skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a developer. The problem is not that I'm "failing to rise up to this level of problem-solving". The problem is how much free time I have, and whether I can afford distractions from my main project to fiddle with IRC and get it to do what I want.

We use Slack because "it just works". You get invited, you join, and BAM! You're done. There is one uniform client for all platforms and a bazillion integrations already developed for you. And creating your own is usually a simple matter of sending a POST request to a channel's webhook using a unique token.

Essentially it comes down to this: IRC is a protocol that requires a fair amount of research and configuration to make it do exactly what you want it to do. Slack is a product that comes with the vast majority of features most teams need. That's why a ton of people are gravitating towards the latter.
You mean something like the Surface Book?
Same article posted yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10483032
If only more people read Bastiat...

http://fee.org/resources/economic-sophisms/

http://fee.org/files/doclib/20121116_thelaw.pdf
Very interesting, I am wondering how this system manages data that transitions from being pulled rarely to often.
Interesting. Health care is a problem in capitalism, and this is another variable.

I wonder if there should be a distinction between how the hospital is funded, just like how public schools cannot have a religious affiliation. But I don't know enough about hospital/health care funding to form an opinion here.
You're absolutely right. But it's sad that comments like this even need to be made. Like people constantly forget that usability is a thing and not everyone has infinite free time to burn on setting things up.
The basic point is that the vast majority of our brains are automatic and that our conscious part is a slim sliver up front. Mostly, the frontbrain makes up stories to rationalize what really happened, and this is error-prone. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” George Orwell

Your last paragraph is interesting. But did that persist, or was it just "switching cost"? Yes, I am from the US and everybody wants to be like us don't they :) It may be that transparency and "fairness" are public goods with low costs of defecting in the prisoner's dilemma of them.
With a properly configured bouncer (ZNS is rather easy to setup), it will work regardless of the client.
Good luck pretending than "setting-up your own IRC server" is easier than not having to care about such a thing, and that most people really enjoy to have to "choose from a multitude of servers, services, clients, bots, client scripts, bouncers, and myriad of bots" instead of just going to https://slack.com/downloads

The article does not even discuss the fact that projects that opened a slack community with a big increase in their audience. Apparently audience is much less important than purity.
What was the CVC issue?
To me, the main obstacle is not the software (I can install a server in VM), it's the implication that I have to rent a VPS, or buy a DNS record, or subscribe to a different kind of ("business") Internet plan, when I already have packets flowing, just so that the email giants and everyone else believe I'm a legitimate participant in humanity. I feel stymied by email giants and ISPs that seem to collaborate to prevent me from doing something that even I agree is simple, to the point that I don't bother. That's 100% a social problem.

I think the desire to run one's own email server today mostly reflects a longing to re-discover the highly-accessible anarchy of the early Internet. Unfortunately, if that is ever to be found, it likely won't be in the form of complying with the highly-burdensome mostly-social requirements of our modern, well-centralized, email system. More likely, it will come from painting over it.
The conclusion being that we should not dare make suburbs more pedestrian-friendly when it so happens that they didn't evolve in a very specific way?

Or, in other words, please no change?
Shameful.

Since both her and a part of Livecoding are in the EU, EU data protection laws probaby make the situation fairly clear (and give her tools do deal with it, but it shouldn't be necessary)
You can see this trend even outside the hospital, for example in primary care, with some doctors choosing to open concierge practices. In return for a few hundred dollar annual fee, you have a doctor responsible for perhaps 1/3rd the total number of patients. Meaning he or she can spend 3 times more time with you. For every MD/DO who reduces their patient panel, it's likely that a mid-level provider (nurse, np, or pa) picks up the slack. I would expect this trend to continue in the future.
OK I missed that you meant "easily fixed" in the strictly mathematical sense, not in the practical, real-world application sense.

With statistics on human affairs, 99% of the hard part is not the math, it is applying that math to a complicated, heterogenous, and difficult to measure underlying phenomena. And in most cases, statistics alone will never give you a straight answer, the best they can do is supplement and confirm qualitative observations. Failing to recognize this is how you get all those unending media reports about how X is bad for your health. PG's post was at the level of one of those junk health news articles.
But that's substantially less useful than Slack's search utility. Believe me, I've spent my fair share of time grepping IRC logs and it certainly works up to a point. What you describe is a pretty lightweight, low-utility solution (are you really going to download six months/a year/10 years worth of logs and depend on your browser's search?).

Plus, keep in mind there are other people besides developers. There are product managers, UX engineers, designers, translators, and any other number of people who might not be familiar with grep and would otherwise not need to be. Assuming that only developers need to chat is pretty naive.
I've been digging into Haskell in the time I have to program at home. Im going through the course at http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cis194/spring13/lectures.html.

In addition to the classes, I've been trying to use it to write small programs and whatnot.

While I can't use Haskell at work, I can say working with it more regularly has definitely improved the JavaScript code I write on the job.
Heh, I'm flattered. I recall we left a rather bitter taste in each other regarding the systemd question (speaking of which, you never got back on my paper).

It's really nothing special. Copious amounts of time coupled with an interest in system software research that motivates me to read research papers, dive into project wikis and the like.

If you'd like to discuss things further, just reply affirmatively and I'll send you an email.
Add Rhino/Grasshopper (Python) to that list.
>No that's the 100% correct stance to take. You are not forced to use Apple's products or their walled garden, and they are not required to grant you access.

It doesn't matter if you're forced or not. In a world where the majority chooses to use them (for other reasons, e.g. convenience, features, price, etc), the company controlling what's broadcast on them is censorship, and has the same effects as censoring the publishing of a book had in 1700.

If the majority had chosen those platforms with the EXPLICIT goal of avoiding your content that would be another thing.
Tree-cat , a golang tool merging tree and cat
On Ballot, Ohio Grapples with Specter of Marijuana Monopoly
I find it surprising that everyone apparently thinks that it goes without saying that Slack's interface is superior to other choices.

It is full of visual noise. You end up in desparate need of splitting most types of information streams in separate channels because of it, and then before you know it, you're channel-hopping all day long.

For core functionality - chatting - I've found that most IRC clients I've used are superior to it. Hell, even Facebook's chat is superior.

It'd take fully redesigned fully native client idiomatic to every platform abounding with customization options to make me take a stroll through that garden. Not web client and especially not some Electron (is it?) desktop client that looks more like afterthought than carefully crafted experience.
Reputation is everything, but when you need to setup a new server on a new blacklist-checked IP for (non-spammy) mass mailing, without SPF and DKIM your emails will most likely go to the Spam folder, in 2015.

Of course, those things are not guaranteeing delivery, but they play an important role.
Ask HN: How do you promote your apps?
So I've made a pretty simple app for the new Apple TV and as I'm sure most people who've built apps know - the discoverability is awful on the App Store, with the Apple TV being even worse!

It seems to be the usual - if you get featured in an Apple list then great, otherwise not

How do you go about getting people to know about and try your apps?
Completely agree with this. We use Slack for our Business Communication and love it, we pay for it so we can see all our messages and it definitely has its place. (Office Managers, Project Managers, Directors, PR are all in it, super simple and easy for them)

For Open Source projects or just general communities IRC is the best medium suited to it. Yes IRC has its issues but maybe that's because no one has brought it forward with the kind of velocity other projects seem to have these days.

I don't boycott Slack teams I just find it difficult to manage more than 2 teams in the client so I just don't, I like channels in IRC. I can flip between them regardless of server or team and can see the entire history.
Or use Quassel (an open source project very similar to the proprietary IRC Cloud) and you can easily import the entire history of a channel into the backlog for a new user.

I’ve done exactly that.
Probably too many stolen credit card numbers used, which a forced CVC check would have reduced? Which then drives up the transaction cost and looks bad towards streamers when their expected income doesn't happen.
Rocket League skills :)
Hacker News:
is closed source
is a walled garden
requires a "Y Combinator" account to communicate

Most people don't use software because of the driving philosophy behind it — they use it because it solves a problem of theirs.

If a tool is the best one for the job, you should use it. And if Slack has a substantially better UI for communication, maybe developers of IRC clients should try to build a better UI rather than complain about adoption of Slack.
If "material nonpublic information" is illegal to trade on, then the entire job of the intelligent investor ceases to exist. It becomes illegal to do thorough research.

So of course the source of the information matters.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's bad to take illegally obtained data and pass it along in a don't ask, don't tell manner to avoid prosecution. But that Dell data? The guy's job at Dell was to share company info with investors. To say the information was obviously dodgy is total nonsense.
IRC? Really? That's your solution? Not some kind of self-hosted Wave-like tool or something? Not something web-based?
[Slightly naughty crosspost from https://drewdevault.com/2015/11/01/Please-stop-using-slack.h...]

There are an increasing number of plausible FOSS alternatives to Slack out there like Zulip, Mattermost, LetsChat, RocketChat etc. Classic IRC simply doesn't compete in terms of the featureset, glossy clients and web-dev friendliness. However, most of the FOSS Slack clones miss one vital point: they just provide a random custom API to their clients which may not even be published. Despite being FOSS software they're not actually promoting Open Communication - they are just building yet more silos that fragment your conversation history and contacts/contactability even further. If you want to pick your own client, or pick your own server, or interoperate with other comms networks (other than naive bridging), you're generally out of luck.

This is why I personally believe it's vital to support open standards for communication like Matrix.org or XMPP or IRCv3, and build glossy clients and services on top, so that rather than being locked into a single server & client from any given project, we retain the freedom to pick the clients, servers, services and service providers that we want rather than being forced into using particular ones for particular communities. A good start would be for the Zulips and Mattermosts of this world to federate with Matrix or XMPP out of the box, even at the lowest-common-denominator functionality set, to support open communication rather than causing yet more fragmentation.

[Disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org]
Hmm, thats a lot to respond to, I'm going to start with just a small part initially.

I'm not taking free markets to be a foundation for morality, I'm saying that I believe morality and values to be subjective. Markets are just one way to achieve consensus in a distributed system.

You mentioned earlier that you believe in moral realism, a definite objective moral code which ALL humans should follow and humans who do not are wrong/bad/broken. Do you believe the same about values? That there is an objective preference ordering all humans should have and those that do not are wrong/bad/broken?

I don't particularly favour capitalism or democracy as systems, but I do prefer them over central planning or dictatorship BECAUSE I believe values and morality to be subjective. Any alternate system should take that into account.

Is this where we disagree?
Well, a black man not being a slave wasn't his right in 1840 Georgia either. Staying in the same hotel as whites wasn't his right in 1950.

It's always better to concentrate at what we think SHOULD be the right or what it's we consider ethical, than merely restating what happens to be the law, which can very easily be BS.

And "whether we like it or not" plays a huge role in having laws changed -- that's where we should be starting from, not waving it away as if we're some kind of non-citizen slaves where things are just forced upon us.
I'm sorry you didn't get upvotes out of randomness or timing but it doesn't help to link a previous submission with no comments.
Also +1, App Engine is terrible. I worked for one of the largest App Engine deployments for startups. We were Python, Java, and Go and all were terrible. I've never felt like a company was giving me the middle finger as hard as App Engine. It's a terrible product and a shameful dev team.

There's a million things wrong with GAE besides performance, but if we just focus on that, where to even start? When I first took my last job using GAE, I was able to improve the performance of one of our apps in my 2nd week on the job from requests taking anywhere from 3-14 seconds to sub 1 second. That sounds good, but actually the original authors of the app didn't really do anything too bad, it was just they tried to write a standard web CRUD app in Django.

The answer to improving performance was mainly to never query their data store if you could help it. Solid advice for most apps, only the queries were completely unpredictable. Pretty much the standard Google answer for all App Engine is to do everything in memcached. OK, again, fine, but then memcached started being unpredictable. Google Answer - we'll develop private memcached to let you tweak it more. OK, fine, but it's still not as fast as when we run memcached on AWS.

Even when we ran our site with 99.9% cache hit ratio, we still had erratic performance. We next switched things to do more on the client and ran an Angular SPA app. Again we saw benefits of course, but still things sometimes were slower than we wanted. Simply Google's billing API requests and their slow servers serving requests tended to be the problem, which was often something we had no control over. And that was basically the theme of other problems we had. We figured out the requests problems at the beginning FYI and told Google, and they simply said they would work on it, but actually over time things often got slower.

App Engine is a terrible platform and most of the benefits can be replicated by various libraries out there for deployment, versioning, caching, etc. or through admin panels in other services like AWS. If you want to lock yourself into terrible APIs that do things like intercept your POST and re-issue it as a GET, go for it. If you want to start building your apps around billing patterns rather than proper architecture, go for it (how can I do y instead of x to avoid being billed?). I could go on, but yeah App Engine is pretty bad. It gets you going from dev to production somewhat quickly, but don't many frameworks + cloud providers do that now? The only real benefit I found which you could argue is that you alleviate some of the security challenges, but that's assuming you trust Google's environment and configuration (which you have essentially no control).
Wouldn't Slack be ideal for FOSS projects? My fear would be of losing sensitive data when using Slack, but with a FOSS project this isn't an issue.

Slack is a tool, like a debugger or IDE, which aren't all open source.

If you are working on a government project with secret clearance, then these issues make sense. Otherwise, the article feels like it has more of a "whippersnapper" message.
Neural Network-Based Autonomous Driving
> (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing.

May well be the case.

Somewhere GregKH mentioned how the pace of kernel development had changed, with git being a major part of it.

It may well be that the pace have now gotten to the point where hobbyists have a hard time keeping up, as they have things they need to do besides stare at code all day.
I don't think that's true. GitHub is a frontend for the open git protocol. You can take your repositories and move somewhere else with next to no effort. Heck, almost all of my repositories exist in multiple situations.

All that being said, I've personally been doing more things on a private git server and less things on GitHub.
There is a difference between psychological manipulation and cultivating confusion or blatantly misleading. An ethics still applies to marketing's use of psychological manipulation that asks the customer to participate.
You're correct, I understand why most people don't want that, and thus also why Slack is so hugely popular. I'm primarily thinking about technical people who actually do want this (such as what's referred to in the article, people working on open source projects or who otherwise require things not offered by slack).
> Any way you look at it, the Soviet Union 1) suppressed freedom and 2) espoused militarism.

What human organization with a military arm doesn't do that? And for that matter how are you even defining freedom? The defense of freedom in the abstract is worse than meaningless.
What is it worth to them?

If you have very little to work on, then most all of your value perception will be in the eyes of your prospects.

Have you segmented your prospects yet? Who are the targets, and what are they all about?

Go and case study with a few of them. Present the use case and planned functionality along with what benefits you see.

Then ask them to model what those mean. They will have some risks and costs on their end too. How do they weigh all of that?

Once you have a good idea of what return they may get, you can price on that and actually have some meaningful basis for your pricing, depending on the level of investment required on their end to really get the benefit.

And be up front with a friendly prospect or two. What would they pay?

They won't really know, and neither do you. Make the mutual investment to find out and use early access, some input on the technology, etc... as an investment on your part to encourage them to do the same.

Secondly, doing this means really understanding what they are about and how they make their money. Each rough segment will have it's own dynamics, and ideally you find there are some common ones.
Idea Sunday
I think it is good to post this again and want to hear good Idea's from HN community.
> it's as simple as adding a server password

is there a way for me to, instead of using a server password, use something like OAuth so that I can grant access to the server based on my companies central login database? otherwise, every time someone leaves the project, we have to rotate the server password...
This was reposted a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Making%20Insider%20Trading%20L...

From the FAQ:

> Are reposts ok?

> If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

It's not very clear what significant means, but all the previous submissions have 0 or 1 points and no comments.

I think that one problem with dupes is that the previous submission have some interesting comments that are "lost", so if I find a very interesting comment I quote part of it in the new submission.
UTC would make some things easier and some things harder. I think it would make reliably scheduling meetings easier.

Suppose you want to schedule a phone call for two weeks from now with your colleague in Melbourne. That's currently kind of challenging. It's fairly easy to accidentally agree to an inconsistent time. What if that two weeks straddles a DST change in one country, but not the other?

In UTC world, you agree to a single time, and there's no confusion. To pick an appropriate time, just look up the range of business hours in Melbohrne, and intersect those hours with the business hours wherever you are.

I don't really see how your google or clock app examples are compelling. Just google "business hours in Melbourne", and then save those in an app or wherever if you think you'll want that information again soon.
Which is a horrible thing to do from a moral standpoint:

Yes, the Top Gear crew will make you profits.

But is it morally okay to hire someone who just got fired for punching their director? Isn’t that rewarding horrible behaviour?

EDIT: Please explain why you disagree in a comment – I’d love to hear other opinions.
Small sites are not supported by ads — traffic is too low, so small sites will sustain.
Consider the UDP-based QUIC protocol that Chrome now supports.

From http://blog.chromium.org/2015/04/a-quic-update-on-googles-ex...:

"For latency-sensitive services like web search, the largest gains come from zero-round-trip connection establishment. The standard way to do secure web browsing involves communicating over TCP + TLS, which requires 2 to 3 round trips with a server to establish a secure connection before the browser can request the actual web page. QUIC is designed so that if a client has talked to a given server before, it can can start sending data without any round trips, which makes web pages load faster. The data shows that 75% percent of connections can take advantage of QUIC’s zero-round-trip feature. Even on a well-optimized site like Google Search, where connections are often pre-established, we still see a 3% improvement in mean page load time with QUIC."

From https://www.chromium.org/quic:

"Key features of QUIC over existing TCP+TLS+SPDY include

* Dramatically reduced connection establishment time

* Improved congestion control

* Multiplexing without head of line blocking

* Forward error correction

* Connection migration"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC
Javascript and golang
Unfortunately, you managed to pull off a Streisand. So... what is Slack? And where can I use it? Sounds useful.
Surely you can mitigate that by using encryption at every phase of your operation? That would be a good idea even if the US government were trustworthy. It's also a good idea if you're running everything on-site; if someone were to gain access to your systems, they get nothing.
I really don't know, but Fiverr comes to mind. Again, I don't know how well it works, but there are lots of people there saying they'll send you targeted website traffic for $5.

https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_in=...