skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a bit of a tough one. Julia is much newer software than Octave, and it also has a lot of knowledge already of what does and doesn't work. They're already well-staffed by programming language experts. I have learned a lot about how the Matlab language works, and also a lot about how Octave is put together.

I don't have much to offer to Julia on technical terms. Octave's codebase started as pre-standard C++, and it's been a long and arduous job to very slowly modernise it. Julia has the advantage of starting modern.

I think the biggest lesson I've learned is, don't underestimate Matlab. It may be old, it may be an ugly language, but it also is gigantic, very well-funded, and everywhere. Julia and Octave are approaching Matlab from different angles, Julia by providing a better language and Octave by providing a free drop-in replacement, but ultimately we are both trying to replace Matlab.

Matlab users greatly value having a complete package with an editor, debugger, visualiser, profiler, and system modeller all in one. They don't generally see Simulink or the symbolic toolbox as being separate components, or indeed, as the completely separate programs that they really are. For the devout Matlab users, these conveniences greatly outweigh a better programming language. Going further, many Matlab users don't even consider their activity "programming" at all, and in recent years Matlab even writes the code for you if you just push a few buttons.

We're seeing some academics slowly switching over to Julia. This is great. The Mathworks knows very well that captivating young, malleable minds in university is how you get loyal paying customers, namely, the future bosses of these newly-molded minds. Julia is doing a good job appealing to profs. I am optimistic that within five years or so, new generations of Julia-trained graduates will slowly spread the love of the new language.
No need to build your entire startup on Slack but a solid integration can drive serious initial revenue for your startup especially if you do not get a lot of direct traffic. "One click install" is what helped Woocommerce and others get massive growth on the back of Wordpress through top exposure in the plugin directory.

Slack is still very much at the bottom of the growth curve. I have seen electrical contractors who need a way to chat with onsite workers at various projects switch from using WhatsApp/SMS to Slack. If one click job scheduling apps start appearing in the Slack App Store they will be quickly adopted by these businesses. I would be surprised if Slack or something like it has not completely wiped out internal email in 5 years.
Yeah, those two. There are some Latvian ones as well. What are some of the issues you've ran into with them? Genuinely curious.
My Erdos number is 30 milligrams.
Google AdWords is not primary enough?!
The technology it's built on is irrelevant. What makes Product Hunt is the community and the way Ryan and his team curate products. They surface the "best" products (based on their curated opinion) and that's what generates the following. Your site looks good, but are you willing to put 2 years of manually curating and scraping for products until you're successful?
There isn't much new here. Skip ahead to the first audience question from Ray Kurzweil (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHKwIYsPXLg&t=38m51s).

Kurzweil, in summary, asks "You say that a machine manipulating symbols can't have consciousness. Why is this different than consciousness arising neurons manipulating neurotransmitter concentrations?" Searle gives a non-answer: "My dog has consciousness because I can look at it and conclude that it has consciousness."
The problems most people have with static typing are related to explicit typing, not static typing per se. (And somewhat inane conversions tend to give dynamic typing a bad name as well).

There are two cases I can think of where the static typing in the most common languages are insufficient. The first is union types--you can't easily express a data structure like JSON in Java (although one could argue this is a feature, not a bug). The second case is where you need to map types to instances of those types, something akin to a Map<Class<T>, T> in Java syntax. While you can generally specify the latter at a method syntax (e.g., public <T> T get(Class<T> clazz)), there's no way to write that method without having to resort to subverting the type system.

Dynamic typing can be beneficial if you would otherwise be stuck subverting the type system more often than following it, although that's as much of an argument for more powerful static type system as it is one for dynamic typing.
All those data science, machine learning, algorithms, database and devops engineers would disagree.
The benchmarks seen at [1] which compare Julia with other languages were written to be idiomatic in those languages. I.e., they weren't supposed to be the fastest you could be in that language (which often would mean call a C library), but rather something which represents the language well. So the right criticism is not just if the benchmarks could be made faster, but also whether the speedup is too tricky or hard or requires calling wrapped C libraries.

[1] http://julialang.org/benchmarks/
> Is there something we should know?

You should know that there are many people in the world (and some even read HN) that do not want to admit existence of AGW, since it requires changes to their own moral compass called "free market".

Same deal as with evolution. However, HN demographics has less tendency to have "literal belief in the Bible" as moral compass, compared to "free market", hence the difference.
Heh. "correctly implemented." Heh.
With a minimum wage high enough that there is nothing they can do that's worth that amount in the employment market, their options are to be unemployed or to work as an entrepreneur, independent contractor, or some other arrangement (possible quasi or not legal) that works around the minimum wage law.

In that way, they can use the skills and effort they have to a productive end, even if no one will bid the minimum wage rate for those services.

If the job I'm doing now is "next" (I don't think the job is "mine" in any possessive sense), I would have to step back and figure out what my next best option is. I'm quite sure that absent the utter collapse of civilization, that I'll figure something out and be fine.
What makes that so? Do most FPGAs lack serial outputs that could generate HDMI/DVI signals? It seems to me that VGA would be harder since you need a DAC.
Sure, let's "teach the controversy"! :-)

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. AGW, just like evolution theory, is one of the biggest scientific accomplishments of humanity.
> Right now, many Windows GUIs (SmartGit/SourceTree) use 'git.exe' to manage the actual Git repositories.

For what it's worth, all of the Git functionality in Visual Studio uses libgit2.
The point is that Florida law requires voting methods to be amenable to manual recount. So even if we agree that e-voting obviates the need for manual recounting, it's still incumbent upon the officials either to demand facility for that kind of auditing or to change the law.

It would be a scary world if we just started ignoring laws every time we thought they were obsolesced by some new tech.
>Calling people who don't want to give all their work away 'cheapskates'

Is not what I said. I said that if you don't want to give away your work, buy a commercial license.
Canon 6d and Lens Giveaway
One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List’
Less than 30 minutes for your tech team.

1) Install Sandstorm (curl https://install.sandstorm.io | bash)

2) Install Rocket Chat (one click)

3) Set up a domain. Done

Regarding maintenance: I set it up 2 months ago and it's still running smoothly.
Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples
As someone who has used both, I really prefer Slack; it feels like a more polished product
This. $80m invested in a Slack ecosystem for these investors is likely to generate even more than that in returns (on their existing Slack equity) even if the investors never saw a dime out of the $80m invested.
Rejection as well failure is just feedback. We should not take it so personal but we build up expectations and project our selfs into that brand building stuff. The choosen ones must be selected and save the Zion or be part of it. What I've learned from my over 500+ jobs, accelerators, etc... Rejection is a fkin template! Move on fast and next time you'll reject them also ;)
Bacon over Lettuce
Quite interesting. I don't believe so, or at least I haven't heard of this.

23andMe can probably easily pivot to this area, but that hasn't stopped competitors in other fields that were dominated at the time. Plus this area is still pretty young and the market still has a lot of room for growth.
There's a reason they are posting the profit margins they have been. AWS != cheap.
Only JS runs in all browsers.

Some people want to write once, run anywhere. Hence JS and Node.js. ( or a compile-to-js language )
Why do we not know who he is? Is it not a crime in the US to leak/steal data and leak it to third parties?

You've released this scumbag back into the pool to continue his shenanigans elsewhere.

You've covered your ass, and now he's someone else's problem, right?
Turns out that if you bend over backwards and use some libraries and do a bunch of awkward stuff you can make most languages fast.
> Matlab users greatly value having a complete package with an editor, debugger, visualiser, profiler, and system modeller all in one.

That's a very good point. Julia's debugger and profiler are both horrifyingly bad.
"provided that you are operating at sufficient scale"

Where "sufficient scale" probably means you're spending 100k+ a year on infrastructure. Let alone staff costs to support it. Also in your example you have no datacenter redundancy so it's 44k if you want to be in 2 DCs, which means "sufficient scale" is probably more like 200k+.

"if you don't exceed 1 gigabit/s at the 95th percentile"

That's a big if, the internet, startups and business in general are uncertain and it's often very difficult to know what your 95th percentile will look like in the future.

Also, it's unlikely that your network utilization is constant. A utilization rate of 50% would be ambitious.

So a better comparison is 44k for 1gig in 2 datacenters vs 102k for AWS (17/2*12), assuming you can predict your network utilization pretty well.
I used Slack for a few months this year. A customer didn't use email, preferring Slack. Slack is an awesome platform, but I missed the asynchrony of email. When I code I like to have 30 to 40 minute uninterrupted work periods and I found an always on Slack took me out of the flow. Using Slack with specified "turn it off" quiet times would solve that issue however.
I love this quote from Christopher Alexander, author of Pattern Language on its failure:

"So there is the slightly strange paradox that, after all those years of work, the first three books are essentially complete and, from a theoretical point of view, do quite a good job of identifying the difference but actually do not
accomplish anything. The conceptual structures that are presented are just not deep enough to actually break down the barrier. They actually do not do anything."

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
Good stuff. I was brought up with images Africans starving on the TV and Live Aid. Horrible stuff. Glad to see progress.
Interesting! It seems almost as if the order doesn't matter, so long as each step is incremental and maintains the invariants of the previous step.
Author of Lita here. Lita's Slack adapter isn't going anywhere. :}
Completing the tutorial for Telescope and doing nothing beyond that isn't something you should probably be showing, especially as a Show HN.

If you polish it up and add a significant amount of custom functionality, maybe.
Show HN: Cool Voice Recorder and Changer
> Well sure, with a tautology like that.

Not a tautology. I called you out for making a baseless, refutable claim. Consider the shooting in Charleston, S.C. Were the victims in that church affluent and white? Seems to me we had a national conversation following that shooting, as well.

> And still, you're missing the point.

I only took exception with the part of your argument about the national conversation shifting to gun violence in the wake of mass shootings of "affluent white" victims. Anything else you inferred from my statement is strictly a product of your imagination.
Really? Because I don't think I've read hunter-gatherers being exceptionally poor.
A good example why people are leaving hackernews ...
Heck, in the quote box from Grammarly's site (the one with five sentences), the middle three are run-on sentences!
570,000 paying customers.
Jotdown Alpha Released
Does Matlab have something like iPython notebooks built in? That is something that would be really nice for academic work.
You did call him a "cheapskate" though. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.
True. It's almost the equivalent of using Rcpp with R and saying it runs really fast.
After many years, we've finally had something that very roughly approaches that in the Octave GUI. I've heard lots of good things about our GUI, but I know we're still very far from the polish of Matlab in this department.
Booking Tours Made Easy  – AmazingBestBuy.com
You forget that the US is an extremely expensive place to live relative to countries like India and China where enormous %s of the world population lives. $1.90 goes a long way in those places.
Are there some tests we can do to identify this issue?
I think they try to take in to account the income from farming to avoid that sort of miscalculation. Obviously there's a lot of leeway as to how to account for that stuff but anecdotally I think things have improved a lot. Especially in China. I was there around 1982 and people were living on gruel and breaking rocks with hammers to make a living, a bit like you'd imagine a prison gang. Now it's quite like the west in terms of living conditions for most.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and view. I appreciate the feedback and your even-handed moderation.

I don't know Ryan, but I've been observing PH for some time now. My opinions and thoughts are from these observations and those of others in the community.

I'm sure Ryan is a good person, with good intentions. Those good intentions stands in stark contrast to how PH works today. There have been other PH critics and from what I've seen RH has not been super open to those criticisms, and in fact, even going so far as to dismiss any critics as "haters" (which I think is a bit of a mislabel since many of his critics are in fact fans that are just opposed to the lack of transparency).

So I think given, its fair to address these failings. Perhaps I can use nicer language, but I trust that Ryan is a mature adult and can take it.

I do see your point about people saying mean things and how that can hurt, but c'mon, life is not fair or kind or nice. And we're not delicate butterflies.

Putting ourselves out there (to be celebrated and vilified) is part of the very nature of entrepreneurship / creation. I see the problems of suicides and mental health in our community (and I've definitely experienced and am still experiencing it first hand), but being overly cautious in our words to not-offend is not a solution to this problem. Somewhat off-topic but related, South Park this season did a great job of making fun of this.
Show HN: WhatsCarrier – Look up friends mobile network easily
It's a risk of failure. There may be other benefits that outweigh that risk. I don't know why you'd make a general rule about that.
The report lives behind a paywall. It's difficult to provide analysis without seeing the methodology. I'm skeptical.
Yahoo is the MySpace of search. She raised it's profile but ultimately there's very little Marisa could have done to change that. If NetFlix was clearly such a great investment at the time it would have been worth what it is today.
For a personal project I actually integrated four different geo ip lookup sources and returned the most common (city, region, country) tuple. If there aren't any in common then I have it go with maxmind geoip v2 (which is from their demo page that lets you perform a limited number of lookups per 24 hours). For the traffic my app gets that's enough.

But I do have to agree, maxmind's flagship database is the best there is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10729864
People are going to get riled up about this statement since it is vague. Better to say: don't build a missing feature on top of a "platform." You will be consumed.

Now, if there is "synergy" with that integration, then it makes sense, but this assumes you have a profitable standalone business to begin with.

If your app is another way to poke people, you will lose. If your app was the first way to post pictures on twitter, you're screwed.
Comparing intelligence operations of the past - with or without the help of business - to the current situation is a false equivalence.

To quote Cybersecurity as Realpolitik[1] yet again:

The central dynamic internal to government is, and always
has been, that the only way for either the Executive or the Legislature
to control the many sub-units of government is by way of how much
money they can hand out. [...]

Suppose, however, that surveillance becomes too cheap to meter,
that is to say too cheap to limit through budgetary processes. Does
that lessen the power of the Legislature more, or the power of the
Executive more? I think that ever-cheaper surveillance substantially
changes the balance of power in favor of the Executive and away
from the Legislature.

In the past, there were always fundamental limitations of money or manpower or capability. It's expensive to run a stakeout, and it just wasn't technologically possible to build a database about everybody; even the relatively simple census took years of work before the invention of Hollerith's Tabulator[2].

Compare that to today, where XKEYSCORE can search most world communications in (approximately?) realtime. Compare the handful of bytes worth of personal information the Census Bureau was able to tabulate about everybody to the still-growing mountain of data (and metadata) that is gathered routinely that we call "analytics". Compare the difficulty of searching for some particular piece of data - even with a fancy electromechanical tabulator - to the powerful and widely available analysis tools we have today.

It is simply dishonest to say the surveillance capabilities of even a generation or two ago is even remotely comparable to the surveillance currently being done by both governments and private businesses.[3]

[1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI

[2] https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/th...

[3] "It ain't the same league. It ain't even the same fucking sport."
thx bill gates u did it.
There is that question... I'm not sure to be honest. I guess sites like HN work because of the community and PGs hard work setting it up. I thought I'd see if people are interested.

Could make it non profit or community owned or open source/ open admin decisions or something?
Electronic voting machines are inherently unsafe. (Consider the difficulty of validating that the software has not been tampered with eg trusting trust, that the drivers have not been tampered with, that the network transfer of the counts is secure and validated, that the hardware is safe and reliable, that the screens and display controllers are displaying what the software thinks they are displaying, etc).

The 'best' option is to use them to print a paper ballot that the voter can validate before putting it in a ballot box. But at that point, you've basically invented a $2000 pencil.

Options that rely on the voting machine itself to count or transmit the votes can't be adequately validated. Options that publish the votes in the clear - allowing voters to check their votes were recorded properly violate anonymity requirements, and options that publish obfusticated votes don't actually provide useful auditability.

Not being able to provide a paper (or equivalent) ballot recount is (or should be) completely unacceptable.
Interview processes are more about social skills than technical skill (even in engineering interviews).
There is a huge amount of randomness involved - Maybe the HR person just didn't like your face!

It's mostly about understanding the company culture, reading the interviewer's face and trying to figure
out what they want to hear as you go along (of course technical skills are a prerequisite).

The only time I didn't get an offer was because I asked for too much money.
I think asking for more money is a good idea though; it weeds out all the frugal companies.

I think that if your success rate is 90%, it means you're not charging enough.
You need to bring the price up and allow the success rate to drop - Then the average quality of offers will go up.
It does require Knockout (~22kb) to work.

There's also a knockout binding that is there to help you integrate the component with existing knockout apps.

But you can also use it with any other framework through jQuery integration.
Well it was done in a bit of a hurry. Improvements to come perhaps.
Our comments should probably deliver substantive feedback. This is a dismissal, and a disheartening one at that. This is exactly the kind of criticism that could have been leveled against HN itself on day one. The amount of custom functionality isn't relevant to whether something is executed well.

I've upvoted this thread. It's probably not executed well, but I like the author's audacity. Good on them. I hope a thousand others follow suit.
I've only skimmed the article (it's in my Pocket for later), but I think the author gives the answer: embedded programming. You can make your environment as constrained as you want then.
Why is Product hunt such a big deal? Is it bigger than Techcrunch or some of these tech sites? Honestly, have not heard of it till now. This whole trip is just giving it more publicity.

I seriously want to know why someone should care about Product Hunt and what its impact and/or place is in the tech world.
> ReactJS has slaughtered the front-end market share (in a good way) and completely taken developers by storm with its simplistic component based approach.

React has recently dominated headlines and in another few months, something else will. Meanwhile, people will keep using stuff from 3 years ago.
Ahem, money == interest-bearing debt created in a computer by private, non-democratic institutions for maximum profit, in case someone missed that little glitch in the system.
If you're interested in this stuff, the author also hosts the excellent Compressor Head video series: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsIJGErt5rrCq...
Did you check out Google Cloud ? I moved all my company's instances to them and I ended up cheaper than on Vultr (similar pricing with DO), while also benefiting to more features (storage, mysql, etc) and better uptime.

For 28$/month you can get a similar instances as on amazon (1CPU and 3.75GB RAM) and 60GB SSD is another 10$. 60GB standard storage is 2.40$.

I'm impressed that Google Cloud is adding a couple of new features every month and I can see them a strong AWS competitor soon.
This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc.

People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it."

Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they're build to scale.
Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?