skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "money could be better spent" argument seems kind of silly when you think about how much more money is spent on efforts directly or indirectly related to killing people. As long as that's still a thing, I don't have a word to say about the humanistic benefits of NASA's funding.

Anyway, the point of NASA and space exploration is to inspire people, to fill them with wonder and dreams, and that is invaluable. Humans want to actually go into space, sending robots and telescopes is just in service of that. There are many ways that we could better focus our efforts to solve various Earthly problems, and we're generally doing other things with our time and resources. Of those things, I would say researching space travel is pretty low on the list of targets for redistribution.
Whether you believe in my innocence or not, the CFAA actually does have a line about "password trafficking," which was alleged by the government -- but not charged.
> How can they possibly be letting a freshly convicted felon talk like this?

Because the conviction, much like the government's accusations and case, is bullshit.
Don't forget to vote in 10 days.
Attempt at layman's terms:

The EU requires that data processors (like AWS) comply with certain privacy practices in order to transfer data between the EU and non-EU countries.

Much like HIPAA, the mechanism the EU uses is the requirement of a private contract. Here, it's called a Data Processing Addendum. In HIPAA, it's called a Business Associate Agreement.

Source: CEO of a private HIPAA PaaS on AWS, running EU customers w/ this Data Processing Agreement in place
Precisely my problem as well, if only pass had a user-friendly interface under windows..
Sous-vide is amazing but I can't believe how expensive they typically are.

Because I couldn't believe it, I built my own for $45 using weird things from amazon. It didn't even take any electrical work or programming and can be setup in about a minute:

Cheap fish tank pump: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EWENKXO

Cheap hot plate: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005T0SN0K

And the star of the show, a temperature modulator with a standard plug: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00V4TJR00

Put a pot of water on the hot plate, insert fish tank pump, plug hot plate into the Willhi. Put your meat into a regular ziplock bag, leaving it open, dip it into the water. The pressure of the water will cause the air to leave the bag, creating a vacuum (you can find many demonstrations of this technique on youtube). Clip the bag to the side of the pot using some clothes pins. Bam! DYI sous vide.

Generally it maintains the temperature within +/- 1 degree Fahrenheit, which is good enough for a rare steak. I had this incredibly dangerous coffee heating element at first, which could keep the temperature within 0.1 degree, but decided it was too dangerous to be worth it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00V4TJR00

I then use a $25 Iwatani torch to char the surface: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BBJC1CY

As opposed to most butane cooking torches, this one seems to produce a large hot flame about 20 centimeters long and the diameter of a quarter.

Not to take away from this griddle or anything, but I'm pretty psyched about my sous vide machine and it was too easy to make just to not tell everyone that will listen.
> I am not a lawyer

You don't say?
Interesting. What are the reason for this transition from Python and R to Scala and Spark?
Overall a good point, but MySQL auto increment sequences and other bugs have given me corrupt state many times, yet good old yet shiny PostgreSQL has caused zero problems over more than 10 years, yet keeps gaining features. I have been using hstore more lately, and PostGIS is hard to match.
> These four car makers involved in the report differ from VW: they do not have a defeat device in their design. Their results are solely because of the lab-vs-road issue.

At the end of the day though, all the automakers did whatever was required to make them pass the lab testing, with no regard whatsoever for what that actually means on the road.

Maybe it's good on the road, maybe it's not, but in all honesty none of them care.

VW went about it different than the rest of them (that we know about), but the end result is the same - cars that pass in the lab and do who-knows-what on the road.
First, find something better to do.

Second, you picked that completely out of context, yet there's nothing wrong with wishing humanity didn't have guns or wars. It's utopia. Outside utopia, in the real world, I am neutral. I enjoy target and skeet shooting with my kids and friends, that's about the extent of it. I don't care about personal protection. Don't need guns for that.

Third, you must be young. I learned the Socratic Method when I was in high school decades ago. It's a productive and non-confrontational way to engage in conversations where we can both discover our positions and, perhaps, but not necessarily, guide each other towards conclusions. I've had many amazing discoveries in my life through this approach. And, no, I am not always correct.

Anyhow, I wanted to have a genuine conversation with you and the original person to whom I asked that simple question. Instead it turned into a lot of wasted effort. It would have been far simpler to answer (or ignore) the simple question and engage (or not) in an exploration of ideas, which can be very enjoyable.

BTW, I own several companies. We engage in this kind of exploration every day in order to discover flaws or new ideas in the various projects we undertake. It is a really productive way to explore corners of thinking or areas previously not well understood.

Another method is the "five why's". I haven't really used it much so I can't comment.

JAQ-ing off, sealioning,..., please.
OMG, that article had some serious common sense.
I'm sad for my friends at Twitter but, this shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
You know what, about two weeks ago I was starting a new Rails hobby project, and I thought "all I've heard about for the past year is how everyone loves Postgres", and was about to throw it in there, when I saw a link to Google search trends comparing the two, and MySQL is still so far ahead: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#cmpt=q&q=mysql,+postgr...

It's quite possible this is just due to people supporting existing applications, but I dunno, I am tempted to stick with MySQL for new stuff for the next little while.
U.S. Fiat Monetary Scam: $100 Bill vs. Gold
With respect, I understand many people viewed that one training event with skepticism. I'm not going to try and change your mind. I would, however, like to address the idea that "training for training's sake" has no value.

Tough, frequent, realistic training is exactly what is required to keep certain parts of the military prepared. I'm not talking about logisticians or acquisitions types. Personnel turnover is a problem. People must learn how to work together. For people like you and I, we have the opportunity to learn to work with our coworkers... every day! In the military, a service member only really learns how to work with their coworkers during these kinds of exercises. When it's cold. When it's dark. When everyone is tired and hungry.

You've also suggested that "the military has the tactics and hardware to engage in urban settings down pat" ... and you're absolutely correct. Senior personnel have lessons learned. Those lessons are captured in various documents. However, much like a start-up, execution is everything. The execution comes from personnel who typically have just a few years experience. There is an enormous amount of knowledge which must be transferred in a short period of time. These training events are how the lessons and doctrine are shared with those junior leaders. Classroom instruction is not sufficient.

Finally, I will disagree that the training event was "odd in it's conception." Certain parts of the military perform these kinds of exercises regularly. The only part of this exercise which was odd was the amount of attention it garnered.
Wow, the Money-Market system does bring out the worst in people.
I agree. MySQL has been one problem after another. Postgres isn't perfect either, but it is constantly improving and normally does the right thing.

The idea of Postgres being a "shiny new toy" is... an interesting viewpoint.
There is always a way... I have a wife, 4 dogs and a 60 employee company to take care of, in another continent, and would definitely take the opportunity without blinking...

The fact is: if you want to be on the world's best startup acelerator, you need to live 3 months in SV. Mostly because they can reproduce the experience anywhere else. But they a flexible in all possible ways... (your company can be based anywhere)

More severe commitments are required if you want to excel in other areas as well: if you want to play on the best soccer teams in the world you need to move to Europe; If you want to be a top actor you need to go to LA; If you want to be an MIT Engineer you need to live 5 years there; If you want to be the world's best tango dancer you need to move to Argentina...

But I'm sure that, wherever you are, there must be decent enough startup accelerators nearby. (There are a bunch in my country even).
Multics Execution Environment (2014)
A sad day for Twitter, but a dose of reality for a lot of the fluffiness in the market at the moment.

Companies need to have real revenue and produce real profit and then need a valuation based on sane multiples. Twitter got behind that curve badly and ultimately this is what happens.
I would like to focus on those comments that are questioning if stocks are just a way to trick employees in getting a lower salary. I believe that regardless of the lifestyle you want to have, stocks have the potential to make you really wealthy, way more than collecting salaries.

In startups a good salary will give you an affordable and stable life, sometimes short-term security (because a higher salary like 200k/yr could only last a couple of years until the startup cease to exist). On the other side stocks are the best investment to drastically improve your finances. To put it in layman's terms, it usually take many years, sometimes a lifetime, to buy long-term security, a nice house and fast cars just by collecting a salary month by month. Selling earned stocks can do all of that in 2/4 years. If it doesn't, then move on.

It's a bet and a different type of gambling, therefore should be treated as such. Now, if you can or cannot afford to gamble it's a different story. In my experience people with families understandably lower their risks by preferring a higher salary, while those who don't have any wife/kids prefer stocks.

Regardless of that, this doesn't change the fact that stocks have the potential of being worth 10-20-30-N times a yearly salary, and sometimes that qualifies them as a good bet to some people (and certainly it does for founders and investors).
As someone who's only briefly looked into Postgres, are there any disadvantages to going with it instead of MySQL?

It seems (especially from the comments here) that Postgres is something to seriously consider in future projects, but I'm wondering if there are any reasons to stick with MySQL.
It seems weird to me that Postgres and MySQL are both going down. I'd expect interest in Postgres to be rising at the very least—what are people switching to?
Is google trends really how you should be choosing your stack?
No additional chip needed. With the USB Serial chip, the only special thing programming does is it's got one of the unused lines on the usb serial chip, RTS IIRC, hooked up to drive the reset pin low. The bootloader that the Arduino uses listens on the serial port for a magic number on bootup to enter into programming mode, no special chip needed.

With the webaudio setup, I guess that's fair enough. For being absolutely foolproof being able to say to go to a specific webpage and then press play on tape is something we've been doing for a while. I personally prefer USB/Serial programming, but that's possibly just me having dealt with too many hand-me-down radios with scratchy headphone jacks over the years.
> Is there a way YouTube could alter the "view count" to only include views where 100% of the video has been watched?

You wouldn't want to require 100%, as many people stop when a video starts rolling credits, or when it switches to a screen using annotations to link to other videos. But 50-75% would work well as a threshold to count "views".
Is indeed sad for the people that are let go, but at least the market is hot and they will probably find new jobs soon.
+1 on roku!
> If someone wants to game the thumbnails, then they will just manually select the thumbnail to use; and there are to many legitimate use cases for this ability for Youtube to remove it.

Many channels I watch carefully select an iconic frame from the video to serve as the thumbnail, or construct an artificial thumbnail that provides useful information about the type and subject of the video. Manual will frequently produce better results than automatic for a good-quality channel.
I don't use Twitter and don't have any friends that do. Am I just uncool, or is it super niche now?
What does one have to pass around? You can `require`/`import` service modules directly... for that matter, with a system like redux/react, you can easily pass anything needed via properties. You can create pretty complex applications without muddying where your services come from...

I've been following Angular2, and while much better than Angular1, still think react+redux as a workflow/render solution with separate state management reducers/handlers is a better workflow... especially as feature count goes up, because complexity doesn't climb as steeply as with Angular.
> A better way to filter those out algorithmically would be to simply look at the thumbs-up vs thumbs-down ratio.

> The ones with misleading titles/thumbnails often have far more down-votes than up-votes

Especially once the total votes pass a certain threshold. Below a certain threshold, any activity makes something interesting; you wouldn't want to let a handful of downvotes bury something early on (as in, 4 upvotes and 6 downvotes). But once you hit the hundreds or thousands of votes, the ratio should take over.
Please no :(
> After uploading, YT gives you 3-5 thumbnails you can choose from.

Can you pick an arbitrary video frame, or only one of the suggested thumbnails?
MySQL is popular because it's easy to use (in the same sense as PHP), easy to setup, and has a lot of tutorials written for it. Also speed used to be a pretty big factor, but that was only because MyISAM took shortcuts with data consistency.

If you care about your data and would rather not deal with the many problems MySQL inevitably brings, then Postgres is the better option. I can't say I've seen many compelling reasons to use MySQL over Postgres other than "what if we need to replace you with a freelance PHP guy", "I want to pay lower wages", and "I want to use phpmyadmin". (Btw: check out Sequel Pro and Querious!)

Popularity isn't a very good reason to choose something. Postgres will remain a juggernaut for a long time. Unless you really think there's a good chance you'll need to hire somebody that only knows MySQL, then I'd go with Postgres.
Considering Twitter is still the first go-to social platform for reactions to news, I doubt it.

Nonetheless, I've had trouble convincing my parents why they should use Twitter.
Same here. I just don't see the value in Twitter when I can easily get personalized content from Facebook's news feed and use an RSS reader for the sites that I follow.
This is bad, if not entirely unexpected, news. What is out of the ordinary is the public markets' reaction: the stock is down 3% in after-hours trading.

Typically when a company announces layoffs its stock goes up. More mature companies have sometimes slashed headcount on the way to a better market situation. But when younger companies announce layoffs, the markets stop assuming they have lots of growth ahead and adjust expectations accordingly -- usually resulting in a significant drop in stock price.

Remember, back in July, Twitter announced earnings beating market estimates. This was at 4pm, its stock surged 4%. About half an hour later, CFO Anthony Noto said Twitter would not see "sustained, meaningful" user growth for a "considerable period of time." TWTR promptly plunged 10%.

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/28/twitter-earnings-7-cents-per-...
Postgres FTW, with native JSON support it is the best RDBMS out there.
4100 employees for a service dedicated to moving around 140 character messages? Yeah, there might be a little fat to trim there.
Vestiti donna eleganti, Abiti donna di collezione – Noradress
Do you get mostly opinions and reactions on Twitter or 140char reporting on breaking stories? I tried using it to follow the Arab spring and just couldn't.
Yes, it's sad for employees being let go, but it's good news for Twitter. I don't think Twitter is going anywhere; it has a huge user base and a lot of people think of it as a branch of the internet. By cutting surgically (removing, as you put it, the "fluffiness"), Jack might very well be able to bring some fighting spirit back.
"Entering the fray next year is the Cinder, a countertop cooking device that promises to deliver sous-vide-level precision without the bags and the water bath."

I've been critical before on technology solving home as opposed to commercial cooking, this statement alone using a technical approach to avoid waste of water and removal of plastic from cooking is fantastic.

"Sous-vide cooking excels at tenderizing typically tough cuts while maintaining juiciness through prolonged, often multi-day cooks that break down connective tissue while also conveniently storing released juices in its bag."

Why is a sous-vide better than a pressure cooker here?
thats a naive assumption, there could be a lot of hidden scaling issues when you think deeper about how it works
I see it used most heavily for, like, customer support... Surprised that's not a more core part of their business
You don't own that non-robotic/robotic factory - only sub-percent of the population does, neither you can tax them properly - tax 'optimization'. Thus redistribution is not happening today and there is not going to happen. Most of today's redistribution is from earners income tax, not from business.
And less workers means less people from whom to redistribute.
Really? For who? That's super interesting
Wish I could find it, but a couple weeks ago I saw someone posting a 20-ish part message on Twitter. At some point you've gotta think maybe this isn't the appropriate way to use the service.
finally.

completely incomprehensible why they needed such a large headcount. ten times more than whatsapp would be ok - but not this behemoth.

all these designers do what exactly? ignore ipads, macs, etc.

i love twitter, use it constantly to follow journalists, vcs, basically to get faster news than any site. i hope twitter can be cut back to the bone.
Cesium: a distributed visual processing framework
I don't doubt it's challenging to keep the thing up, but 4100 employees? And meanwhile WhatsApp has 50 or so employees in total.
As long as underlying data is preserved, software is better done fungible. Data formats change, processing models and architectures change, underlying hardware change - allowing us to do more with less. In my career I have found there are no stable architectures - systems require refactoring every couple of years to stay manageable and full rewrites possibly once every technology cycle to make it in tune with the times. This is not a limitation, but an opportunity as software is constantly evolving and is more like a living,breathing organism than a permanent structure.
Pivotal Web Services - Run.pivotal.io - is the CF equivalent to Heroku. Documentation is at docs.run.pivotal.io. IBM has one at Bluemix.net as well.

CF is very good if you want to run a cloud native / 12 factor app. It's also rapidly evolving to run rich workloads (TCP router is coming, .NET is in beta).

I would say CF is more flexible at the kinds of apps and services it can run as the buildpacks tend to be more sophisticated forks of the Heroku buildpacks, or new from scratch buildpacks (like PHP, Or Java). Docker images should be hostable in the near future as well.

Whereas the service levels and instance sizing flexibility available from Heroku tends to be richer.

This is a function of where both companies make their money. Heroku only makes money from their public cloud, whereas Pivotal is focused on selling high end subscriptions for those who want to run their own private CF on Amazon or VMware or OpenStack.
The translation into a linear flow of commands is an oversimplification - it assumes that the graph is a specific type of tree, when in fact any directed acyclic graph is valid.

Also, I personally find it way more interesting what happens when you update existing infrastructure, not just deploy new infrastructure, with an arbitrary dependency graph. But probably that's just me.

Shameless plug: you don't have to use a proprietary cloud! OpenStack provides the same thing via the Heat project.
I agree with @bpicolo when it comes to support. If you have a problem with most of the big companies in terms of support and they are delaying a response, all you have to do is reach out to the support team on Twitter and they respond ASAP.

Companies such as AT& T, Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Amazon etc..
It automatically captures 3 different thumbnails (I guess using the algorithm in OP) and lets you select any 1 of those 3.
rise of cockroaches was the techcrunch headline, arguably this is a bit of a nod to that.
Many videos seem to have completely arbitrary thumbnails which are not from the video. Most of the Epic Rap Battles videos, for example.

Perhaps this option 'unlocks' after you reach a certain subscriber count.
They've got to be training on more inputs than mentioned. For example, is one or a close set of times in the video linked externally and generating traffic? Grab the entire set of frames from that time period and run it through the quality classifier, there might be iconic frames from that section that people are looking for.

Are people re-watching a small segment of the video? Try classifying individual frames from that segment or just before. Of course, those are often action moments that result in smeared motion and artifacts and may not result in a quality thumbnail.

These ideas also only come into play when a video has been live for a while, after the uploader has initially picked a thumbnail. Maybe a "We have some new thumbnail suggestions for you, take a look" alert or message?
Thanks for the feedback. I looked at the motion it has lot of holes. First I am going to prove thier inconsistency. Then going to say that they are not active and dont want me to act on my oppurtunity. They are a startup too, their money will run out fast!
It's crazy that it makes sense a billion+ company would need that few people now
A lot of the original article is about a retrospective of technologies pinterest seemed to have picked before they were able to afford a fairly large team. If you do have a really huge engineering budget and can afford a commercial support contract, you are now in the business of trying to spend money moreso to maintain your existing business than to try to scale it faster and faster.
I have an incorporation right now. But they are suing me personally. I have not signed any documents with the other company.

I looked at the motion, it seems like they dont want me to apply for Ycomb!
Sorry if you got an email that felt unsolicited. The only email that was sent was to some users of Sibbell (https://sibbell.com) which is another GitHub-related service we built. We really weren't trying to spam people, but thought they might have a genuine interest in another tool based on GitHub.