skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the idea is to pick niches that are small now but will become big in the future. Build the only programming language available for the Altair and you have a high-margin monopoly on a market of a few thousand machines. Build the only operating system for every IBM PC and clone, and you have a high-margin monopoly on a market of hundreds of millions of machines.

That's behind the common SV wisdom of "catch a wave", "ride a trend that's larger than yourself", "find markets, don't try to create them", etc.

The pitfall is that it requires some degree of future-prediction, and predicting the future is left as an exercise to the entrepreneur. The guy who built the first programming language for the Altair is the richest man in the world; the guy who built the first programming language for the Alto [1] has largely been forgotten by history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
I never saw them at Trader Joe's but they are always there at Indian grocery stores in NYC/NJ and it is reasonably priced.
Auto is a marketing game. The words used to sell the same BMW in the West are different, from the words used to sell it in Asia. And Apple, all said an done is the worlds best marketing company. Cant wait for Jony Ive's superficial bullshit to go where its never gone before.
I ran the “Convert > To Latest Swift Syntax” on an app with about six view controllers, four views, a network service, and three cocoapods. It worked surprisingly well, most of the changes were really just suggestions ("this var something could be a let something"), small change to how NSData unwraps.

I did have to guess around an obscure compile issue (solution: "Clean Build Folder"), but after that it was clear sailing.

My overall Swift experience has been terrific. I’m not the first to say this, but to anyone who’s wondering if it’s “ready”, yeah, it’s ready.
New Tote Bag and Arctic Zone Cooler Coming
Notes from Tech Inclusion 2015
Traveling to new places, having sex, exploring a new cuisine, going to a concert, hiking in nature, all of those things and a billion more you're surely familiar with, and you won't find them universally as part of this one particular job.

Work is fine, but doing nothing but work which is what Elizabeth's life seemingly alludes to, means you're missing out on all of the above. If you truly love life that way, so be it, to each their own, but for the vast majority of people life's desires are much less lopsided and there's a much bigger desire for a different balance. And that doesn't mean you have to hate your job. I like my work, I also like going home. Liking just working is like eating just bread n cheese and nothing else. I quite like it but I'm quite happy to eat other things, too.

Most of those people would even go so far as to liken a love for work and nothing but work, at all, as a sign of some kind of addiction. Can it be genuine love for a life spent just working? Well yes, absolutely, but knowing nothing else, I'd definitely be inclined to assume that a person who works, does nothing but work, is probably not fully aware of the richness that life outside of work offers, is scared or intimidated by it (it's easy to say no to love, or friends, or family, if it hurt you in the past, or say no to sports if you don't feel you fit in), or is somehow addicted to work in a way that's not completely free. Again, exceptions can exist, but those are reasonable assumptions when talking about such an extreme case of someone working and doing nothing but working for many years on end and no intention of stopping.
You can keep saying that but it has a long, well documented history of harassment. It might be about those other things too but I strongly feel that name has been poisoned beyond recovery.
That's a nice worldview, but it is predicated on the assumption that people are basically good, as suggested by Rousseau. Many of us adhere to a more gloomy philosophy as suggested by Hobbes, that people are more likely than not to be selfish assholes given the opportunity (as demonstrated by the subject of the story). From a game-theoretic point of view, you need a strategy for dealing with defectors, just as in nature plants and animals need to evolve responses to parasitism or suffer the consequences. Symbiotic/cooperative mechanisms which are mutually beneficial can emerge in nature and in markets, but it's by no means a sure thing that they will in any given instance.
So, here's my take on the Uber-ification of cars:

1) Cars have a useful lifespan far longer than the car loan payment. This will continue to favor private car ownership until the maintenance and upkeep costs outweigh the marginal cost of calling an Uber (or whatever we'll have in the future). I'm not sure when that point will hit, or if it ever will. Electric cars are very low maintenance (battery packs are expensive, but that is fixable).

2) Cars have a significant delta between the high end and low end. You can easily see several hundred-thousand dollar cars driving on urban streets. They're a status/luxury symbol, and aspirational for a large number of people.

3) Cars-on-demand will, for some people, never replace the comfort of having a vehicle waiting for them in their garage/driveway. For the same reason hot desk-ing never caught on, it's nice to have a "home" where you can leave your usual creature comforts when on the road. I don't currently have a car (or car commute), but if I did, I can imagine it being a bit discomforting to have an unusual set of surroundings, lack of creature comforts (my gum in the cupholder, tissues in the center console, my phone already hooked up to bluetooth, etc.).

4) Busses, even if self-driving, are not going to replace dedicated vehicles (see the group shuttles from airports as to why).

It feels like the car as a status and convenience symbol is here to stay for the foreseeable future (certainly our lifetimes). And making cars for upper-middle/upper class folks is very profitable. Sure, Apple wouldn't make a $5000 car no more than they'd make a $50 mobile. But a $40k-100k car? I think they could hit that one out of the park.
What I got from reading this article is the impression that it makes absolutely no sense to use the F-35 for close-air support. It is inferior in performance and far more expensive to operate than the A-29 for CAS missions. Here in Canada, politicians are dithering and dickering over whether or not to buy the F-35 now that it's looking less impressive and the weak Canadian dollar has made it far more expensive. For some inexplicable reason, the prevalent idea is that the RCAF should own and operate just one model of fighter. This idea needs to change.

The reality is that Canadian planes have not engaged in air-to-air combat since the Korean war, but virtually every conflict the CF participates in requires close-air support. That mission is currently fulfilled by CF-18's. The A-29, or a similar plane, could provide superior CAS capability for far less money. Then, as an added bonus, the successor to the CF-18 would not need to be compromised for CAS, as the F-35 is. Canada could look for a pure air-superiority fighter, and buy a smaller number of them because they would not be called upon to perform CAS. The end result would be an air force that's better at it's primary roles and far cheaper, and Canadian forces (and their allies) on the ground would be far safer.

Maybe I'm wrong?
I'm still confused as to why Apple hasn't considered purchasing Tesla.
If you can achieve profitability, then you could presumably wait for your competitors' business models to fail and then rake it in when all their customers have to migrate. They pay all the costs to build up your customer base then go away.
Live Emoji Emotions
The more I hear about Apple making a car, the more it seems inevitable.

Apple's revenue is 180 billion dollars. If they enter a new market, it has to be big. How many high margin billion dollar industries are there? The entire watch market is just around $50 billion dollars a year. If Apple wants to continue growing like it did in the past, the watch is a distraction. They need to aim for something much bigger.

Besides the financial reasons, I think it's the perfect time to break into the market. The switch to electric motors levels the playing field, giving newcomers an edge if they can move fast. But the most important part is the integration of all the systems in the car, most importantly the digital user interface. Todays cars have horrible interfaces. Manufacturers are too busy covering every possible niche with dozens of models, which makes it impossible for them to make a single great car. And even if they tried, they are too dependent on component suppliers to create a single, integrated experience of the kind Apple does.

There are two questions I wonder about:

1. How will Apple be able to make use of their experience in electronics when they move to a completely new industry?

2. What are the technical tricks Apple has up their sleeve? The iPod had hard drives and the click wheel, the iPhone had multitouch and a SoC that enabled a real browser, the watch had force sensitivity, haptic feedback, and a pulse meter. What will the car have?
Exxon knew about climate change decades ago, spent $30M to discredit it
I have absolutely no objection to the opinion and said about three times that I was glad to have read it. The exact same opinion can be worded in different ways. It's not about being diplomatic, it's about being informative versus inflammatory.

If you try to read it literally what does "one of the most unique scumbags I've ever come across" mean exactly? It's not possible to translate this into an informative statement - it contains too little information, and "one of the most unique" is not even an oxymoron, it just has no informative content. (Some people consider "most unique" to be a grammatical error.)

So if it's a reflection of the author's emotions, it should be stated in those terms. But if the author takes a moment, he (or she) can make it far more informative. This isn't reddit.
>There is no situation where I want to be manipulated into buying a service or product I didn't specifically come to a page for.

Counterexamples:

* Paid placement on Google Search pages for exactly the thing you're searching for.

* Affiliate link ads for products on pages that review the product.

* Paid reviews of games, or products on Amazon: Many reviews posted on Amazon, and some professional YouTube reviewers, are paid reviews. If I'm in the review section of a web site, I am there to see a review. If I'm searching for a game review on YouTube, I want to see a review. I expect to be told that they got a product for free to do the review, but it's also the primary content. But it's also a paid ad.

Advertising is not just psychological manipulation to prefer Pepsi to Coke. It's also communication of the existence of a product to a potential audience that wants that product.

>There are no good ads.

You're using that term again, and I don't think you know what it means.

If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that I don't want," then the statement is tautological.

If you use the term to mean "ads are anything that is paid content," then that would exclude anything that is relevant but that had been paid to be included on that page. I've seen that happen many times -- that some new product is bootstrapped into organic search results via paid advertising.

What is your definition, if not the above?

And how do you expect a new product to be promoted if not through advertising? You don't just grow organic search results by magic, and waiting for word of mouth to be enough to promote a product is a pretty sure way to kill a company. Even advertising by getting a product placement on blogs tends to be practically worthless in terms of conversion numbers. Are you just saying "no new products are necessary, I'm fine with what I have"?
Fixing missing dependencies in build systems (2014)
I never understand why PBKDF2 gets so little love. It's easy to use, it's easy to implement correctly, it's standardised. scrypt is cooler, but PBKDF2 is just fine.
I'd love to see what could be done to these with some selective farming.

Heck, a good number of years ago, this is what a wild banana looked like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/In...

If some enterprising farmers can figure out how to minimize the seeds and other less useful qualities, then there's a good chance this will be a new staple.
I think western writers have a silly perspective on India. It's more diverse than the European Union, really! How can one say anything at all about all of India at once?
I know for a fact those aren't the numbers for Candy Crush.

That's from an arbitrary index. You can hardly conclude the cost of install for a specific app from those numbers.
It seems that organizations where security is a compliance-driven process are barely concerned or not concerned at all about security breaches, only regulators.

Some of those processes are a fucking joke. The HIPAA technical safeguards include nothing particularly interesting; the hard part is the paperwork and legal ass-covering. Some PCI-DSS "auditors" are nothing more than salespeople who bought Nessus or similar and charge $10k/pop to run it, slap a logo on its report, and email it to you. Security regulations that businesses at large actually seem to care about have nothing at all to do with secure software engineering, just checking boxes like "have a firewall" and "have a password policy" and "have a network security policy" as if producing an endless trail of Word documents will make you less vulnerable.
Even though it's hard to imagine Apple making a car, there is an awful lot of smoke around this. There has to be a fire somewhere. Lots of people are wondering how Apple can differentiate in the car market - I think (surprisingly) it comes down to price. Few people may remember this, but when Apple announced the iPad, people were shocked at how cheap it was. People knew the iPad was coming and were predicting it would start at $1000, easily. It cost $500.

Leaving out driverless car tech, which I'm not sure whether Apple will have ready for launch, I think the Apple Car will look and function like a $100,000 car - but will cost significantly less. Say, half the price. Ive, in a recent interview, spoke about how he hated so many cars on the road. Not because they were cheap, but because they were poorly designed and put together with such little care. I think, unless he's gone off the deep end into the luxury market (which he very well may have!) he would want to produce a car that is really great - but still affordable enough that lots of people will be able to afford it[1].

All of that being said, and no matter how much Apple cares about the mass market, Apple will want to keep their high margins. They'll need to bring down manufacturing costs considerably. However, if anyone can do it, it's Tim Cook. He's well known for being a wizard at managing supply chains. Perhaps it'll be their first product assembled entirely by robots, who knows.

We'll see what happens but if Apple are able to produce a very high quality car at a reasonable price, I suspect that it will be extremely disruptive. In the UK at least, pretty much every car under £30,000 is utter garbage. I'd love it if Apple could change that.

[1] I suspect, as with Apple Watch, there will also be a high-end version of an Apple Car. It will probably have the same functionality (i.e. it won't just be a super-car) but will have extras, like a Hermès leather interior. I, for one, look forward to customising a car like a new Macbook - current car customisation screens are a pain (besides Tesla, actually, theirs isn't too bad).
I believe it's called "money."

As in, "I wish to exchange my fantasy internet points for money."
Does anyone here agree with me that it's weird that every article about Theranos is actually an article about Elizabeth Holmes? It seems most other high profile startups inspire a mix of articles, some about the founder, some not.
Conjunctive mode verb ("might") in the title -> bullshit.
There is a movie from a decade ago called "Life and Debt." It explores how international loans and aid have actually suppressed the local economies of the countries they tried to help.

For example, chicken breast meat is very popular in the western world. Once they remove the white meat where does the rest of it go. What the producers can't sell domestically in the US or Canada they export to developing countries at cut rate prices. This drives the local farmers out of business.

Before donating fruits to countries in need (and can grow the same fruit) think long and hard about the impact that help might have on their local economy. In any other scenario this would be considered dumping and that country would be taken to WTO court.
That makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense that Apple would start out there.
The purpose of the industry isn't to provide steady revenue to drivers. That's a non issue that will be solved by drivers quitting when the price gets too low.
Isn't this essentially how Gates financed the purchase of DOS?
Is that big thing on a top a heatsink?
"Literary fiction" might sound redundant, but in fact it's jargon used by critics, usually to describe a certain range of writing styles in which all of the implied drama takes place in the characters' inner emotional states rather than anything explicitly described in the narration or dialogue. It's usually contrasted with "genre" fiction, I guess because they wanted a broader term than "pulp."
Maybe they have and Elon won't sell.
TV ads can be quite price-effective if you have the right strategy, are catering to a broad enough market, and have a good pro. Fantasy football has such broad market appeal that pretty much any ad buy is going to reach a significant number of people that play it.
Candy Crush brought in $1.5 Billion dollars in revenue in 2013[0]. In 2014 it had 93 million users[1]. That means Candy Crush brings in at least $16 / user / year. I'm guessing they don't really care what the cost per acquisition is when they are making that much per user.

[0] http://bgr.com/2014/02/18/how-much-money-does-candy-crush-ma...

[1] http://www.gamespot.com/articles/93-million-people-play-cand...
> I believe

That's why it is called "fiat"
Do you means this? https://www.smacktls.com/#skip
What about security?
Ohh, ok. Yeah that's right. There is a dish in Kerala that's made from the unripe fruit and it does have a kind of meaty mouth-feel.
Do you have any information at all about what they are doing?
It's pretty funny that this even needs to be said, but for some reason it does. This stuff is business 101. Irrational exuberance anyone?
Now someone just needs to write a small converter that instantly converts an existing Chrome extension for Firefox, and a script that allows people to install from the Chrome market, too, and instantly the available extensions for both browsers doubles.
I've actually seen it cause numerous issues. For example, consider this pseudocode:

// Returns binary data
shaPass = crypto.sha256(userPassword)
// returns an scrypt password
crypto.bcrypt(shaPass)

I've seen many people pass binary data into functions that will terminate reading the string at a null byte. This obviously limits the strength of the number of bytes before a null byte is hit in the binary data (mostly only concerns PHP and C).

Just noticed someone else posted the ircmaxwell blog, which is the best writing on this topic.
NW.js vs. Electron
Atlassian has a $100M marketplace for developers
Bank of America Files Patent for Cryptocurrency Wire Transfer System
Are you now implying that there is some "smog multiplier" below which you are more upset about reduced performance? What is that multiplier? How many asthmatic children are required for your driving satisfaction?

I have no explanation for your reading difficulties.
from all accounts, it makes her life extremely enjoyable. there have definitely been lots of times i was eager to get home from work and spend the rest of the evening/night hacking on my open source projects; if i were a more driven person i could well imagine being happy spending my entire life that way.
>after a 2 hours walk in the mountains (close to Kodaikanal, a beautiful place)

Where near Kodai? Yes, lots of jackfruit grows there, some height below the town.
Saw a calculation that estimated it at $0.25 / day at current hashrates.
Yeah. I agree, there should be some signal when looking through searches what is paywall content vs what is free. I'd be for Google punishing sites that don't differentiate (at least without putting to much thought into the subject).
Himal Chuli FTW.
Virtual Reality Filmmakers Document Attempts to Save Endangered Rhinos
> Either redditors are learning to ignore offensive, Hitler-mentioning trolls

It is ridiculous to suggest that any mention or comparison to Hitler or Nazis is automatic troll.

These were important historical events, and it is essential we keep talking about them and always remember what happened.

If someone or something leads to Nazis or Hitler, that needs to be pointed out, not shot down. Otherwise, we end up with Hitler and Nazis.
+1 for mentioning the "Clean Build Folder" issue. I was stuck on that for about an hour yesterday, then I found this post:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32586144/upgraded-to-swif...

I didn't know about using the Alt key to reveal "Clean Build Folder", and I've been doing iOS dev for years. I'll add this to the list of unhelpful compile errors that are fixed by cleaning the build.
React Native Example App: Navigation
There is a surge of tooling aimed at production secret management, this has pros but there is a real danger that the standards around cert management are thrown deeper into flux as a result? Just me?
Garage / driveway? What's that? Hum. Clearly you don't live in a densely populated city, where, you know .. the vast % of the population does and is migrating to.

I think if you lived in a condo, and there was always a queue of Apple luxury vehicles waiting at the bottom of the elevator, you'd be good to go.

The reason this hasn't taken off before is because people are bad drivers. Borrowed cars get very roughly treated.

Also, try parking in a big city. It's insane. Much better to just get dropped off.
These two comments from the /r/Bitcoin thread [1] sum it up nicely:

"So it's an overpriced SHA256 ASIC attached to a Raspberry Pi? For $400?" [2]

"I'd rather just buy $399.99 worth of Bitcoin..." [3]

EDIT: Its first-listed "feature" on Amazon [4] seems disingenuous at best:

"Buy digital goods with the constant stream of bitcoin mined by a 21 Bitcoin Chip"

especially since the makers themselves refute this in their FAQ [5]:

"Yes, you can indeed make a profit with the 21 Bitcoin Computer. However, you would do so not by directly selling bitcoin, but by selling digital goods _for_ bitcoin. That is, you are not going to get rich by immediately selling the bitcoin mined by the device for offline currency, but you can potentially do very well by selling digital goods and services to others for their bitcoin."

In other words, there will hardly be a significant "constant stream of bitcoin mined" as the tech specs [6] make clear:

"the 21 Bitcoin Chip has an efficiency of approximately 0.16 Joules per Gigahash and can calculate 50-125 Gigahashes per second"

At the current difficulty, that would produce somewhere between 0.01289890 and 0.03224725 bitcoins per month [7]. Even if the difficulty remained constant, it would take many years to recoup the initial $400 investment.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3lucwl/21co_websit...

[4] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014RD021C

[5] https://21.co/faq/#making-a-profit

[6] https://21.co/faq/#technical-specifications

[7] https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator