skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So Spapchat achieved what Path tried limiting friends? Real connections with real friends.

Funny thing, went to Path.com now and find out two interesting things: i) they have two apps at the same website now - Path, the social network and Talk, a messaging app; and ii) they don't even mention the 150 friends limit anymore (contrasting that it was the core feature and the epicenter of their launch campaign)
10 essential skills for roboticists
I read some of the slides, focusing on the sybil attack mitigation. Just how hard is this PoW? Is it really hard relative to the potential gain from fraud?
In this particular comment, I wasn't talking about Norrth Korea, but a more general principle of propaganda and brainwashing. NK isn't the only country with this leader cult, you know.
Consider the statement "People are smarter than dogs." This is not literally true, but is true in a very useful sense. Our language need not look like legal contracts, which are written to be literally true, and yet still they have ambiguity problems.
I love the comments in the Kickstarter. Especially the person who asked for Zombie Jedi.
Is there an easy way for that with hundreds of bookmarks?
You and samth seem to be missing the point: academic research is often built using methods that will ensure no real-world success while aiming to achieve real-world success. Factoring in real-world constraints, best practices, and existing work-arounds will let academics achieve better results on average. Baseline of practicality goes up.

And again, these are all academic projects that aim at being practical. The point is supported by a number of academics that incorporate real-world information and constraints into their work to produce deliverables that advance state-of-the-art and are useful. Examples that come to mind are: Haskell/Ocaml/Racket languages, CompCert C compiler, Microsoft's SLAM for drivers, SWIFT auto-partitioning for web apps, Sector/Sphere filesystem, the old SASD storage project (principles became EMC), old Beowulf clusters, ABC HW synthesis, RISC-V work, and so on. So many examples of academics keeping their head in the real-world instead of the clouds to making a name for themselves with awesome stuff with immediate and long-lasting benefits. I'm not Matt but I'm guessing he'd rather see more examples like this than, say, a TCP/IP improvement that breaks compatibility with all existing Tier 1-3 stacks and whose goal is to improve overall Web experience. Yes, there are people working on those. ;)
You're technically correct. I'm using the term "price discovery" crudely in light of the audience. "Valuation" would be a more accurate, if more ambiguous, term.

If everyone buys indexed ETFs, the market stops discerning between the index's components. If everyone buys "China," the difference between "shitty thing over there" and "half-decent asset if not levered through the roof" vanishes. When the market starts falling "finger in the pie" syndrome sets in. Nobody has any idea what one thing is worth over another. Even if they do, they probably can't trust their data, and even if they can, they know nobody else can. So everyone dumps "China," punishing all assets alike.
I didn't tackle the apparent contradiction because I think others here did a good job. But let me try then based on your follow up:

1) Your business, without a balance of funds, is an unacceptable risk and not worth them supporting
2) Your business, with the appropriate balance of funds in reserve, is now not risky to them

I understand it seems contradictory/hypocritical. But it's all about whether you view it as a "freeze" (which has much more dramatic connotations) or simply a risk mitigation strategy on their behalf. Once you solve for the risk mitigation they're comfortable doing normal business with you.
When the IoT Comes to the Office
Students build one of Leonardo da Vinci's bridges – out of ice
To answer this, the parents, and many sibling posts all in one; we've already have almost a good decade of misery together, so we figured "might as well do it for masochism's sake" :)

I'd re-echo the clarification of my main point though, and be less glib: by being able to meet these differences head on, we each managed over the years to shift the other, and produce a dynamic I've become "pretty OK" with. Fortunately the mindsets of the parents don't have to carry down to children in exact parity. (To re-glib for the conclusion; Especially in my case or else I'd be elbow deep in some cancer patient, and I don't have a strong stomach for that sort of thing)
An advanced alien civilization will probably have very low radiation signature. To afford the maximum amount of computation, it should completely encase the star (maximum energy) and radiate all waste heat toward a black hole (maximum cooling).
writing, repetition, and reminding seem helpful.
Why use PayPal for credit card payment processing above the petty cash level? If you're up to $30K, you should be getting merchant services from a real bank, not an intermediary. If you're not using eBay, PayPal provides few benefits.
Perhaps. Certainly one could make the argument. My point was more that it would be a major uphill battle to get damages in excess of a total refund from the seller

Among the many issues, another raised here is the presence of specifically enumerated remedies:

> Failure to fulfill your orders will lead to charges as stated in the Seller Policies.

Which could well be interpreted as limiting the liability of the seller to the fines specified in the seller policies.

Clearly there's some kind of contract here to give money in exchange for the ticket -- the question is how high are the damages in the event of non performance of the contract, and what further remedies are available once a refund has been issued.
Depending on the setup, moves / exporting / snapshots can be helped by fancy-shmancy file systems that allow snapshots (well LVM does too but I hear it is slow). But generally means BTRFS or ZFS. The pattern is to create a read-only snapshot of directory. Then feed that snapshot to tar (maybe apply some mild compression on it depending on your tradeoffs). Then delete snapshot.

Even better directly use BTRFS (or ZFS) send / recv to send to move to another system with that file system.

Can also pipe tar directly to something like nc. Remember benchmarked moving a large number of files on a LAN and tar + nc came out as the winner over say rsync or scp. It saturated 1Gbps connection pretty close to its maximum expected capacity.

You'd obviously not expect user to do that by hand and would write tools to do it.
Yay! I like the changes.

But they are doing absolutely nothing about my biggest beef with PostgreSQL. Which is that there is absolutely no way to lock in good query plans. It always reserves the right to switch plans on you, and sometimes gives much, much, much worse ones. No other database does this to me. Even MySQL's stupid optimizer can be reliably channeled into specific query plans with the right use of temporary tables and indexes.

This is a problem because improvements don't matter if the query plan is "good enough". But they will care if you screw up. PostgreSQL usually does well, but sometimes screws up spectacularly.

The example that I have been struggling the most often with in the last few months is a logging table that I create summaries from. Normally I only query minutes to hours, but I set it up as a series of SQL statements so I first put the range in a table, and then have happened BETWEEN range_start AND range_end. PostgreSQL really, Really, REALLY wants to decide that the index on the timestamp is a bad idea, and wants to instead do a full table scan. Every time it does, summarization goes from under a second to taking hours.

Hopefully the new BRIN indexes will be understood by the optimizer in a way that makes it happier to use the index. But I'm not optimistic. And if I lean on it harder, I'm sure from past experience that I'll find something else that breaks.
I think this is more common than people might realize. In fact, I think it's fundamental to how the predatory lending industry(READ: banking industry) operates. David Graeber's DEBT is a good read: http://libcom.org/files/__Debt__The_First_5_000_Years.pdf
Help us make Industry 2016 the best product conference anywhere
I'm the organizer of Industry 2016 (indsum.com), a conference for people who build, launch, and scale world-class products. Last year, we had hundreds of people come to Cleveland, Ohio from 21 states and 7 countries to hear from folks like Nir Eyal, Trevor Owens, and others.

We're already gearing up for 2016 -- and are excited to have Ken Norton of Google Ventures give the opening talk.

My question is:

What would you want to see in a conference that's designed for product managers and those building products?

What kind of an experience would you expect?

This is very much a "for us, by us" conference. It's completely bootstrapped by two of us who have worked in product for quite some time. We're intent on this becoming something special for product people (and are on our way, based on the feedback from last year), but we'd love to hear your ideas/input.
At the risk of sounding stupid, why would Paypal freeze their account and why would the author of this story describe this as "understandably"? Is there something dubious about having that much money in any one account?
That's interesting that you know this depression is going to happen. How much money have you placed on this certainty? There's a few different ways you can short the Chinese economy. You'd be crazy not to if this is as sure a thing as you say.
It would be amazing to use this data in a study. I'm all for observing and analyzing unsuspecting people - that's the only reasonable way you can avoid the effect of people changing their behavior when they know they're being studied. I think that the biggest issue here is not with scaling, or even with finding a reliable subset of the data - it's with fitting such experiment into formal and ethical framework of science. Some of the issues I see:

- Scientists generally design their studies, trying to amplify the visibility of studied phenomenon while filtering out as much noise as possible. Here you'd have an experiment that's not designed. My guess is that it's something most researchers are not used to nowadays.

- It may be hard to reuse this technique. The first team to run this study may have some results that we could trust, but as soon as they publish and everyone knows that apps are now used to study people, users will change behavior.

- It creates a whole battlefield of interest. It suddenly is in the interest of scientists and their research institutions to promote commercial apps. It's also in the interest of the app vendors to enter into agreements with researchers, because getting an interesting result will become a huge marketing opportunity. And so there will be pressure to find "proper" results.

> I've also ran some unscientific analysis that confirmed my biases. Major one: when I consume less calories then I burn my weight goes down, and vice versa. ;-)

I think you should publish :).
Gamma ray bursts are produced by stars that are very massive and short-lived. So one can argue that after few tens of millions of years a cluster wouldn't produce that them.

On the other hand you are of course right - in a galaxy that is still undergoing intense star formation it is still dangerous to live in a dense region where a nearby young cluster can still render your home planet sterile through a GRB. However, our own Galaxy doesn't seem to be forming stars that actively anymore, and the chance of a new GRB pointing directly at a given star cluster is negligible.
I've worked for 5 companies since I've lived in MA, I've only ever had to sign a single non-compete, over 10 years ago. None of the places I've worked since have had them. I've never met anyone in MA that had one enforced.
How Nigeria's Konga Is Emerging as an African Technology Powerhouse
I remember reading a blog post in the MySpace era about how their bad UI was the key to their success. Look where they are now.
The one-stop-shops are definitely slick and easy to get started. But when you start doing serious amounts of transactions you really have to shop for competitive rates and consider other less sexy gateway providers.

I don't know anything about chargify but even stripe will negotiate with you if you reach a certain volume. Once you start paying tens or hundreds of thousands in fees, those percentage point fractions become a big deal!
I do some work with a non-profit. We use paypal to collect fees/dues from our about 400 members. It works fine. In the 7 years we've been using them we've yet to experience any problems. We aren't high volume.

I think the internet echo chamber makes Paypal seem out to be really bad, when the truth is all payment processors have their bad days.

People have heard of paypal and trust them. We had a few questions about it when we started (Do you really get the money if I use paypal).
> I don't know if it's a side effect of living in a western society ... In reality, if you make your self look like an ass in front of the wrong person, at the wrong point in the fiscal year, it affects your bonus / promotion / etc., and you never get that back

Is this western as in Europe, North America, Aus/NZ or just US?
Unfortunately it's their product and they can do as they wish with it. If this includes not building it for WP, well that's life. 6snap wasn't their app, and yes they had every right to have it removed from the WP store.

That's how the game is played, if one doesn't like it then don't use Snapchat.
Heh.

I had lots of experiences like yours up there. People noticeably changed their demeanor when they found out I was from Kentucky and Ohio, grew up on food stamps, and went to a medium sized Midwestern school. I once had someone actually ask me with a totally straight face "how do you know this stuff?" He was referring to machine learning and combinatorics. It was not meant as an offense. He was genuinely mystified that someone with my background could possibly know what a state space was.

http://www.theonion.com/article/midwest-discovered-between-e...

Another true story:

I was once sitting in a restaurant in Boston for lunch. There was a basketball game on. I overheard two obviously upper crust fellows at the bar chatting about it: "I see they're playing a bit of street hoops... they must be in Chicago or Detroit."

"Detroit" was pronounced "dee-troit."

I'm a white nerd and right then I felt black as oil. Hilarious.

There's an amazing amount of brains and talent up there but it's all stuck in this morass of cultural anachronism. You could probably fix the place by kidnapping all incoming Harvard freshmen, dosing them with acid, and dropping them off at a hip hop show or Burning Man or something. It's too bad because Boston is a fantastic city and I otherwise liked it up there.

Unfortunately I fear that the insane gentrification in the Bay Area may eventually infect it with this stuff or at the very least drive out its culture of hands-on reality. You should thank the bums and the dirty hippies. They're a vital part of the ecosystem, a constant reminder that there is in fact a universe beyond planet trust fund.
With the tech bubble/bust you could look at underlying companies for the canary in the coal mine. With the housing bubble/bust as you mention you could look at each mortgage and the ability of the borrower to pay. When you have a bubble arguably in government debt, what is the mechanism of transparency to look for?
They're only dangerous if they happen within the same galaxy and your planet happens to be right on the axis of the narrow burst cone. In that case there might still be a statistical advantage to being nearer to the core of the galaxy due to more matter density, but it might be offset by the increased chance of getting hit with a GRB there in the first place.

Also, we're not actually within the outer rim of the galaxy: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/gallery/gala...
What you are saying sounds cavalier to me. Fact is, big rewrites are very risky and there's nothing appealing about working on them, I can attest! Any developer worth his salt should fight tooth and nail to kill such a rewrite project and then run screaming when business and management go forward anyhow with scrapping the working legacy system in order to "start fresh".

Lost opportunity does suck. It would be nice if the first system was written in an extensible way with lots of tests and correct documentation, but it rarely is. All software needs to be replaced at some point. All software has a finite useful lifespan. So, this is a common problem. But you must have a responsible plan for replacing any first system. Any sort of project plan that has a magic day where the legacy system is shutdown and the second system is turned on is reckless and absurd. I've heard of failure rates for such projects being 80%, with the rest going way over budget before completion.

The best you can do when replacing a crufty old system is to employ strangulation. You slowly, methodically kill off the legacy system one feature at a time with the equivalent features in the well-written/tested new system. You run both systems side by side, sharing the processing load until one day, years in the future, when you have replaced all the features and the legacy system has nothing to do. It's a hassle and it requires everyone to be organized from start to finish, but you eliminate the big-bang release risks.

Luckily, with all the web services and factored out componentry we've been building in software over the past 10 years, the strangulation approach has never been more feasible.

There's lots of good youtube lectures and agile community blog posts on the topic of second systems and strategies to implement the strangulation. Here's an old classic that introduces the concept better than I could:

http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerApplication.html
This is an idea, but have you thought of opening donations on your personal site or even on readlang? That way, for people who don't want to use the product, but want to help, can just donate a few bucks?
The need to be right is frequently dangerous. From my days motorcycling:

Being right won't keep you out of a hospital bed
Wow, that sucks. Wandering around Tsukiji was one of my favorite experiences of being in Tokyo some years ago. If you have the chance to go before it closes, I urge you to do so.
I don't know.. Releasing a Windows Phone app means maintaining a Windows Phone app. Cost of maintenance for a userbase that is like 2% globally isn't worth while for most companies.
Yeah, we have to be careful not to take this debunking too far. It seems pretty clear that the formalized definition of 'learning styles' as codified in various teaching manuals and classroom planning tools is bogus. But students do learn differently, and likely can be grouped into different general styles for which different approaches may be more or less effective (how effective they would be compared to, for example, just having smaller class sizes or more resources is another question).

The bathwater's bad, but hang onto that baby.
Initially by default, many of them are older than OSes with dynamic linking support.

The ones with compilers that also support dynamic linking, either via a switch or via explicit dynamic modules.
OpenBSD and FreeBSD, primarily.
I completely agree with this. Every time I get a snap from someone who I'm not super close with, I can't help but feel happy that they specifically selected me. In return, I tend to send snaps to my fringe friends more often to let them know I'm thinking of them as well.
Show HN: SlackBot that watch for links and generates digests based on reactions
Thanks, man! Glad to see you enjoyed it! I'm going through the course as well! The Python route is certainly the easiest to get your hands dirty with TensorFlow, I must say.
I think that HN is one of the rare forums where this article doesn't apply.

Usually the top comment in a particular thread contains the least hedges and most enthusiastically espouses a particular opinion. The comment is not usually overly bombastic (though it sometimes is). The comment almost always adopts the majority opinion on HN.

Posting a comment not aligned with the majority opinion carries a risk of at most -4 points. I assert that downvotes more often correlate with disagreement than failure to abide by the standards of discourse. Since the penalty is limited, that's okay.

Therefore, if visibility and replies are your goal (who wants to comment without interesting replies?), then it's best to write boldly and concisely with a minimum of hedges.
This is very important. Writers like Matt might do well to factor in the "academic" constraints much like he encourages them to do for industry. I ran into this in a discussion with Anti on prior art for Rump Kernels. Learned a bit in that discussion but his troubles getting approval stood out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141736

I had heard about BS in academia where only paper output, grants, citations, and so on count. That Anti had to fight to get them to care about his work being implemented speaks wonders about how this works out in practice. Had he only cared about academic success, he could've dropped some light technical details and graphs in the paper then been done with it while the idea collected dust. Many benefited from him fighting the tide on it to produce good papers and an implementation.

I'm not in academic circles but I bet many face the same battle. With the pressure, it might be impossible for them to produce the desired output on their own within their constraints. Or so difficult many give up. Perhaps we should encourage them to have one good line of research they string out over years for quality and ensuring delivery while doing lots of nice papers in between to keep institutions happy. Think that might work?
Latest Intel Compute Sticks Use Skylake and Cherry Trail CPUs
A corollary for this is learning the same information in the same manner, but in a different location. Study in your bedroom, on the train, at the library, under a tree in a park, while walking the dog, at the beach at dawn, etc. This removes environmental cues out of the learned material and makes recall much more effective.
Malicious apps in Google Play made unauthorized downloads, sought root
Mental illness is a complex entity. Beware of any simple "definition of insanity"

I recently discovered I have a mutation which makes my verbal intelligence too high to measure but has negative effects in other areas. Other people have similar variations.

Some kinds of mental illness such as schizophrenia seem very much to be a biological phenomenon, but stress and particularly the way stress is structured has a definite negative effect on the origin. You can become stronger and more capable in many areas by applying stress in the right way (athletic and military training, for instance), but stress without time to recover has negative effects on body and mind and certainly surplus coercion leads to surplus stress.
Conversely if apps are important to you, Windows Phone may not be the best choice.