - encourage people to come to your site!

($) blog

($$) opinion article

($$$) solid multi-page feature

($$$$) they went out and made a bloody documentary

It's not even that it's difficult to build. YC should just build it as they are out of the Google/Facebook/Microsoft want to own everything ever written equation.

If there is one system for this you can give search engines access for free and even allow people to share articles with relevant people.

There is no paywall, you pay per article a fixed fee per $ everywhere. There is a value system built in if people think the articles were bad. Better tiers of users can have different levels they can charge. There is not need for micropayments as the wallet you top up with $10 per time even though articles cost, say, multiples 5c.

JS toolkit to bring up the "authorise" credits dialog ala Facebook friends dialog.

Bookmarking... and loads of other features would be easy to add.

It would make loads of money that.
It was a web application in Python. It was at a startup weekend. It was 2-3 days of work. Can we let it go? Do we have to go to the internet to post about it with screenshots of chatlogs and all?

I feel so awkward reading this post.
Make your screen touch sensitive (sort of)
This is something that happens with HN, by the way. Links are not underscored, so it is not immediately obvious that you have to click on someone's name, the domain, the timestamp, or the comment count. I personally had this problem when the "link" link to a subthread disappeared.
This is why Xi Jiping is making stamping out corruption one of his top public priorities, more so than any previous Chinese leader in modern history.

And/or this campaign is destroying rivals to his power....

He is also on record that he wants China to move forward to have proper rule of law.

And if so, we'd better hope he's a 2nd Lee Kuan Yew. Except as you note, the scales don't even vaguely match, trying to effect such a policy change without well neigh unimaginable reforms all the way down to the local level strikes me as equally unimaginable.

One of the reasons to equate the rule of law with "democracy" is checking the power of local potentates; hard to see how a huge, all powerful state like the PRC can do that from the top down.