skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are plenty of companies that just have a human read your receipts. Hell it can even be automated with Mechanical Turk.
Sure! We batch together data to load into warehouses by time and a few other properties. Usually, to figure out what objects are in S3, you have to issue an S3 list objects command. That operation tends to be relatively slow, especially if there are many objects.

Instead, when we put a new object, we update a table in Aurora which tracks all of the relevant objects. That way, we can query information like "what objects were uploaded in a certain time range" very quickly.
>>I'm curious whether this would hold for creative, mentally taxing work like programming.

It works when it should. As a teenager from a poor family in India, I would generally go on 5 hour sleep- My waking live was spent going to college, studying for long hours in the library and doing late night studies at home.

I used to sleep between 3 AM and 9 AM in the morning.

I didn't even like I was doing anything great at all. It felt more like 'opportunity'. Because frankly my other friends from a similar background where having it way worse, most had quit studies and were doing small time jobs to support their families.

I had these kind of episodes in my life quite a few times. Generally something good comes out of it. And it has always felt like 'opportunity'. Stressful, tiring, taxing and demanding of course, but I feel blessed to be even given the opportunity to undergo the struggle.
ProTip – Peer to Peer Tipping for the Web
If they've already chosen to quit, paying more may only keep them begrudgingly.
> Gone, too, is a classroom poster that once warned recruits that “officers killed in the line of duty use less force than their peers.”

Wow. That was a thing that existed?

> Alexis Artwohl, a former police psychologist and consultant to the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association...is skeptical of some guardian-style training. Artwohl has co-written a book on deadly force whose promotional blurb begins: “In a cop’s world it’s kill or be killed.”

Jesus.

I hope this new-style training actually has an impact.
Although I chastised hga, your contributions haven't been much better. You've taken this way into personal peevishness.

Respecting the HN guidelines would have meant dropping this a long time ago, so please stop.
Some quick, deep analysis here (from an industry veteran): http://blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4391
I wonder if they considered breaking the app up into smaller parts that can be sold to different markets:

* API that accepts the scanned images, parses and returns the receipt data.
* API (that does the above and) stores the data to allow later exporting of
receipt data in Quickbooks, Excel, and other formats.
* IOS and Android Libraries that integrate with the API.
* Birdly app build on top of the library and API.

Birdly could be used as an end-user application, but also as a showcase for the API usage. Other application developers could license the libraries and API from your service; sure it creates competition, but you'd be getting a slice from a larger pie.

Also if there was a solo API plan, I would probably consider something like this for some personal expense tracking software I've been thinking about writing for myself.
Nix Tour
This really struck a chord because I've spent the last couple years working on a productivity app and it took me a few iterations to get people coming back. It uses spaced repetition to help users remember what they read on the web. I feel like I've removed a lot of the friction of apps that did this before (Anki, Supermemo) by making it really easy to add information to it. It would be possible to replicate it with a simple word processing tool, some copy-pasting, some typing, calculating review intervals, and adding reminders to a calendar to review a specific portion of a document. By eliminating that friction, I've appealed to a small but growing crowd of people, like us, who are too lazy for the pen and ledger approach, but are willing to put in some work (in this case, to reread a few lines of text each time they get a notification).

The "productivity" designation is an inadequate one. There a few obvious productivity apps that translate well from processes that people are used to in the real world, like note-taking apps, that don't require much education for the user to understand. It's a notebook. Cool, got it.

Onboarding is such an important facet of this discussion, and you do mention it below:

> I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable

Unfortunately, developers do get so close to their product that they forget that users often don't know where to start, so I think that having to build an onboarding process is something to be expected. Education is the only way to make one UI for many people. I think the questions that need to be asked are:
1. How long is it going to take to make my users proficient at my app?
2. Can I make it fun for them?

I don't think the moral of the story is "Don't make productivity apps", I think it's "Don't make an app that's hard to explain to its users"

Unless they have an external pressure like:
- In the case of B2B, complying to company policy (Slack)
- In the case of B2C, it's social and everyone is already on it (Facebook)
Maybe HipChat will finally have chat notifications on iOS [0]. A messaging app. Probably one of the many reasons people migrated to Slack.

Meanwhile, latest update reads: "New: Scumbagify support! Prefix any emoticon with (scumbag) to show how you really feel"

[0]https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sug...
Facebook and some others started out one upping myspace (myspace one upped friendster) and was a weak technology company. Text entry boxes and messaging do not make you a strong technology company especially when you're copying frameworks. Google's started in AI and as a strong algorithmically based technology company and has continued.

Facebook has a long way to go along with many other companies.
EMV liability shift is why both banks and retailers suddenly got serious: http://www.emv-connection.com/understanding-the-2015-u-s-fra...
A gentle lady on the cashier once took card out of my hands and rubbed on her hair. It worked lol.
You're not.
It's working alright for Uber ;)
How I Created a $100M ARR Software Company Knowing Nothing About Software
That's one issue. I still cannot seem to get my mind around another, though.

Conceptually, I don't grasp how possibly exposing my PIN number at a point of sale is MORE secure. I just can't get past the idea that I'm now using the number I use to withdraw funds at an ATM at MORE places than just at my bank.
Ugh, went through that a couple years ago after a course of antibiotics due to a dog bite. Wouldn't wish it in my worse enemy. I'm also much more wary about ever taking antibiotics again.
>It's sad how politicized this has become.

Totally agree. I think if there's one thing that shows Republicans refuse to let Obama have credit for anything, it's the prisoner exchange for Bergdahl. The Republicans should've been happy that one of the troops they so fervently idolize was brought home, and they undoubtedly would've been if it was done under the supervision of a Republican administration.
The whole "enter your banking credentials" thing is definitely a bit weird, but I understand why they do it.

A slightly different use-case, but does anyone know of a good service that replaces the need for nightly ACH batch processing that works with good old fashion routing number and account number (and maybe some other details OTHER than banking credentials)?
Fortunate? Freedom of speech (et al.) is a birthright, NOT a privilege. If only the people of Japan stood up for their rights..
And for the ability to review already seen problems using spaced repetition.
I have it and honestly have no reason to use it because credit cards just work.

This is exactly what I thought, but I started using Apple Pay, anyway, because Discover is offering 10% cash back on all in-store Apple Pay purchases through the end of the year. That's too good to pass up. Now that I've been using it for a while, I wish it were available everywhere. It's a small thing, but taking my phone out of my pocket is the most natural thing in the world. Subjectively, the process feels smooth.
Businesses build cars; governments build roads.

It's hard enough to get a government to keep roads pothole-free, how much harder is it going to be to get them to build "smart roads" when they have little or no incentive to do so?
Unnecessarily rude and combative. Flagged.
Thanks for the reply! Any plans on supporting other databases? Namely the Microsoft alternatives (SQL Server/SQL Datawarehouse)?
I don't think you can draw any conclusions from comparing the price of Wendelstein 7-X and ITER. ITER is much larger than Wendelstein, it looks like the magnets in ITER are roughly 10 times as heavy, so ITER needs much more material than Wendelstein.
ASLR whats that? Common vulnerability in major antivirus products
Deploying HTTPS on a site with tons of legacy components, third-party dependencies and a lot of ad networks is definitely no small feat. There's a reason why most news sites are still HTTP-only.
Odd, I'm seeing an EV cert at https://www.washingtonpost.com/ (though not at https://developer.washingtonpost.com/)
This part is key:

> Take the time, on a regular basis, to talk to your employees about their lives, goals and challenges. Ask them what they hope to accomplish, not just in the next week, but in the next year, five years and ten years in their careers. Listen intently to what they say, and think about how you can help them achieve that. And then act.

Anyone who asks me those questions will get double the loyalty out of me - they'll know before I even think of going elsewhere. I've been at way too many places that just don't give a damn, or assume that people will look out for themselves. They will, but probably to another place. But if you want them to be dedicated and loyal to working for you you need to get out in front. Solve the little problems before they become big ones, or lose your best employees (who can easily get a job elsewhere) and let your companies morale and productivity die.
That's the thing though, I can do 100k transactions per second with an RDBMS, it's not an achievement.

Whether a DBMS allows relations or not or uses SQL or not is an independent property of whether it has built in dynamic schema/graph/replication/failover/query distribution/sharding/rebalancing/distributed consistency solutions. And whether those solutions are built-in has little to do with whether solving them is possible.

If it's just that we are disappointed that the traditional database systems (which happen to be relational and SQL because these are elements of that tradition) feel like they don't need to solve these problems, then I absolutely agree.

The performance benefits of flattening your data model, avoiding indexing things you don't query against, sharding, using a distributed map reduce, etc. can all be had with SQL and an RDBMS, so speed is a poor argument for straying from the tradition, IMO.

If it's really about wanting a new generation of comprehensive platforms for solving distributed data management (all those features above) that's a great argument, but somehow it's always about speed. Of course distributing asynchronous writes across a cluster of cheap cloud VMs starved for disk IO is faster than single-point synchronous writes on one of those VMs, but is the operations overhead of orchestrating and monitoring that cluster really cheaper than provisioning the hardware it'd take to do the same throughput with a simpler traditional system? Not as often as I'd be had to believe.
By this thinking any word without context can cause outrage.
How does Dwolla differ from Stripe?
Core flaw: Telegram uses a block cipher mode that requires padding to the cipher's block length, which means messages end in a variable amount of random bytes. Telegram "MACs" plaintext (really: applies a SHA-1 hash to it), but doesn't include the padding in the MAC, which means attackers can extend messages with arbitrary amounts of attacker-controlled padding.

From that affordance, this paper comes up with an error oracle that relies on message alignment.

There's more not to like than this:

* The protocol is MAC-then-encrypt; it has to do a large amount of work and validation before attempting to cryptographically validate the message.

* They use a nonstandard padding scheme which requires them to rely on a message_length field to strip padding; conventional CBC-like applications (with respect to padding, IGE is like CBC) would use PKCS#7 padding, where the padding itself describes how to strip itself. That also has problems, but the message length solution requires them to do calculations with respect to plaintext length, padding length, and the body all before the fingerprint of the message is checked.

This protocol leaves a lot of room for attackers to invent cute tricks with message lengths, block swapping, and field validation. Modern crypto gets around all these problems by ensuring that messages are cryptographically authenticated before they're encrypted.

The author's point, which is correct and pretty much the universal opinion of cryptographers who have looked at Telegram is that MTProto should have just used a conventional AEAD mode rather than inventing their own weird thing.
"It's all those damn engineers' fault."
SimilarWeb acquires mobile intelligence startup Quettra for $10M+
I would invest a bit to encourage you and your friend to put this on youtube. : )

I bring this up because these things are really entertaining, and with a bit of witty commentary and nice graphics, I would probably end up spending hours watching these. Like all stories, you have to have an 'arc', themes, etc, but these come later.

In college, I must have spent thousands of hours watching let's play for SimCity and Minecraft. My friends were always amused how I enjoyed watching the gameplays more than actually playing those games.

On the other hand, you don't need me at all.

Edited for clarity.
If your company is in SF, BART will get you pretty far in an hour.
MIT Researcher Reportedly Sentenced to Death in Syria
Well, sometimes the truth hurts.
Can you share what the treatment is?
It has a great getting started experience and some fun gimmicks but most of the innovation was cloned from Flowdock anyways. What you are seeing is the power of a famous CEO and an awesome marketing engine powered by an experience VC.
To See the Future of Electric Cars, Look East
There's a global hackathon going on right now at Atlassian. Keep a eye on https://twitter.com/hashtag/shipit33

Memorable tweets so far:

1) Founder of the company last night calling it quits and heading out for a beer. https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/674734326571921409...

2) Insanely clever marketing by the jira team: https://twitter.com/Atlassian/status/674964465717260288

Reply with your favourites! ;)
Only have to take leave for weekends in certain situations, like if you're taking Friday and Monday off and will be out of the local area the entire time.
And the "cybersecurity" ETF: HACK
It's not worth it, because every single decision ends up depending on your output targets anyway.

(You can't afford accurate motion estimation at low bitrates because you can't fit the accurate info in your budget anyway. Except for when you can.)
Facebook Open-Sources Artificial Intelligence Hardware Design for the First Time
> On the bright side, VW is a very small portion of the market

In the US. In Europe Volkswagen accounts for 25% of new car registrations. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-11-17/volkswagen...
Sorry, brainfart!
If you went through and sorted those which were pleasant from those which weren't, you would own all those you sorted. Good luck getting even one picture that looked anything more than static or pure color.
The Social Travel Guide – Tripblan
Compared to its competition Jira does rather well. Jira won't blow you away as an amazing, delightful app. But it gets the job done and is relatively painless.
I think that this is direction of analytics and we'll see products similar to this one in the next few years. The analytics companies realized that they can't answer all the questions their customers ask so they started to add this kind of features to their products, just look at custom applications of Mixpanel, Redshift integration of Amplitude or S3 integration of Keen.io.

The main reason that these companies implement these features to their infrastructure is to provide an alternative way to analyze data within their product in order to prevent losing their existing customers that need more advanced analytics features. (They are usually the biggest paying customers) The funny thing is that when you have an analytical database combined with a stream processing application, you can ask almost all questions you want to ask and get answers you need quickly enough so the value of their core product becomes less valuable when you have this alternative way.

I think that the BI tools such as Periscope and Mode Analytics realized this and started to promote their products as an analytics product rather than an application that creates charts from your data.

[Shameless plug]
I'm also working on an open-source analytics platform (https://github.com/buremba/rakam) that collects data from clients (web, mobile or a smartwatch, doesn't matter), transforms (ip-to-geolocation, referrer extraction etc.) and stores data in a database that you specified. (currently there are two alternatives: Postgres and an in-house big data solution that uses PrestoDB as query engine)

Then, you to execute SQL queries, pre-aggregate your data for fast reports with continuous queries and cache query results with materialized views. Once you have these features, you can perform all analytical queries such as funnels, retention, segmentation etc. and create your custom analytics service easily.
> You are very delusional

> With an attitude like that it's maybe not very surprising

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, so please edit them out of your comments here.
It still baffles me that, as a Linode customer, I'm not actually receiving an email in regards to things like this.
I use Apple Pay sometimes. It's somewhat easier than using a card, which is a nice little advantage.

Unfortunately, Apple Pay is suffering from the wrong end of network effects. Support is far from ubiquitous, so you don't know whether any given transaction will support it. You can look for the NFC logo, but some places with the logo still don't support it. At that point, it's easier to whip out the card by default. If I've been to a place before and know they take it, I'll usually use it, but there aren't many such places for me.
http://bigcharts.com is pretty good as a rule, too.
Why does it look like democracy is on a declining trend all over the world, even as the Internet is more used by more people than ever?
Nope it doesn't. A highly trained and armed soldier can easily overcome ten or more untrained but armed people
Yeah hopefully they bring this to Washington!
One few of my colleagues did some agency work for Walmart. A large web application for working in parts of their supply chain.

These guys are some of the best programmers I know and they had nothing but respect for Walmart tech teams.

The first time it came up that I made a casual assumption like "oh, they must be very 'enterprize-y' in their software development." and one of them corrected me by saying something to the effect of "You'd be surprised actually, they're not just surprisingly sophisticated technologically 'for an enterprise' but they're actually surprisingly sophisticated for anyone"

Anyways, small anecdote that stuck with me.

Walmart is apparently VERY strong in the IT side of things.
I hope you are right - but to me it sounds like the "why" question is the key to the whole story, so they need to investigate it first. And they mentioned that in the next episode they will talk about the search efforts. As for the time of day he was captured - I might be wrong, but wasn't he walking it the dark looking for flashlights and listening to radio chatter just before that?
<3 bootstrapping. They started this company on their credit cards. The founders are already well involved in mentoring local startups here in Australia. This is fantastic for the local ecosystem all around. Atlassian founders/directors/employees will be the PayPal Mafia (for Australia).
Nope. I'm male. I have three cards in my wallet (debit card, credit card, driver's license). I never said paying with a card is a "hassle", but between the two, paying with my phone is just so much quicker and easier.
The longest commute I ever had was open highway, about 40 miles in each direction. Rush hour was not an issue as I was just going between two small towns.

It was awful. Sure, I got to listen to ~90 minutes of podcasts or Audible each day, but even still that's not productive time. All it took was one accident on the highway and my day just went from 9.5 hours to 12.

Needless to say, my next job (and current) is about 4 miles away from my house and my quality of life has gone up exponentially, even though when I was doing it I did not mind the commute much.

You could double my salary and I don't think I would even consider a 2 hour one-way commute.
Same at the last place I worked at.
Reading the article, all I could think was "sounds like a problem with getting users to form new habits."

Those categories they listed are apps you'd use on a daily basis, or that have some kind of notifications (read: dopamine hits) built in. They build up a habit loop by making the app fun to use, and emitting notifications to keep the users coming back during that formative early usage period.

Monthly expense reporting (or monthly anything, really) seems like a rough road for building habits.
I've always been curious how, in this business model, you protect API tokens if the users of the API deploy mobile apps. Embedding them in an app isn't secure: anybody could reverse engineer the app and use the key for themselves free of charge. And there is no way in Android or iOS to know which app makes a request from the server.
OK, do-able. But your other option is to make 70% of that in a city where housing costs 1/4 as much.
Connect the Dots with Internet Peering at IX Points – DigitalOcean
Mapping the Startup Nation: The 12 most popular Tech hubs in Israel
Generating Semantic Editors Using Reference Attribute Grammars [pdf]
Only after 50 it is impossible to switch back.

Before that you just have to report, that you're unemployed and the state forces you to go back into public healthcare
Agreed. I would see success in gamification on the younger user base. Get this into middle school PE and drive through highschool
According to Fortune they have raised around $750M http://fortune.com/2015/10/28/theranos-is-seeking-to-raise-2...
All I'm saying, is if you recognize that a word is potentially costing you contributors, why wouldn't you change it if there is another word that is just as good?

I'm just trying to be practical, not trying to force PC-think down anyone's throat.
> you want us to be more xenophobic, but in the same time steal local jobs for yourself, with our pay, but your local expenses. just WOW

Keeping things polite is a good intention, but this is far from keeping things polite.
States with state inspection could plausibly require proof of some form that the update has been applied. States which use OBD-II diagnostics should generally already be capable of doing this by reading the CALID supplied by the ECU (it's part of the standard), so they could work off of that.