skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There was a Quirky mid-aisle display at Wal-Marts for a while. I also see their organization stuff at Marshalls/HomeGoods on an irregular basis. Quirky made Wink, the home automation product line, which has a permanent endcap in most Home Depot and Target stores. As the article mentions, the lack of strong branding was one of their problems; it's easy to see their various products throughout a store and not realize they're all from the same company.

http://i.imgur.com/8lExkKy.jpg
The idea of crowd-sourced invention is cool, but they should have kept their products going with crowd-sourced iteration, rather than just abandoning them for the next thing. Or, maybe they could have sold their earlier products off to third parties to continue developing once they'd established product-market fit. I definitely think there's something there, it just needs to be executed better.
Valuable for whom, or for what?

If those did what they claim to do, sure: They would help to allocate resources to invest in projects that created the most goods and services to raise everyone's standard of living. There is certainly value in that, since we all would get more and better capital goods for the same amount of investment.

Sadly, this is no longer the case. I don't really know about finances, but I have seen first hand great engineering companies that got bought by assholes that did not have any money themselves, but used their dark wizardry financial tricks to leverage themselves to the ears.

Then, they proceed to cut costs like there is no tomorrow, again, making the numbers in the accounting books look much better than the real health of the company, all this at the cost of gutting the mid-to-long term feasibility of the business. Finally, they go and use their lies and numbers to find a bigger sucker, and sell the company by a price even bigger than what they paid in the first place.

And you know what, the whole financial industry exist to enable those fuckers to go around dishing chaos and destruction, because earning an honest profit by servicing happy customers is almost never as profitable as dilapidating in months stores of wealth that took decades to build up in the first place. It does not matter if they sell below the real value, since they did not personally invest any time or effort in accumulating the wealth, getting pennies on the dollar suits just fine.
New Slack community for hardware startup support around the world, help us grow
The problem is that the app needs internet access, and access to much of your phone's data, to provide the watch's useful functions. You can't just block internet access without disabling apps that require online data.

That's no excuse for them to then upload all of that data to their servers for monetisation and possible sale.
Add-ons were certainly a big part of it. Firefox 15 fixed most of the add-on problems, see here:
https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/2012/07/19/firefox-15-p...

But there were plenty of other problems fixed too. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for lots of details.

With that in mind, in the future perhaps you could think twice before posting snarky comments based on your experiences from five years ago.
Why quirky failed, kickstarter. It was an awesome idea, but kickstarter handles the long tail, shards and distributes the workload, and is universal. That is why Quirky failed.
Cofounder/CEO here, just finished with Makercon and catching up.

The Glowforge does require a cloud connection to operate. We use cloud vs. local a host of reasons including the motion planner, alignment, image recognition, and faster feature development.

But based on the excellent point made here that nobody wants a paperweight if we fall off the globe, we decided to make a change. We're going to do a GPL release of the firmware so people can do whatever they want, including porting offline functionality. You buy it, it's yours, you should get to do what you want with it.

http://glowforge.com/gpl-licensed-open-source-firmware-for-g...

Thanks for the great feedback.
The internet. Really.

It's like asking "Horse vs Car: who will win?". People in 1900 may have said "horse, of course", but we know the real answer, given time.

Oh, and by the way, 18-24 demographic is watching less and less tv...
He has just made a commitment to release the firmware as GPL[0] when the device launches. It is user flashable.

[0] http://glowforge.com/gpl-licensed-open-source-firmware-for-g...
Glowforge does have both air assist and purge air FYI.
That's a feature, not a bug.
I need to use YouCompleteMe for C++ autocomplete.
The fact that iOS 9 supports the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, which were released in 2011, kind of takes the bite out of the grand conspiracy theory.
An Appetite for Innovation
That doesn't solve any of the problems they listed in the article.
Trello - Color coding on priority, fast notifications and easy to use.

Slack - Quick communication and easy integration to other apps/tools
Yes.

In the final analysis this question is equivalent to "Is it difficult to make a site that can have any piece of it fail to load or be removed at any time?" since website developers have no control over what may or may not make it onto the list of an adblocker.
Due to the excellent suggestions here, in large part. Thanks for the feedback, both positive and critical.
This makes the most sense to me. This kind of innovation was going to happen, would it be centralized or decentralized? For now looks like the latter, made sense to fund both models.
The price the manufacturer is looking to sell, this doesn't make sense. Sure it offers more hardware flexibility than a PI, but its ultimate form factor makes it at best a pi type substitute rather than opening up new possibilities like what the Arduino Nano does.
After extensive research, I uncovered key details about SocialText at the following website

http://www.socialtext.com/
Cameras are here, the software is here too, I've actually toyed around with some implementations and they're definitely good enough.

The big problem that scares me is sports licensing and all the legal stuff attached.

VR will allow lots of cool stuff like that :) . One possibility I was thinking about was putting the cameras on the referees instead of the players themselves (for sports such as soccer).

But I think it'll happen as soon as there's a critical mass of people buying VR headsets.
Quirky was an NYC startup and never seemed to have the buzz of a traditional web or software startup to me (I'm in SF)
The majority of people might not obfuscate their mobile applications, but I think that's a problem in tooling and awareness. A lot more would if they could, and if they knew how.

That being said, there is also a very sizable minority of companies that do obfuscate their mobile applications.
I think HN has an unwritten rule not to post articles behind a paywall.
Putting your money in someone else's hands was probably a lot riskier in those days, and that is priced into the interest rate. If there's a real chance a passing army or crooked king might walk in and take your money, you need to be better compensated.
Boeing publishes photos of secret 1960s stealth plane experiment
Perhaps the Swift conference end of October?

Coupled with the amazing NeXTBSD work that's spun up, I've found myself surprisingly excited about what Swift might become.
You might consider posing a little more substantial a warning if you're going to leave it publicly. Your comment on the flagged comment doesn't leave much context for anyone else coming to this.
White House group considered four ways to unlock encrypted info
Application cache is a fucking nightmare. Service Worker's can't come soon enough.
OnboardIQ (YC S15) Is Hiring Magical Lead Rails Engineer
I imagine his managerial style is leading by example.

More of a "Hey guys, we're going in this direction, follow me!" over a "Hey, we're going this way, off you go!"
DiscoRunner BASIC Interpreter and Applesoft BASIC Emulator
How much of their $$$ did they spend on Wink and related stuff? I'd love to see the economics of that one product. I'll bet it was a major driver of their problems! I experienced poor software, many support related calls required and then a recall because of a broken software update process!
Terrible, terrible arrangement of ads alongside, and hilarious chart in article graphic.

Read this instead.

[http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1612191290]
In some of his recent keynotes (especially the later quakecon ones) he focuses a lot on how he's changed his mind and that he now believes that software development has a lot of "social science" aspects to it. I think he's given a lot of consideration to how one manages a software team, and even though he sometimes disappears into his office to write something like this Netflix app, he still does manage people.
Correct, Adblock Fast’s blocking is meant to be “good enough” (and not catch every single, last ad) but in exchange for much better browser perf than other ad blockers or no ad blocker.
> He keeps going on about SQL not requiring it, but SQL requires it in every statement (the select clause).

haha a string of SQL is not the same thing as a type constrained data structure.

> I'd hate to be the one who has to maintain an admin app that could potentially access 230 tables with dynamic column references scattered all throughout the code and no types to keep things in order.

Thankfully, the client used a database that is capable of enforcing type constraints automatically, so I didn't have to spend time writing business logic to reiterate what the database already knows and strictly enforces, in a language that can't even enforce type constraints anyway. Re-declaring your column names and types in javascript literally does nothing except waste time. You shouldn't be reading through your application code to understand the schema of your database, especially when you're dealing with hundreds of tables.
I guess what it means is that the advertisers were willing to throw more money at him for doing this than he made from selling the app.

Sounds like a stupid plan though as the users will obviously go for something better and the deals will end up being worthless
For those interested, here's their sale motion ( https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5k5SQee7k5pT0hrMTNqVC0ybFU... ).

09/22/2015 | #17 | Motion to Approve (Debtors' Motion for Entry of (i) an Order (A) Approving Bidding Procedures and Bid Protections in Connection with the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business, (B) Approving Procedures for Assumption and Assignment of Executory Contracts, (C) Approving the Form and Manner of Notice, and (D) Scheduling an Auction and a Sale Hearing, and (ii) an Order Authorizing and Approving the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business)filed by Jeffrey L. Cohen on behalf of Quirky, Inc.. (Cohen, Jeffrey) (Entered: 09/22/2015)
Actually, before LLVM bitcode, self-checksumming was quite possible on iOS, and is widely used by many commercial obfuscators. Furthermore, self-checksumming is the root of all good anti-tamper schemes. It prevents someone from automatically patching out your license checks/anti debug/anti jailbreak/whatever. Without self-checksumming, someone can easily patch your app to pirate it, inject a backdoor, or modify it in some unwanted way. So it's really a big loss if you care about those kinds of things.

Self-checksumming via intrinsics and clever layouts is a very interesting idea, but it's impossible for you to checksum a program when you're not 100% sure what it will look like after compilation. For example, even if you manage to correctly 'guess' what machine code your LLVM bitcode would be translated to and adjusted your checksums accordingly, Apple could just update their LLVM bitcode compiler at some point in the future, and invalidate your checksums.

Also Android is a much more interesting platform than iOS, because it allows for self-modifying code, which various commercial obfuscators use in various interesting ways :) Also there are very interesting things you can do with reflection or the JNI in Java.
So, umm, how is it exactly that you found out this exciting news about this and other medical breakthroughs? We could be doing a lot more medical research and a lot less social networking. We could also be doing a lot less medical research and a lot more other things. Those statements are always true and almost never useful.
"I shouldn't need to pay every network or affiliate to block ads."

And you don't. You can do it for free. DNS is quite effective at blocking ads.

It is amusing to see Google trying to push this "contribution" scheme.

Clearly, ad blocking is sending a loud signal to the websites that "make you the product". Websites that are "free" through advertising sales but also attempt to make a record of everything you do at the computer (and are continually becoming more and more successful at it).

There will always be content on the www. I have watched it grow since its inception and from the beginning quality content was contributed without any expectation of return. Why? I really do not know, but this is how it happened.

And I have no reason to believe www users won't continue that tradition even if ads completely disappeared.

Perhaps this is why sites like Google never try to charge people. Because the www has always had heaps of free content. Maybe these large sites, Facebook included, know that if they were to charge, most people would not pay. There might be a backlash.

It is silly to pay for ads to be removed when they never had to be there to begin with. Yes, I remember using search engines before there were ads. But I know there are generations that never experienced that, and who probably find it hard to imagine.

Ads are smothering the flow of content over the www, not enabling it.
I think the Kickstarter model also massively de-risked the process by introducing a pre-order model that gave you a sense of the potential revenue ahead of time before you went an invested $100k on tooling.
Extensive discussion a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10082517
It turns out not to matter (since the numbers are so small) but your math implies that 10^305 people guessing would give a probability of about 9,300 that at least one of them is right on all 1000 coin flips. Since probabilities can't be larger than 1, that's a bit of a problem.

For anyone interested, the full set of steps (that produces a numerically identical result):

Prob[1 or more in 1,000,000 right]
= 1 - Prob[all 1,000,000 wrong]
= 1 - Prob[person 1 is wrong AND person 2 wrong AND ... person 1,000,000 wrong]
= 1 - Prob[person 1 is wrong]^1,000,000
= 1 - (1 - 0.5^1000)^1,000,000
= 1 - exp(1,000,000 * log(1 - 0.5^1000))
= 1 - exp(1,000,000 * log1p(-0.5^1000))
≈ 1 - exp(1,000,000 * -9.33 × 10^-302)
= 1 - exp(-9.33 × 10^-296)
= -expm1(-9.33 × 10^-296)
= 9.33 × 10^-296

log1p(x) = log(1 + x) but is more accurate when x is near zero.

expm1(x) = exp(x) - 1 but again is more accurate when x is near zero.

Both are necessary here to get a result other than "0".
With all due respect to the author, Quirky failed because they didnt care about their community and users. It was a predatory business, like Davison and other companies that prey on the ignorance of their customers.
Quirky failed because a business that exploits their users cannot succeed long term in an interconnectred world.
I am actually looking at that bitcode right now :) You can use this program ( https://github.com/AlexDenisov/bitcode_retriever ) to extract it from the MachO file, then use Xarc to decompress the archive, then use llvm-dis to disassemble the bitcode. You will see it's chalk full of information that is otherwise not available in the machine code.
You should read Tetlock's other work about foxes and hedgehogs in Expert Political Judgment. It presents a theory of why some people are indeed better forecasters than others. It's not lucky or genius, it's more about people who are able to consider several different data points, consider historical precedent, and make a relatively unbiased judgment about what's going to happen. These are the same types of people he sought out for the Good Judgment project, and its these same types of people who were considered Superforecasters making hundreds of forecasts over the course of a year about geopolitical issues.
What matters more: the right to forget, or to be remembered?
Same here.

If someone were just completely up front about what they were doing and came out with "BlockCrappyAds," I'd run it in a heartbeat. I'm OK with small filesize, static ads. I just don't want anything active.

Get me something that will only download ads if they're under some certain acceptable size (with size attributes declared in HTML), only on the base layer of the page (no modal overlays), and only jpgs/pngs/text with no active content. I'd run that.
this tool looks good, do you have a demo?
Sometimes there is a secret master plan behind these actions, sometimes they're doing what makes the most sense. I can see how bitcode might make a lot of sense from a centralized distribution standpoint, and it may work for certain types of apps. But you still may prefer to test and experiment with the actual code that will be distributed to your customers. Seems like a reasonable requirement. Apple ought to have an extraordinarily good and transparent reason to require centralized compilation in the future.
To be clear though, you could contract "would have" as "would've" -- the mistake there is again the mis-hearing as "would of", I suppose.
Thanks for specific answers. I think we've both "proven our point."
I would be curious whether electric planes significantly reduce the carbon footprint of flying. My intuition is that you wouldn't be dumping CO2 and H2O (both fairly potent greenhouse gases) directly into the upper atmosphere, so it would be a huge win, but I am neither a climate scientist nor an aerospace engineer, so maybe I'm missing something.
This is such a re-hashed story. While not good, it's not the big issue people seem to think they keep discovering.

For non-brand advertising this is easily solved by down funnel tracking. Any marketer worth their salt tracks to the 'ultimate goal' and will avoid shadier networks by results based tracking. End of the day marketing value comes down to a ROMI metric. It doesn't matter if 50% of the impressions are fake as long as the total investment pays off. For brand marketing I simply follow the networks that show DM performance as an indicator of quality display.

Generally the worse point for junk clicks is mobile display - particularly in app. Id never advise RON campaigns here without tight monitoring. I like to build white lists rather than a black lists for companies where I handle their marketing for display on mobile.

Interestingly I've been noticing increasing bot clicks on Google search ads. If I can detect this is makes me really suspicious why Google, with all their data/prowess is not.

This would really make interesting reading if someone wants to show this to the world. Even more interesting than the 2012 FB 80% bot claim: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/30/startup-claims-80-of-its-fa...
Homo Naledi 3D Scans
I concede that LLVM bitcode can be obfuscated just like machine code ( with enough effort, and LLVM bugs aside ) . However, you're still losing the ability to self-checksum your code, which in turn means you can't protect against things like piracy or unwanted modification of your binary.

I agree also that Apple probably made this change to better analyze programs being submitted to the app store. That and to recompile programs to use intrinsics more efficiently, as new intrinsics become available.

And finally, while I would not be concerned about Apple reversing my code, certain companies are and have to undertake steps to make that as difficult as possible.
Came here to say this! First thought was "Why god why return to this interface??"
Neat.

I wish there were a collection of such things, where data-structures and algorithms are used in real life (or even at places where it's not visible in everyday life, like inside the Operating Systems).

At http://interviewkickstart.com, we love these little nuggets. They make interview coaching fun and very real.
I see your app is GPLv3 but I don't see any exception in there for Apple, nor do I see any mention of a release for other developers to sign before accepting pull requests.

The vanilla GPLv3 is incompatible with Apple's App Store and they have pulled GPL apps in the past as a result. See: http://www.zdnet.com/article/no-gpl-apps-for-apples-app-stor...

Here's an example of a work-around that would allow you to retain a copyleft license and continue to distribute your app on the app store: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/blob/master/CON...
Learn How to Perform API Automated Testing Using Only Microsoft Excel
Good move in response to a rather vociferous desire.
Oh man, this is the second best thing I could have hoped for after their earlier announcement today. The best thing would have been also open sourcing their cloud software, but I can see how they'd be reluctant to do that given that it is a competitive advantage over other laser cutter manufacturers.

I'm really really tempted to buy one now.
Understood. It's obvious a lawyer has to be a part of this if I decide to go forward. Thanks.
Google Glass Now Project Aura
This may sound like a very shallow comment, but what happens to the Wink stuff? I just bought one of the GE Wink light kits & the Wink hub is a "Quirky" product. It's already been a little buggy, but I figured it'd improve over time. Does GE pick up development/support work going forward?
I don't buy that.

The OrangePi is crazy for what you get. And it's $15 with $3 shipping.

I don't see a reason to buy the CHiP, given I can get a OrangePi ordered right now and have them in 3 weeks.
Previous discussion of original Washington Post article (this one is just blogspam): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10271139
Iirc Signal is open source, so anyone can simply insert a backdoor into the source code and compile it, and then distribute the modified binary.

However, I'm talking about applications for who the source code is not available. If you properly use integrity checks, signature verification, and obfuscation, you can make repackaging and piracy of applications significantly more difficult. With LLVM bitcode this is no longer the case.
Ty! Do you mind filing a bug against the repo, so we have a good place to follow up?
It's a custom glass DC tube with some cool engineering to improve the mode quality to TEM00, which gives us tighter spot size / higher power density. Similar effect to cranking up the power, except you also get tighter kerf and you don't have to make the tube longer.
Is Your Code Too Solid? – Forward 3 Web Summit
This is the impression I got from watching a video linked elsewhere in these comments.
"Swift is a great language, but I'd really like my skills to be somewhat transportable."

If your skills are locked in to a certain language then you're doing it wrong.
So basically, once we get technology that doesn't exist yet, we may get vehicles that take advantage of that technology.
They make it sound simple: apply a rational, scientific mindset to life. Talk about easier said than done. Most of us sink into easy-to-reach reactions that are only good for the simplest situations, and sometimes not even then, and often come with emotion or resentment. Still, the former mindset is a nice ideal to shoot for.
Sorry to tangent the tangent, but will we ever see adblockers hunted down the way torrenters were? The net effect is the same, but the scope (news articles) is much smaller.