skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not cash. From their 10K:
Cash and cash equivalents: $14B
Short-term marketable securities: $11B
Long-term marketable securities: $130B
Apparently so: http://appadvice.com/appnn/2015/10/microsoft-announces-plans...

(Unwelcome) news to me.
Webmail is way too ubiquitous for desktop email software to be worth the million dollars a year it costs to hire five bay-area software developers to build and maintain it. I imagine Dropbox would have kept it around if it saw more user traction, but it didn't.

Inbox by GMail has some of the ideas from the Sparrow team incorporated in it, but it's only really usable on mobile. (The desktop Inbox web app is awfully slow compared to, say, GMail or Outlook.com.)

When Hotmail came out, who still paid for Eudora licenses?

That said, if a decent email client is that important to you, don't underestimate the impact you could have building it yourself as open source on evenings and weekends. And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?
Sure you can. Maybe not quite so efficiently, but its far from impossible
Gmail on mobile still doesn't have a unified inbox, and it also doesn't have features I've come to depend on such as snoozing messages. I usually use Inbox by Gmail on mobile, which also lacks a unified inbox and (bizarrely enough) support for HTML signatures but does have pretty good message snoozing, and I like how it handles bundling.

Outlook (incidentally, another example of my original complaint, as it's just former email startup Acompli with a fresh skin although obviously it's probably not getting shut down anytime too soon) doesn't have very good message searching for Gmail, which is a common complaint I have for non-Google mail apps. Obviously, I get that Google has a huge built-in advantage here; but if your email app is going to support the "Mailbox paradigm" of abandoning folders/traditional labels in favor of just marking things as done, it also needs to have search functionality that can back it up. Outlook was also really buggy for me when I last tried it, although that was a little while ago so it may have improved.
This article reads like a note from a parallel universe. I've been tinkering with electronics since the '80s but have never before heard of any such thing as an "electronics surplus store". On the other hand, I was utterly unsurprised to learn that these originated with military surplus, since "military surplus store" is an ubiquitous business category in my experience, a convenient place to buy camping gear, work clothes, parachutes, ammo boxes, etc. It is amusingly weird to imagine a world where giant warehouses full of electronic parts are normal, but shops full of cheap durable army gear are unknown.
State of the Word 2015
All stores have blonde roast (almost) all the time. However, you have to ask for a pour over, they only tend to have it on drip early in the morning.

Since doing a pour over is kind of a pain, most people who work there will just say "we don't have any left", instead of offering the pour over.
Doesn't Keras work with TensorFlow and Theano only?
I imagine Mailbox has a heavy server component, which would be non-trivial to get set up and running on your own.
I don't know about desktop. I just use my phone/ipad for 90% of my email, so that works fine by me.

As for being hired, Readdle makes a ton of ios apps, and are profitable in their own right. Also, while Spark is free, some of the features they've hinted to as coming in the future will likely be in-app purchases / upgrades, that will allow it to be profitable as well.
Any tips/hints for getting started?
Changed! Thanks for the heads up.
Paying for Uber rides does not include paying for new roads. DC traffic is bad enough they need higher density options. If that's busses with dedicated right of way, or street cars with dedicated lanes, or new subway stations they need to do something that people will actually use.

PS: I don't live in DC in large part due to traffic issues, but also giving up the right to vote bothers me deeply. So, this is from someone that lives close to, but not in DC.
Google, Microsoft, Comcast Say Verizon’s New Cellular Tech Could Wreck Wi-Fi
I haven't seen any modern ones, but back in the day it was generally a complete and utter disaster.

And having extensible points doesn't work.

The whole problem is that if they're complicated enough to actually encode a client's project, they're so complicated that they're really just a visual programming language.

But that means all the code conditions are hidden in drop-downs and checkboxes. But in reality that's the logic, those options are the code, but you can't easily read the code. If you can't read the code, you can't understand the code. So increasingly no-one has a clue what the system is really doing and you have to test it like crazy.

It also makes it very hard to know what has and hasn't changed and even if you can diff it somehow you often can't even understand what the change means.

Other problems include the 'extensible points' not being atomic enough, or too atomic, or badly documented, or badly coded, or just plain insanely coded. And if there's a bug you've got to wait for the code generator to be fixed.

And finally you are locked in to your vendor. Which becomes a big deal.

What happens is that you'll start writing your own code to fix these problems, or edit the auto-generated output somehow (if you're lucky enough to be allowed to) and it'll rapidly turn in to a complete mess that only 1 or 2 people really understand what's going on and it takes a month to do changes that should take a day or two.

ORMs are the closest we get to auto-code generation and there's a reason we stop there. We learnt from bitter experience. And even they can be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Still, I guess we've got to try again every now and then, one day someone might nail it.
Imagine a world where, after prototyping something locally on your glowforge, you are then presented with a "order this from lasergist" single-click ordering button :)
That you have to share with everybody else, with flooding attacks, ... For other categories of "good", the biggest network is not necessarily the best.
I really hope someone writes a few good machine learning tutorials in Javascript (preferably ES2015). Many people use it for everything else other than machine learning stuff. Wouldn't hurt to not having to shift to another lang when dealing with ML.
Such a shame. Only snoozing system that works for iOS and Mac without injecting additional emails into the thread to return them to the inbox. Ugh.
Do you think Nylas is headed towards this eventual doom too?

I guess Mailpile isn't trying to be commercial, so perhaps it will keep soldiering on the power of donations for as long as that keeps up.
This is very sad news and I don't really get the decision.

The thing with Mailbox is that it was truly a great product before it switched hands to Dropbox. Once they bought it, that was the end of good functions and the product only went downhill from there.

There's a lot of potential with email clients that will help you work better, Mailbox was definitely one of those products that helped. With good clients for Mac and PC along with smartphones it would also be profitable IMHO.

The only thing I can think of is that Dropbox is headed for major firing rounds and they want to save up on resources.

I have switched to Airmail on my Mac and I am much happier now.
Good luck! I dig this emerging 3D printing/laser cutting model (Metal/Plastics).

https://www.heroforge.com/ is one I dig as well.
Looks great!

Will you be offering sheet plastic and/or card too?
Mastering Coffee Delivery, One Tray at a Time
E' version...

Some philosophers, e.g. early Wittgenstein, would argue that certain philosophical positions only exist by sleight of tongue because the philosophers who held these positions based their theories upon some form of incoherence that can only exist in imprecise language.

From his Tractatus (note that he sort of changed his mind in his later work): "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -- and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one."
> this is the kind of thing that could be created in a few hours from scratch

Yes and no. There is opinion that needs to drive the design and feature set; if this was using stock bootstrap I would be much more inclined to agree with you, but there is definitely some thought and care put into whats there and why. I don't agree with all of it, but it's not haphazard or careless, and is not something i found myself scoffing at for being overly simple or boring.

Second, it was submitted for feedback and the author has been receptive to it; not everything on HN needs to be a major news headline. The author also started a development blog for it, and as a project it can hit close to home in one way or another for many HN'ers. Building things is hard, and I think we do well as a community to support people who share what they're up to.

As someone who's not afraid to flag, I didn't find this unreasonable or unworthy of HN. But, you are welcome to feel differently.
I think you can almost stop that at the word acquired. I loved pre-acquisition FolderShare. After Microsoft bought them, FolderShare was mashed into a bunch of aborted projects that sucked.
unless they have a secret pipeline of talented coders who don't want to be in an office, live in the woods or on the beach, work 3-4 hours a day, collaborate minimally, and never have to worry about finding new work or maintaining a pipeline. Actually, that sounds nice. But still, seems like there's not that many around from MIT, CalTech, Google and Stripe. People with that pedigree have huge opportunity costs; why would they work for below market enough to make this attractive to the clients?
It seems to sort with the newest at the top. The app is free so try it out. It took a little getting used to after having used Mailbox for so long, but it unquestionably better.
I thought Carousel looked really cool, eagerly installed it on release.

Then I discovered that when Carousel is installed, the Dropbox app stops automatically uploading photos from your phone. You have to now open Carousel to do so. Broke my existing upload process, and due to iOS permissions for the new app or not launching it frequently or something the new Carousel upload process wasn't reliable.

Discovered this by noticing that weeks of pictures weren't backed up to Dropbox. Glad I didn't lose my phone.

Ended up just deleting the Carousel app rather than figuring it out. The Dropbox app started syncing reliably again.
Stepping off the pity train, what out there is a good replacement for Mailbox?
Awesome. Putting something on this string that tries to passively slightly bend the string while allowing the string to pass through should be enough to have it lifted and kept up.
>>These idiots refuse to inter-operate.

Not true. There is tremendous effort in place trying to get IMS roaming/interop working. http://www.gsma.com/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IR.6...

The problem isn't idiots refusing to interoperate, it's that the standards are implemented in subtly different ways between operators.

So if you're on an AT&T or VZW network making calls to a Sprint person, you have 5 dependencies in play:

1) IMS compatible home network w/ HD voice codec support
2) HD Voice compatible home device
3) IMS compatible destination network w/ HD voice codec support
4) Interop agreement between carriers.
5) HD Voice compatible destination device.

Device churn is just as big a hurdle as the non-trivial network compatibility problem.
"I'm not sure that's true (see: Sparrow). I just don't think there is enough demand for people to want to pay for an email client."

Yeah, this is definitely what I saw with Sparrow. For it to become popular it has to be adopted by a substantial number of people. However, I find that only really tech savvy people cared about Sparrow and its streamlined interface. When I showed it to other people, they were reluctant to use anything else because they were afraid to move from their Apple Mail. I'm guessing if Sparrow had existed for windows it would've been the same thing with people using Outlook.

And then there's people who don't even use e-mail, who think it's outdated and prefer PM messaging as a form of communication. It's easy to see why a lot of these promising mail client apps don't really take off the way other apps and services do.

Nevertheless, Sparrow will always have a home in my Mac, as long as it keeps working on OS X.
Yes. They are shooting themselves into the feet. Too bad I pay annually! They won't be able to realize I left them until next year! I even got one extra year from Dell's Black Friday. Urgh!
Back from the Brink: Akatsuki Returns to Venus
The word "contest" is bad for us because it implies that the only reason you'd participate is to beat other people, but really your primary adversary in these challenges is Erin, Patrick, and me.
I had to look for this too: http://blog.sunrise.am
Progopedia – An Encyclopedia of Programming Languages
The saddest part is that Metro used to be incredible. I first moved to DC in 1993, and back then the trains were on time, the cars were clean, and the fares were low. It was excellent. People routinely pointed to it as the best thing about living in the District.

It's taken two decades of neglect and mismanagement to turn it into the horror show it is today.
Gmail for Android supports third party pop\imap servers quite well.
The GMail Android app does work with other people's IMAP and POP3 servers, for what it's worth. But then you have to use Android.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6078445?hl=en
The point was that those are forbidden in E-prime, (they have "am" in them).
One Month (YC S13) Is Hiring a Director of Growth
Yet that same Silicon Valley rewarded Mailbox with $100MM in an acquisition...
The new Outlook app is actually surprisingly good. I think the Sunrise guys (sunrise.am) are running that team and it shows. I laughed the first 2 times friends recommended me the app, but I tried it and now also highly recommend it.
The article is really about the effect of evapotranspiration. It's more of a look into a hidden effect of our attempts to remove and control larger amounts of fresh water. It isn't really a discussion of general policy.
I'm sympathetic to your ideas, but you're really overstating your case here. Redistributing income is probably the primary activity of governments in rich countries today. Even in the US, transfer payments are about 14% of GDP: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=2Qi3
Yeah, it will be lame if they decided to kill it just because Google Photos added a feature.
When you give me a language that I can specify explicit memory layout and support for generics we can talk.

Otherwise C++ is going to continue filling the space for large, performance sensitive applications.
I loved Mailbox. Really disappointing. What do folks suggest we use as our replacement email app? Problem with Apple's stock Mail app is that Google doesn't allow push email. Yes, those few seconds before I receive an email are very precious to me :)
I seem to recall a blogged anecdote from the height of the Apple vs Samsung lawsuit. The blogger had overheard a couple reading about it in a newspaper, and they consistently called the Samsung tablet the "Samsung iPad".

When all the media is yakking about is iPads, all the world knows exist are iPads...
I left DC about 18 months ago.

I used to be a daily metro rider.

Washington DC has some deep issues with a legacy of discrimination and urban decay that created a highly disadvantage population in the cities poor neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, they've tried to use government employment to fix these issues by turning certain agencies, especially the metro, into jobs programs for poorly educated and socialized locals.

This is the primary problem with the DC metro. It's staffed by a croneyist union who holds none of the employees accountable, and who simply pass any and all wage increases onto riders without even trying to attempt to find cost reductions via efficiency. It's an awful, awful system.
As someone who lives in the bay area, I think the DC Metro is absolutely amazing. The idea that your public transportation is always under heavy construction is kinda nice -- at least they're actively working on it. And you know, it actually exists at all.
This looks really interesting, I'll try it out when I build my next Ergodox keyboard for a stainless steel case instead of acryllic!
At least they didn't go $6.25 billion over budget on a broken bridge:

http://www.citylab.com/politics/2015/10/from-250-million-to-...
Silicon Valley's Hometown Bank Booms, but Risks Are on Horizon
> At $200m and 10 years though (and counting), I wish a subway system expansion would have been implemented.

Nice thought, but not realistic.

Firstly, $200 million for full metrorail construction is way low. The NoMA station cost over $100 million, and was an above-ground infill station that required no new track. That was just the cost to build a new station. The Potomac Yard station in Virginia is budgeted in the $210-$270 million range, and is also infill and above ground, but will require a slight track rerouting. An H Street station, if it were even possible (and I'm skeptical because the whole area is riddled with other rail infrastructure) would involve new underground track through newly bored tunnels, and a new underground station. I bet $200 million is off by at least a factor of two.

Secondly, even if the city did want to spend the money on it, they wouldn't be able to. DC can't unilaterally spend money on Metro; all new construction has to be divided amongst eight different jurisdictions according to a legislatively pre-determined formula, and the WMATA board (which has representatives from all the jurisdictions on it) has to vote to approve it. This basically never happens for new construction in the city, because DC is a minority on the board and none of the suburban jurisdictions want to pay for core infrastructure, only extensions. DC has taken to replicating more and more of WMATA's services under its DOT umbrella just to avoid having to deal with the bureaucratic nightmare and mismanagement of the transit authority. The (wildly successful) Circulator bus system is an example of this, as it in some cases directly overlaps with WMATA bus service. The streetcar would have been another such attempt.

Third: if by some miracle DC could get agreement on justifying new underground metrorail construction and pull the funding together for it, H St. would be nowhere near the top of the list of priorities. Metro has major rush-hour capacity issues that are in dire need of addressing, and a random spur out to H St. wouldn't help with any of them. New construction should go towards an additional Potomac crossing north of Rosslyn, and a separated Blue line running north of the current blue/orange/silver shared track. This has been proposed to run along M, and could conceivably eventually serve Georgetown, Logan circle, and Union station.

(None of this is to say the streetcar project isn't a clusterfuck. It is. WMATA just isn't the answer.)
Tech Gadgets You Wish You Could Afford (slideshow)
Locking it into a Microsoft product can be seen as the same as discontinuation.
The definition of a multiquine specifically disallows passing in source code as input, though. The input to a multiquine is strictly for selecting which sub-quine to run, or which output set to calculate, and is not used in any way to influence the calculation of the selected output.
> And if you don't think it's worth your time to do that much, why would you expect anyone else to?

I don't expect anyone else to build me a FOSS email client. I do expect that by 2015 somebody would have figured out a way for me to give them money for a good email experience. :)
The wideband "hd audio" codec was developed by telecom people in the 70s. The problem with mobile is that the vocoder is trying to cope with a channel having 99% packet loss and latency variance 10x over the mean. The width of the passband is the least of voice's problems.

The solution to mobile voice's problem is for the carriers to invest in a network that isn't ludicrously oversold.
I switched back to Airmail on OS X last week as it was pretty obvious Mailbox was dead as there were 2 critical bugs regarding switch and images not loading that hadn't been fixed in months. It's a shame but that's life.

I have to manually setup the rules/filters for now but reading through some other clients in the app store they seem to be buggy. I used Airmail years ago before Mailbox and it was stable and has been since switching back.
First thing to do after installing Linux Mint 17.3
>Which is unfair, but it's either that or the rise of the 'Sixth Reich' in a generation

That sounds a bit like Sam Harris advocating for genocide in his book End of Faith: Sure it would be a crime, but otherwise millions would die.
Isn't "CTF" at least as bad, with the extra bad of making no sense to most people?
Would be interested if they supported something like this - https://stampery.com
I find this attitude pretty condescending.
A broad gender statement like "boys are trained to be loud and space demanding" isn't honest in representing all boys.
Maybe use DIY.
A poor description is quite useful when used in real time: during a small window of time after the crime, within a small radius.

Descriptions are frequently sketchy like this. You hear them on the news daily. "Middle-aged white male wearing jeans and a ball cap". If that's all you have and don't act on it immediately at the time and location, its usefulness evaporates.
your posted numbers were garbage; mine weren't: (http://www.ccsd59.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Administrat...).

chicago isn't an outlier; it's a big city with a higher cost of living.

real costs are hidden behind 'salaries', a term managed by the public unions to understate real comp. 8 months a year / health / sick / retirement age (55 typical) / pension. emotional appeals like your's are what have allowed the public unions to rape the average family (both in the classrooms where they fail, and in the pocketbook where public school teachers are doing their finest work).
This is a great idea and I wish you guys success, I really do.

I just hope your margins are high enough, or you're doing this on the side your company's main business, because your prices seem extremely low to me. (Also, Mazak over Trumpf?)

I worked for a while (albeit approximately ten years ago now, but still) for a custom fab shop that did a lot of custom business with lasers (for industry, not consumer, generally), and I have a fair idea of the cost of lasers, the stainless you're using, and probable cost of development for the software toolchain you put together for this. And I hope you're using something like SigmaNEST or ProNest and not just chunking down rectangles for your parts, because that would help your costs considerably. It sounds like, from your description, that you are, and that you're using cutouts from other parts to do it, which will hopefully help your costs.

And I would be worried about high-rework costs or low customer satisfaction due to heat issues from people who don't understand laser, or hole locations, etc, etc, etc?

But you probably have already thought of all this, and don't need a random internet commenter to bring it all up. I had wanted to do something like this when I worked at the custom fab shop, but I didn't have the time to develop the toolchain necessary to do it all in 2005-7, so I guess I'm a little jealous.

Good luck!
Anyone looking for a decent note platform, just use google keep, it works like a charm :)