skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is there any visibility into how this is actually implemented? Was considering switching from self-hosted Postgres on EC2 to RDS, but that delay would be certainly an issue.
>Twitter reported half a billion in revenue last quarter

And yet managed to lose 136 million dollars.
While revenue is interesting, it just doesn't matter if you can't turn a profit.
Psychedelics can trigger psychosis too.
Whatsapp used to be monetised before Facebook bought them, so in theory it shouldn't be that difficult to go back...
Its not clear this is any kind of problem. Reducing emissions in lab tests may very well result in car designs that have reduced road emissions.

This is the logic that European politicians have used in the past.

If there were a direct relationship between lab test emissions and real-world emissions, that approach may be acceptable. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

In the case of NOx, implementing the Euro standards should have resulted in an 80% reduction in emissions over the past 15 years. As the vehicle fleet is renewed, that should have translated into significant reductions in kerbside NOx levels. But this has not happened, and London continues to suffer some of the worst NOx levels in the world.

It turns out that an 80% reduction in lab test emissions has not translated into anything like an 80% reduction in real-world emissions - not even close!

The current system is inadequate because manufacturers simply "design for the test". There is huge real-world variability between vehicles that may record very similar lab test scores. A vehicle may claim similar test score results as another, but in fact have hugely differing levels of emissions in the real world.

Test environments need to reflect real-world conditions!
Note that it is "if", and not "if and only if". Basically, if you can be tracked or advertised to ("advertracked"), you ARE the product whether you pay or not.

Money has to come from somewhere; if it is not from you, it is by monetizing you. But ... why not monetize the user even when they did pay? It's a whole new revenue stream, that's often orthogonal to the payment stream.

Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.
Not happy to see any company have to cut its staff but Twitter is in trouble and some big changes need to be made.

Twitter's IPO stock price reflected the promise that the service previously showed. The company was drowning in the possibilities provided by the incredibly valuable real time data it holds. It's not an easy task but what they've failed to do is organise and deliver all that data in a way that provides value.

Specifically, the user experience is horrible. The argument from people who love Twitter is that those who don't enjoy Twitter need to refine their stream, follow carefully and proactively curate their feed. In my opinion that's bullshit, and the onus should not be on users to find value in Twitter's data! Instead they should be able to enter their interests and Twitter should do the heavy lifting to give them relevant and interesting information.

If every time I open my Twitter feed I find interesting news, information and new contacts I'm going to keep coming back and engage with the platform.
Yes, but I'm wondering about the general case.
Doesn't make it acceptable. Just because the logic makes sense in one context, we don't actually have to accept the entire premise of that context.

The list of interested parties let in by the gatekeepers is all by itself horribly flawed.
Then there's questions about accountability, secretly planned PR campaigns and whatnot.
Whenever I think about this for more than a passing moment I just become so scared and angry. How the fuck is a company able to take a country to court over a public health measure? Who the fuck voted for the evil bastards who made that possible? How do they fucking live with themselves?
Wait, but did that work?
Male Student Perfectly Explains Why Female Classmates Aren't His Equals
I'm not sure they still comply for the UK Data Protection Act. According to the Information Commisioner Office https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio... :

> A company in the UK uses a centralised human resources system in the United States belonging to its parent company to store information about its employees.

or

> A travel agent sends a customer’s details to a hotel in Australia where they will be staying while on holiday.

> If you intend information on the website to be accessed outside the EEA, then this is a transfer.

This means if your data can be accessed outside the EEA e.g. you access your on-premise CRM on your African holiday, you are likely to void the Principle 8.
https://github.com/linuxfoundation/cii-best-practices-badge/...
The irony is that React is controversial because of mixing HTML and JS but in Angular you also are encouraged to mix JavaScript and JavaScript-like expressions with HTML (e.g. in ng-click or when setting ng-class conditionally). And you must insert some weird looking DSL to HTML.

So I think that React way of using plain old JavaScript as a DSL for creating HTML components is indeed more elegant and more expressive that Angular way of injecting an artificial created and limited DSL and chunks of JS-like code to HTML trying to figure out how to make things properly.
It didn't help improve the interface much. For example, on this site the interface shows me quickly who is replying to whom. A billion dollars in and Twitter still can't do this. They tried to be the world's largest chat room and basically came up AOL.
Hi, one of the Airbnb engineers involved in this op here. Yeah... that does sound a lot like 3 years ago. The situation has gotten a lot better, especially with 5.6 and PIOPS. These days, things work pretty smoothly (even as the volume of traffic and data has scaled massively).
Ask HN: What about us under valued developer
Hi All,
I think I am undervalued developer. I have good expertise in my field and I have caliber to solve the hard problems. I am not too good to show my skills to others. On my day job I have good impact on others but I am some what undervalued. I am capable to do so many things but my day job is not much challenging. In interviews I was not able show my true skills so that I am in very small company. I think big companies do not give shit to candidate expertise. I am very good at my work.
I need your advice. I am really got depressed some time because of this. My day job does not have good challenges and I think this is my mistake because I am not able to show my true potentials to others.
Please advice. What you do to show your skills. How you get a good job. What should I do. Please help!!
I think the general market could learn a thing or two from WhatsApp: 55 people powering a platform used by 800 million _active_ users across many different platforms. And WhatsApp has innovated, e.g. the new video and calling system works very well.

I have often wondered what thousands of Twitter employees are doing all day long? Their platform and apps have been stale for a long time.
Show HN: Task management from Vim
I find it impressive that a basic feature of the interface that makes HN usable is completely avoided on Twitter. The platform provides absolutely no way to follow the thread of a conversation! To ensure that this mistake is permanent, they've made it practically impossible to use third-party interfaces on top of their API, so no one else could develop and distribute a solution to this.
Those 4,100 people are not just facebooking all day. The question isn't whether they produced anything - it's whether it is actually needed to run twitter. And personally, I believe the answer is "not really".

As an example, they could have gone with Zurb Foundation instead of doing Bootstrap. They could have used (redo, cmake, tup, a hundred of other tools) instead of doing Pants.

If Twitter was non-profit, their breadth of products would have been awesome. But it's for-profit, and most of these projects are negative on the P&L summary, even if you favourably take into account intangibles like "help in recruiting people" and "coolness of brand".
I mostly agree, in the long term. There's no point in fighting if you'll need to replace what you're fighting with something more resilient, as merely building it and showing it is better can be a far more effective way of winning, by deprecating the entire system.

That's the approach taken by Bitcoin - why attack the banks when we can circumvent them? We can build what we need and ignore the old system. No need to get down to the level of kindergarten kids throwing mud. Do better instead.
No, there was zero visibility. Again..This was just over 3 years ago, so my memory isn't super fresh but we managed to wring bits and pieces of info from our paid aws support after we kept getting such horrible intermittent write latency.

We later tried just running mysql ourselves on big instances, and raid'ing across a large amount of EBS volumes... we ended up running into other weird issues with that too. We would sometimes get terrible write latency spikes, which we were told was a result of "stuck blocks on the SAN". Apparently the backing SAN would sometimes have some blocks that performed very poorly (maybe a disk under high contention in one SAN cabinet?), and this would cause our overall RDS performance to plummet, but only irregularly. We would usually get on the horn and after talking with someone it would either magically stop being slow ("we dont see any problems here!") or we would be told about some "stuck blocks" and they would do some type of remapping or migration of those blocks. Not very transparent to us what really was going on. Sometimes we would just spin up new instances and ebs volumes, and do perf testing on them until we got a set that performed consistently, until something goofy happened again a week later or something. Pretty awful. We tried local instance storage, but it just wasn't fast enough (primary reason), and it felt a bit dangerous -- even though we backed up to an EBS volume pretty regularly.

We ended up bailing from aws and saw huge performance improvements (reduction in latency, etc) by using ssds and real hardware. We even actually ended up with some cost savings! Not long after we left, amazon came out with local SSD storage (high I/O instances I think they were called?), which may have been workable, but by then we had migrated away (we still used s3 though, and still used on-demand instances for developers).
Twitter has great revenue too. It's the profit that's problematic.
Currently, there is way too much emphasis on power. Who really needs 200 hp for a family car?
How to be a good front end developer? (2014)
I wonder, exactly how might a cell "commit suicide"?
The new video and calling system, innovation? Skype, Hangouts and Viber have had those features for years...

I don't think WhatsApp introduced any innovation at all, its popularity is derived from network effects, together with the questionable practice of using phone numbers as public ID and automatically adding all your phone contacts as chat contacts without them having any say in the matter.
Exploring ES6: Upgrade to the Next Version of JavaScript
Ah. That is great to hear! It was a special kind of hell having to deal with it with such regularity, at any and all hours (4am?! of course!). ;_;
> If I was being cynical, I would say that the entire reason you posted the comment was to self-promote your HIPAA PaaS on AWS.

Haha that seems harsh. He didn't name the service after all.
OpenBSD with xfce4 and toad for user mounting of USB sticks is most useable as a desktop on a core-duo thinkpad.
Apple often beats expectations and trades lower after the earnings call.
If intent and actual effects of EU cookie law are anything to go by, EU Safe Harbor is going to create:

- a "value-add" or middleman opportunity on service provider side (think hosting companies differentiating themselves as compliant, like in discussed piece, or offers of "one stop EU compliance", and similar check-box ticking);

- more annoying popups for users ("this service is not available in your country", "click here to acknowledge you are outside EU", etc).
We need fully open high bandwidth radio protocols for creating useful mesh networks (MU-MIMO tech in hardware you don't need licensing for), using protocols like CJDNS, anonymization like I2P, Tahoe-LAFS and IPFS for distribution and management of data, etc...

And we really need better crypto key management. Keybase.io, Namecoin, OpenKeychain, Yubikey NEO, etc, they all contribute to part of the solution, but we need something more comprehensive.
Should everyone receive an unconditional basic income?
Eh, I'm by no means a Delphi fan-boi (during the golden age of Delphi in the late 90s (? around there.) I was a teenage gcc/QT kind of guy), but I've had to take over some projects. With the proper VCL components you can get a modern feeling application pretty easily. XE10 might not come in first against IntelliJ, VS or a good emacs setup, but it's definitely not too painful to construct RAD/Line-of-business apps in. In fact, I'd argue up until Lightswitch came out for VS (2007?) it remained the best solution for whipping out fast apps. What specifically in Delphi is grinding your gears? I'm by no means an expert but I've got pages and pages of Delphi resources I've saved over the years.
Why this is an innovation though? Just because they have fewer engineers to repeat the work that has been done by so many other companies?
Don't make the assumption that because you don't like, or see any use for, a particular product other people won't.
Nothing inspires fighting spirit like layoffs.
Because of the how and why
There's also the ever-increasing safety requirements, which have resulted in (among other things) substantially heavier cars over the last few decades. Heavier cars require more power, which creates a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to reducing emissions and improving efficiency.

These safety requirements aren't even necessarily a straight up win for overall safety: the increased height of car beltlines reduces visibility and the increased vehicle weight (and resulting impact force) can worsen accidents involving non-vehicular objects.

An unregulated car industry is certainly not the solution (as proven by these diesel tests among many other examples), but overly strict regulation may only serve to improve regulatory avoidance by manufacturers. Sane, obtainable goals must be set, and both sides need to be involved in keeping things honest. It's absurd that these regulations were set without ensuring that they could reasonably be met and that they were actually being met. It reflects poorly not only on VW and the others, but also on the EPA and their counterparts.
Or with a "significant other".
Regarding CLI: mycli and pgcli are both much nicer than the built in alternatives.
Totally. People keep talking about removing the 140 character limit. That's just one of the many UX problems they need to address.
You have invites? I'd love one, KeyBase seems awesome but I couldn't find an invite. If you don't mind, could you send me one by email at yohaiberreby@gmail.com? Thanks :)
There is evidence that does not agree with (edit: support) this statement: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130819185302.ht...
It's interesting that they don't mention how/if they're avoiding false positives. I don't doubt that some people have exceptional facial recognition skills, but if they're given a face they haven't seen before, how likely are they to match that face with someone they have seen? How do they know that someone wearing a mask on a security camera is enough information for him to actually make an accurate match?

I'm worried this might be another case of police over estimating how effective something is (like hair DNA forensics) to make arrests, with innocent people paying for it.
Have you forgot about the GHCQ and their "illegal" data exchange to overcome legal hurdles? And I wouldn't vouch for other friends of the USA who exchanges data >10%
(the self-imposed german limit) en bulk. Denmark, Sweden and the Neitherlands would come to my mind. In almost every european country are huge US listening posts.

So even inside the EU there's not a safe harbor as you don't know the percentage and the filters in place, the secret interpretation of laws, and cooperation, infiltration and hacking into the main exchanges and cables.
Writing a toy language with RPython and RPly
I am an active user of WhatsApp and their service is much more reliable than Skype or Hangouts. There's a reason why 800 million people are using it and it's not only because of network effects, it's because the base product and service is rock solid.

Their innovation is evolution of WhatsApp past text messages. And in the end, nothing is a true innovation -- most things build on past ideas.
How is it even possible for a company like twitter to spend a billion dollar and change in one quarter? That's enough to run a small country complete with golden bathroom for the dictator.

Time to go read about their OPEX I suppose. Anyone got a link to a good write-up?
Indian ISP stores passwords in plain-text
Kid pretend he was wounded by a gun shot cause people to get amazing reactions
Same here in London, but for a 1BR.
And now, thanks to the hobby of one developer, my phone blocks ads in /etc/hosts, preventing even in-app ads from appearing. My web browser on my laptop does just as well with a plugin.

All that's left in my browsing experience to hint that sites are trying to maintain themselves on advertising are reels of clickbait stories that come at the side and bottom of every traditional media article. I can't help but hope they are only a technocultural shift away from the abyss of anachronism.

The technology can be used to target us, but in the end machines do the work and they are very predictable. We also have machines, and knowledge, and can stand up against the bullshit.

> Paid Hulu has ads. Windows Solitaire has ads now. Movie theatres have been showing ads since forever. Cable TV is showing ads.

The problem with my idealistic vision of the near future is that we are just as likely to accept this as normal. We habitually pay for stuff and still get ads. We have the tools to block the crap but it's much more important that we decide to.

Millions of people gave up eating gluten because they learned about celiac disease. I'd like to imagine that we are just a few headline-grabbing research papers away from swaying the public about the healthiness of exposing ourselves to psychological bombardment.
You're right and by extension you have to put together a search in order to see exactly what someone has tweeted to someone else, by which I mean you have to pro-actively search in order to truly follow someone.

For instance, during the recent downtime I wanted to see what Squarespace was saying and what others were tweeting to them. There's now way to do that without doing a search for their username.

Tweets and replies only show replies to what an account tweets, which is virtually redundant when sat alongside the full 'tweets' stream. There was no quick click way to see what others were tweeting to them.

This compartmentalisation is a constant attribute of Twitter that they seem to actively maintain and even design towards. They expect you as a user to know what you want to see.

They need to be much more active about presenting data views to the user and take away the need for the user to try and extract meaning and relevance from the constant stream of data.
I don't think you read either of the links you posted. For starters, you have to admit guilt to get a caution. Secondly, can you give ANY examples of people from the London riot's who were arrested for attendance only? Like even a single example?
Developing nations are not a "concept". See the history of colonialism. Do not fall prey to the prisoners dilemma fallacy of "competition" between countries with dramatically different labor standards. Humans can engage in a race to the top or a race to the bottom. The choice is ours.

From http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCAKCN0PJ00F20150709?...

"The United States is upgrading Malaysia from the lowest tier on its list of worst human trafficking centers ... The upgrade follows international scrutiny and outcry over Malaysian efforts to combat human trafficking after the discovery this year of scores of graves in people-smuggling camps near its northern border with Thailand.

Malaysia has an estimated 2 million illegal migrant laborers, many of whom work in conditions of forced labor under employers and recruitment companies in sectors ranging from electronics to palm oil to domestic service."
Does this mean that Amazon can transfer customer data (their AWS customer) outside the EU (like address and email ets.), but it does not mean that AWS customers can move their customers data outside the EU?

Comments here seem to mixed things up.
waiting for insightful comments and summaries to be posted
Out of curiosity, how did it go with Mendeley? Were they able to recover your account?
Robert Yang makes sex games the industry won’t touch
This is very IT focused, (not strange for an HN post) but I am also very curious about the standards that are altered for food safety. This is mainly important for Europe which was about to ban a lot of endrocrine disruptive pesticides but didn't, allegedly due to TTIP.

http://www.ibtimes.com/ttip-controversy-us-officials-industr...

http://www.chemtrust.org.uk/the-eu-claims-that-ttip-wont-red...
The first line is what I wrote about on my blog http://ricardolovelace.com/blog/2015/01/11/vim-is-not-a-blac.... Oddly enough there aren't more articles like these, just repos with a couple hundred line long blobs with every plugin, "hack" and keybinding known to man.
TA: "The fact that the effects last beyond the time that you take the medication -- that's really a new paradigm in psychiatry."

I have no doubt that psychedelics are capable of producing lasting changes in behaviors, habits, or outlooks. Actually, I'd be surprised if that particular point is at all controversial.

However, prespcribing a psychedlic that could have lasting impacts on a person for "reasons we don't understand" seems... unnecessarily dangerous, whenever an alternative exists. Which of course is only an argument for more research.
I wish that conlangs were more popular. There are many bad natural languages that could need replacement. I live in Europe, and the languages is one of the things that annoys me the most about this continent. For example, languages like Dutch, German and Spanish use guttural sounds. Normally, when you try get rid of slime from your throat, you make guttural sounds - why on earth do people use that to communicate with? It's ugly. Or take some of the grammar of natural languages, like the das, der and die in German. I think "the ticket" in German can be called der Farhschein, die Fahrkarte or das Ticket - it makes no sense.

Maybe I should put my feet where my mouth is, and start learning Esperanto or something...
Got it, thanks for clarifying. The transition to bare metal story doesn't seem to be nearly as frequent nowadays, although it does still happen. We've been mostly lucky with AWS performance so far, but this certainly isn't super encouraging, especially given the apparent performance unpredictability here.