skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"...it's a little confusing to figure out what isolating a root would mean. "

Well, to take an example from some of my past work as a structural engineer, say you wanted to find out how much wind load a structure could sustain until it buckled under its own weight. So you create a finite element model of the structure that applies the wind load and then ramps up the gravity until the structure fails. The input is the magnitude of the wind pressure. The output is the total gravity at failure (in units of g). subtract 1 from the output, and you have a function where the root is the level of wind load you're looking for.

You're point about it always terminating when you use the bisection method is well taken, however. I was using a hybrid that included some Newton's method iterations to reduce the total number of steps, since each "function evaluation" took a lot of computer time.
Scrum is the new waterfall
Hey! Yev from Backblaze here -> If you're still reading the thread, sorry things ended up getting a bit heated in the comments here. We like Dropbox! Our hope is that more and more companies will realize that it's a lot more entertaining to open up and chat about this stuff. Hoping Dropbox joins in soon! It'll make for a lot of interesting conversation. Either way, hope you don't feel too put out!
I really like that Netflix is constantly open about how their systems are run. In terms of raw throughput not a lot of companies can hold a candle to them, so its cool to see how the big players do things.
I did not argue that marketing emails are bad. I'm stating that I don't want them, and guessing that many users are like me.

Regarding your example, I have no problem if such emails are not stylized.
Comparing Redbull on both platforms is pretty meaningless. There are other users who have way more followers/interaction on Twitter. Redbull has a brand that fits nicely with Instagram (photos of extreme athletes), while something like @BreakingNews makes tons more sense on Twitter.
Maps has really become a chore to use, too. I remember getting directions used to be easy once and now it's like interacting with enterprise software.
Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 Experience: HMP Kryo and Demos
Yep, that's the context we (I and the grandparent comment) are using.
That was kind of the point of the article really. I screwed up. Made mistakes. The frenzied approach to the article reflects the experience I put myself through. I added a summary that hopefully drives home the point better and offers some hindsight to it. Thanks for your comments, it made me realize what I left out.
I'm with you on this one, though I didn't realise we were extreme!

Plain text cuts all the cruft and I can reasonably expect emails I receive to largely look similar so I get good at extracting relevant information.

Every client I have, desktop and mobile, displays and sends in plain text only and I'm pleasantly surprised how infrequently this breaks anything completely and how often it exposes tracking links etc.
Tongue in cheek: I believe this attitude proves grand parent. Of course, only if Bitcoin actually succeeds :)
I missed your parenthetical earlier.

> you're still in touch with old friends, and whenever they move close enough you know it and can rekindle the friendship

This is a big if. I'm speaking of people who have moved across the country or state, and where the likelihood of this is near zero. The only way they'll rekindle the friendship (specifically being physically local) is if they move back themselves, rather than waiting for their friends to move to them.
L5 Society
It boggles my mind that any organization still pays for "professional services" provided by these massive consulting firms. Every single project I've seen like this involves countless layers of middleware implemented by consultants barely intelligent enough to follow a generic runbook, countless calls "home" to deal with your "unusual environment", delays, and a creaking disaster of a finished product.
It's not a next step because the US dollar is monopoly money forced on you by the government. Also it's supply is controlled to keep the value steady.

Bitcoin has nobody forcing you into using it and nobody controls the price. Bitcoins are just bits on a ledger that maybe someone will buy from you tomorrow, maybe.

Even in the niche roles where bitcoin is superior to bank accounts, credit cards, and cash, there is nothing beyond momentum keeping people from switching to another type of cyptocurrency. That's why it's monopoly money.
> it is B2B, email sent to public adresses, so it is not spam

Unsolicited commercial email is spam, regardless of whether it is B2B, and regardless of whether it is sent to "public addresses".
Why doesn't it? There are plenty of instances where bad safety practices with high energy have led to injuries. In fact, the parent comment had more information relevant to the discussion than yours did. By your measure, your comment brought absolutely nothing to the discussion, and you would have been better to simply ignore the comment you didn't like. Policing what people say in that manner is subjective and tends to lean more towards your personal dislike for the comment than for any stringent criteria of quality. All that said, I like tofu too. Maybe we can find a tofu discussion on HN to carry on in.
Fatih Bit İlaçlama Şirketi
>I was wondering weather the current HN backend is as fast as it can be, I'm sure there are dozens of developers that would like to rewrite it for free.

Yeah... it's too bad Y-Combinator doesn't seem to trust the hacker community enough to risk open sourcing their code and taking public pull requests. Can't risk having people see the algorithms and whatnot.

Heaven knows the "dozens" of Arc programmers out there probably don't have much else to do...
(Can't edit.)

Warning: This is mere conjecture.
The part of the article I was hoping to emphasize with the original title (IIRC it was Tamper-resistant time-keeping) was this:

the sandglass was the primary means of fair timekeeping. The sand glass was visible to all in a room, and it could only be dramatically and obviously “reset”, it couldn’t be fudged like a mechanical clock.

By virtue of being highly visible and slow to reset thus difficult to sabotage made it an ideal tool not just for time-keeping in general, but dedicating time to activities where fairness and equality were important. The simplicity of the mechanism hides the sophistication of its action - being an auditable accounting system.
I clicked much more than one time (just to see the animation).
Cybersecurity Expert Discusses Building a Secure Data Transfer Solution
techcrunch, we need to talk about your article titles.

Addressing the content of the article:

- "Gmail Makes Developers Shun Email", I can't think of any developer I know that shuns email, and they all pretty much use gmail.

- "How Gmail Breaks Email", to be frank... not even in the slightest. Sure, it sounds pretty annoying having to jump through all those hoops for a fancypants email.

- "Google should take the lead in bringing the web mail stakeholders from Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL together toward the support of a common set of CSS and HTML."

Who makes a demand like that of a company? Hey, Company X, gather every industry leader please and force them to all standardize to one spec. Am I the only one that would prefer companies to not be in the driver seat for these kinds of decisions? Isn't this what led to the IE6 debacle?

I really don't get these articles. Today I've read HN front page articles about horrible gmail is (my favorite email service for the past 10 years) and "Amazon kind of sucks". I must be out of touch.
I was aware of the proxying, but didn't realize that gmail always prefetched the image. This implies that even sending each recipient a unique image URL will not work?
To be honest, while I do see his point to some degree (just about every webmaster forum has become an utter cesspool due to a lack of moderation and a flood of idiotic posts and signature spammers), I'd also like to point out that being too harsh can kill a site just as quickly.

For one thing, it makes newer users feel a bit too scared to start contributing, especially if everything slightly below quality standards get removed immediatedly. And given that a community depends on new people as its lifeblood, the result can easily be an ever dwindling pool of site veterans talking among themselves til everyone loses interest and stops visiting.

So you want to remove the obvious idiots and poor contributors, while not scaring away people who might otherwise become decent users in the process.

There's also a related issue you need to consider here, and that's that to some degree, you need to avoid being too strict in terms of what's 'relevant' to the community. If you've got a programming forum, it may seem tempting to shut down any 'low quality' conversation about unrelated matters like TV or films or sports or whatever else, since they're not related to the site. But people don't purely talk about one thing over and over. It's best to have a place to discuss these 'unrelated' things (with some semblance of quality control) so as to bring the community closer together and to see other members as friends and associates rather than just virtual colleagues.

In other words, keep quality up, but don't brutally remove anything that's even the slightest bit dodgy or shut down everything not 100% related to the topic, otherwise you'll likely end up with a perfectly immaculate ghost town.
T-Mobile Will Let Customers Stream [some Videos] Without Racking Up Data Charges
Let me know when it covers Japan.
Google updates its Container Services with focus on speed and scaling
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False (2005)
Given the author of the article stated that he was a linguistics major, please speculate on the labs that this person might have taken.

My minor in cognitive science was administered by a three-way alliance between the computer science, linguistics, and psychology departments, and nary a one of them required more time in the classroom per week than the number of credit hours. None. The psych professors, of course, dragooned their students into the psych testing pool for a maximum of two hours per semester, but that was not graded, nor in a classroom.

My chemistry lab sections were all 1 credit-hour, and we spent more time than that every week in the chem lab, which I am willing to count as a "classroom" for the purposes of extending the benefit of the doubt.

Classroom time = lecture + 3 x lab . So in order to be in class 8 hours per day, or 40 hours per week, we get this system of equations:

40 = lec + 3 x lab
21 = lec + lab

lec = 21 - lab
40 = 21 + 2 x lab
19 = 2 x lab
9.5 = lab, 11.5 = lec

Wow, that's a lot of lab sections. When I got my chem minor, each 3-hour lecture section had an accompanying one-hour lab section. The work done in it overlapped substantially with the out-of-class work expected for the lecture.

You didn't do very much homework for the lecture section. You mostly did the lab work from the lab section. Rather than doing your homework in the dorm, you did it at the bench or the fume hood. So even if you counted time in the lab as "in the classroom", that's still 4 credit-hours for the class, 3 in the lecture, 3 in the lab, and maybe up to six in your room if you really had trouble understanding the material.

So I still have to wonder how someone studying linguistics in general and Maya in particular managed to rack up so many hours "in the classroom" per week.

Degree requirements: http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/degree-requirements4...

Course catalog: http://www2.ku.edu/~distinction/cgi-bin/6254

I was unable to identify any possible lab sections other than possibly LING120: The Physics of Speech, for 4 credit-hours, and maybe LING 980: Linguistics Field Work, which seems unlikely for an undergrad. Everything else looked like lectures.

Are you just winding me up here? Nobody takes half their course load as labs. Even if you did all hard science classes, you're still only going to end up with no more than 25% your course load credit-hours as lab sections [as an undergrad], which gets you maybe 6 hours "in the classroom" per day. That's still not 8. I don't think you can convince me that number is not bullshit without the author's actual class schedule.
Or, in the interests of compassion, the indentured workers.
Priceless! Cliff would not doubt have a good laugh at what he got wrong.

I was involved in a discussion this weekend that had a similar tone around people becoming too future aware. Specifically when you know a lot about the underlying technology (as Cliff does (and did) about networking) you tend to extrapolate what you know, but when you don't know anything about the underlying technology you tend to extrapolate your imagination.

People can imagine wondrous things. And when they tell an engineer to go build it, that engineer starts working backward from what would have to be true in order to have that amazing capability, and starts working on the pre-cursors.

Of all the things he got wrong I think there is a lot of resonance in the online education thing. I've done a few Coursera and MIT-X courses and while it could be my previous experience clouding my expectation, I personally learn better when the teacher is in the room and I can ask questions as they arise. Too often I start trying to answer a question to get clarity and get distracted into a whole new train of thought. That makes the learning process much slower and less satisfying for me.
Betacam SP is not Betamax. Betacam was used much, much longer after Betamax deceased.
I haven't got any conclusive stats to hand, but I get the impression that Firefox performance is gradually improving. This is one example of an upcoming feature that should offer some performance improvements:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
Yes, that's definitely poorly introduced, didn't notice that
What makes you think that metric is even relevant? Since women haven't been competing with men on equal terms for long you have to look at fields and metrics were being young isn't a disadvantage. Taylor Swift had the most selling albums of 2014, Jennifer Lawrence was the top paid actor/actress under 30 the same year. Also many metrics relating to education, which if you really are curious can find yourself. Of course there will probably never be an outright dominance of women at the top of any field simply because of competition. But things are definitely going to change.
I'm sorry you've interpreted my attempts at responding to your comments as being dismissive, but, based on my own experiences at work and in business over the past decade and a half, I do feel strongly that the world view you have apparently adopted, which assumes that men tend to build professional relationships with women only when they harbor romantic interest and avoid them when they don't out of paranoia, does not reflect what happens in most professional settings. Furthermore, I cannot imagine that taking such a world view into every professional interaction with a member of the opposite sex can be a positive influence on the interaction.

The mere fact that there exist statistical inequalities between the sexes does not in any way prove that your world view is the root cause of these inequalities.
> substring searches

God yes. What the hell man??
It will be nice to see the long term data.

But I don't think being in the news has anything to do with it. Nobody who wasn't using Twitter before suddenly heard the announcement and went "Hearts? Finally! I fucking hate stars!"

Twitter's a global media platform, so it's hard to tell when the tail is wagging the dog. Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain that it's a 6% increase in this specific activity relative to all the other activity they track.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's really something all businesses building apps (native or otherwise) should be concerned with. Until we have one global network provider (haha), I don't see them cooperating with each other any time soon in any way that doesn't line their pockets. There are some EU roaming laws progressing in that direction, but I don't expect that for North Americans in the near future.

Latest example I had while I was travelling - the AirBnb "app" couldn't show me my accommodation details without internet access. Really, what's the point of the app then if you can't cache the data locally?

Browser caches should also be less aggressive about getting fresh data too. Caching is hard, but not everybody stays in one place with access to the internet until later. Do I have to continue printing on paper? Most web apps and pages don't pay enough attention to those cache headers.

I used Maps.me while in Europe and it worked well except for the occasional crash, and the offline routing was very welcome for navigating the cities.
What? If you left-click in a place, a small card appears with an arrow that you can click to get directions. If you right-click, you can get directions from or to the place. And if you search, you also get a very visible round button with an arrow and the label "Directions".

How is it hard?

EDIT: Sorry if this came out as aggressive. I'm just dumbfounded, that's all.
Then at some point some other state arise that is more efficient at taxing, and conquers your state.

Obviously it's not your fault, but building unrealistic system 100% conforming to your values vs building realistic system that conforms 90% to them is interesting question.
If we can list all the things that were good, perhaps we can just re-create it and then pack it with some snazzy css framework to make it look good.
I would call them bubbles not exactly fad's.

They both don't age well with younger or long time users. Worse, there monetization strategy is to annoy users. So, long term I expect there going to be replaced with much leaner organizations that need less revenue to make quarterly projections or just shrink.

So sure, social networks may be around, but message boards for example have evolved into some small, but reasonably profitable companies like Reddit.

PS: Long term Facebook might try the MS route of buying enough companies that something sticks. EX: MS Access. But, that says more about Money than Social Networks.
Agreed on education, in that what we currently have is not a replacement for a human teacher. But I think he still missed how valuable the internet now is for research of all levels, from the kind of research that gets published in academic journals, to the kind a 10-year-old does to learn about dinosaurs.
It gives ssl certificate warnings
GMail, we need to talk. Thank you for making it complicated for people to send me "rich" text emails. Thank you for making it harder for embedded tracking images to function correctly. Perhaps the moving target that are your rendering changes will lead to a simpler, more featureless, email landscape like we once had. I really appreciate the time and money designers are forced to spend on annoying me; if i have to deal with the full frontal assault on my eyes, they should at least have to work for it. Please keep up the good work and thanks for encouraging people to focus on the iOS market instead (those people will buy anything AMIRITE?).
I think the chat logs will help, but it won't just be about that data.

The data around how users interact will also be important:

Do they prefer a back and forth conversation, or do they want to say everything in one go.

Do they want to start a conversation, drop it, come back to it several hours later, or do they like completing it in one go.

How do they handle switching back and forth between different contexts, if certain requests take time, or do users not switch context.

What data are they happy to share, and what are they not.

What are the typical response times that a user considers acceptable 5 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minutes, 60 minutes? Does it vary depending on scenario.

Is there particular services or information that there is a trend towards, for example local search requests, research/information, particular types of purchase etc.

We've just spent 6 months going through a very similar process to this, which has helped drive the development of our Converse platform, which allows people to build semi or fully automated conversational messaging services, so this is fairly closely related.

(From our point of view, the NLP data we gathered was useful, but it wasn't the most important part)
Supermicro also sells a sata plug mounted storage device it would have enough for a kernel to be loaded.

though i think a PXE or similar boot option would be a smarter move. just enough to bootstrap something to run in ram. (alternatively a minimal kernel and dedicate a section of the disks in the chassis to holding the running software (500MB x 45 with decent levels of erasure coding is a fairly minimal slice.) the kernel could then pull down the code after first boot (or updates)
A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school. Here’s what he found.
This isn't a very good article. Judging from the first table, netflix is written in node.js using python and java. :-/
One of the number one ways websites piss me off is the stupid "you're on mobile have a mobile layout no you can't have desktop mode" mentality. I outright won't buy from e-stores that do it. And now HN is doing it. I would expect you to know better...
The time for offline was bazillion years ago. They just try to convince us they are innovating / incubating with their billion of dollars?
They are pretty different platforms. Twitter is mainly read-only and they will not change that, ever. They should start being happy at what they have instead of mourning forever.
I use

var err error

at the beginning of the function if needed.
I've very recently moved away from GMail for various reasons, but part of the transition was using their web panel to tidy up some things.

Wow, I agree with you that it's visually worsened. I'm shocked at how much harder it is to visually parse information in there. It's not harder to use overall per se (from what I remember) but the number of visual indicators defining what's clickable or a message in a thread or a sliding panels hiding tags or pop-up reply panels that are just harder to work out is very surprising. I actually stumbled on an interesting piece today discussing this exact point, I forget where I saw it[0].

I admit to using desktop/clients for virtually all email stuff so going back into the web panel was a surprise to say the least.

[0] http://www.nngroup.com/articles/clickable-elements/
you may be right regarding definitions of spam, but as a user I treat relevant-and-targeted(-yet-unsolicited) emails very differently than I treat automated junk email.
Online tracking more common than most realize
You can cancel online, just send an email. Comparing this to Comcast's service is hyperbole.
Semi-OT: Kind of an odd metaphor to use, the year after the band Nirvana "ended" with the death of the lead. The web won't end with a shock to its head?

I see this problem a lot: even if you know what a metaphor refers to, it can be unclear how its use is intended:

arms-length transaction: so wait, within arms length, or beyond arms length? (The term is used for the latter.)

sanguine: sang ... blood? So you feel bloody about this? What does that have to do with optimism? (I know, the four humors thing, but it's still weird.)
I have had to use navmii which uses openstreetmap data on all 4 of my recent vacations. The fact that bandwidth is abundant and freely available breaks down as soon as you step outside urban areas.
Linux is a test case. If you can get Linux to use DNSSEC without cooperation from intermediate routers and caches, then it's just single-organization engineering work - Apple and Microsoft would need to write DNSSEC-capable client implementations (which Microsoft already has for Windows Server) and deploy them. This is an OS feature like any other OS feature.

The obstacles to changing to IPv6, or to making any changes whatsoever to TCP, just aren't there.