skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole point of the article is that more businesses start during recessions. The logical flow from this article is that because The Great Recession was what it was, we have this huge cycle of businesses starting up.
This is a big issue with pseudo-economist authors. On Audible, you can find dozens and dozens of books on bubble and crash is coming. All those title immediately tells me that author found exactly what he wanted to see. It's very hard to find subject matter which is unbiased and purely analytical.
Donations, it seems
http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21294015...
Show me an industry where there aren't thousands of women who have told their stories of being made to feel unwelcome, disrespected, and even harassed and abused, because of their gender, while working.
> It seems like TTS technology hasn't evolved much over the years and I was wondering if any startups are working on making it sound more realistic?

It's not true that TTS hasn't improved (see below). Many people are working on this, both in academia and in private enterprise. It's an obvious and potentially valuable part of the human-computer interface.

This is not to suggest that it's easy -- the mathematics and vocal tract modeling problems are formidable. The only reason there are reasonable TTS resources now is because of the rapid increase in computer power -- power that's needed to support this feature.

Here's a site chosen at random that offers a high-quality TTS example:

https://www.ivona.com/

It's pretty good based on prevailing standards, and it's the outcome of a lot of work.

To find the companies working on this, just Google for "high-quality tts".
Making a dev product: what I've learnt so far
Ask HN: How to get interviews/introductions through work on GitHub
I am interested in finding out about stories (both of success and failure) of trying to get an introduction and/or interview by way of making modest contributions (features, bugfixes, performance improvements) on social coding sites like github.

My purpose in asking about this is two-fold. (1) It is well known that resume based screens for candidates can be a huge pain for both companies and prospective employees, partly because of the small signal to noise ratio, but also partly because resumes simply don't efficiently communicate the kind of information employers might like to know. (2) This frustration is compounded for the employer by the fact that, even when a candidate passes an initial screening, they might subsequently fail a fizzbuzz type test or otherwise not meet some kind of minimal criterion for moving forward in the process.

It seems reasonable to me that companies with a significant open source presence might be interested to find out that a contributor to one of there projects was looking for work as (1) if they are already aware of and helping develop projects in the company that is a strong signal for potential skill and cultural fit and (2) if their contributions were accepted into the project that would seem like a reasonable minimal criterion for moving forward in an interview process (i.e. they have some technical skills and a few current employees know their work). This process is roughly analogous to a `project based` interview that many companies do, but it is a signal much earlier in the process and probably less time consuming.

So that's the idea in theory, but I want to hear evidence for against/this strategy. There are some details particular to my situation that I'll leave in a comment.
Just to clarify, Alan is only 'running CDG' insofar as he is supporting and representing it as a sister lab to VPRI. The various research groups there are completely autonomous and as far as I can tell not publicly identified.
Ask HN: Why is cancer trending?
Non-rocket spacelaunch
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9368443
There's probably a couple reasons, but I'll summarize my experiences with them.

I haven't dug into MySQL for a few years (last I really worked with it was 5.5), but out of the box, it does a lot of things that are pretty unsafe or encourage bad practices, such as truncating data when it's longer than the column size, inserting the zero-value for a NOT NULL column rather than erroring when a NULL is inserted, confusing timestamp column behavior, no DDL-level transactionality, etc. Additionally, and not necessarily a bad thing, but it has made some odd implementation and feature decisions that can be (IMHO) counter-intuitive or have a large impact, particularly with regards to how foreign keys get implemented, but also with things like not having schemas (database > tables, rather than database > schemas > tables), not having a boolean type, its datatype specification (int(1) means an integer that displays only a single digit, rather than denoting storage sizes), or the fact that every ALTER TABLE causes a complete on-disk table rewrite.

PostgreSQL, on the other hand, makes every attempt to keep 100% data integrity at all times, has a lot of killer features (probably the best date/time math implementation I've ever used, typesafe operators, etc), is generally very extensible, and most importantly, is extremely predictable. True, it doesn't have the same scalability features out of the box that MySQL does, but that's getting better every release, and as mentioned elsewhere, there's plenty of adequate third-party tooling available (e.g. Slony).

I think MySQL is very much so the PHP of the RDBMS world - it does a lot of silly stupid stuff - mostly for historical reasons - but in the hands of someone who knows how to use it properly, it can be an extremely useful tool. Postgres just defaults to being an extremely useful tool out of the box without needing to know all the gotchas that come with it.
> Since Schemaless uses MySQL asynchronous replication, the write will be lost if a master receives a write request, persists the request, and then fails before it has replicated the write to the minions (e.g., in a hard drive failure). To solve this problem we use a technique called buffered writes. Buffered writes minimize the chance of losing data by writing it to multiple clusters. If a master is down, the data is not readily available for subsequent reads but has nevertheless been persisted.

Postgres has the same replication semantics as MySQL async replication. So yes, if you want to build something like this, you could.

However, the question you should be asking yourself isn't "could you" but "should you".

The answer is probably not.

Multi-master setups are extremely difficult to build reliably and unless you understand them extremely well you can frequently shoot yourself in the foot with something that seems right but really is only right for a handful of use cases.
Or Ruby 2.3's lonely operator (&.) or swift's optional chaining (?.)
>Mining and logging are extremely dangerous, hard physical labor.

Okay, and? There are pushes for parity (or at least more inclusion) of women and men in firefighting, policing, and combat roles in the military, all of which are extremely dangerous, hard, physical labor.

The issue here is that technology is one of the few fields where the fight for the parity in gender is focused. I don't have a problem with that, gender equality is a good thing. Understanding why technology is a focus and different from mining and logging might help us understand and discover ways to bring about that gender parity.
Eh probably. What a strange question.
World's oceans warming at increasingly faster rate, new study finds
I was working for a startup in 2008, and before everything turned to crap, Sequoia gave us up front warning to start preparing for the coming apocalypse, which probably is the reason we survived and made it to an exit of some sort.

Over-raising seems like more proactive version of that (2008 still being relatively recent in investors' memory), and VCs likely suggested this to portfolio companies.
I think this is interesting, from a planning standpoint of today. In Portland, there is a huge effort to focus on pushing biking and transit as opposed to improving the quality and capacity of our roads. I find this interesting, only because the concept of a 4 wheeled automobile that is around 6 feet wide. Existing infrastructure will be heavily utilized by this no matter what the future brings.

I am not an expert at all on city planning of course, and I realize its an incredibly complex field, but from a complete layman standpoint, investing in existing infrastructure today seems prudent.
Performance will be back if VR gets adopted. At 90 fps, you have around 11 milliseconds to update your game state and render views for each eye. That is not much time. C#/unity and scripting languages will have a noticeable penalty compared to native C code. Bloated engines will likely suffer as well.
After seeing other people grumbling about the affiliate stuff on the website in this thread, I couldn't resist trying to do it on the thread itself :p
The short version is, Postgres is developed under the "do it right, then make it fast" philosophy, for the most part. Early versions of MySQL were like, "ACID? Pbbbbbbbbbt." So they treated your data like it was essentially worthless and it could lose it at about any time. For a lot of applications built on hardware at the time and the needs at the time, the data really was kinda worthless and so people built stuff on it anyway. But a lot of people remember those early days when MySQL was a pretty crappy database that just happened to be fast and scale out well. MySQL has mostly caught up to Postgres in the whole "not losing data" sense, and is catching up in terms of SQL features as well (although I wish it had CTEs, among many other things). Postgres has made a lot of advances in speed and scalability too, but still lacks some of what MySQL has in terms of clustering and the like without using plugins or add-ons.
Fantastic Contraption Video Mixes Reality and Virtual
This really makes me want to cook up a little AI that has random novice user problems and let the two of them go at it while I watch with popcorn.
I'm a "mostly vegan" individual and beyond the smug attitude that plagues that choice, I have to say that this lifestyle seems to be good for one's health as well. It is less fun, sure, let's be honest, but the benefits somehow outweigh what you lose by giving up meat and processed foods.
Not everything with Telegram is open source like Signal. I still use Telegram because it's designed better and updated much more frequently.
Full text of a message Stewart Butterfield sent to all Slack employees
I suspect her issues were due to age, and microsoft stack /enterprise" experience moving into a younger scene like Rails/Django. I heard stuff all the time against people using visual studio, and god forbid they ever used Microsoft SQL Server instead of Postgres. Applicants got put through the wringer during interviews at my last job. The CTO, She literally scoffed during interviews when people mentioned microsoft's enterprise stack.
Bootstrapping your startup, Q&A with pMD CEO
Sylph is interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126772
There is no compacting to do, if the uuid is always and forever a 16-byte sequence. E.g. as a resource, or a handle, or a channel id etc.
We use Kubernetes, which includes its own secrets API:

http://kubernetes.io/v1.1/docs/user-guide/secrets.html

I can't remember which issue this was on, but it seemed like there was some discussion on their GitHub project about making pluggable secrets backends (HashiCorp's Vault was mentioned).

Kubernetes' secrets API is still very basic, but I think the fundamental concept is very sound and has a great foundation to continue building on.
Happy to help you growing your business, mate! Email me to andre at pixelmatters dot com
It landed, just didn't stick the landing :-)
I offer the following as a thought experiment:

Without aspirational media & news (by which I mean media that is intellectually targeted above the optimal profit point), intellectual discourse lessens in greater society. This lessening of discourse leads to lessening of intellect in greater society. Repeat ad nauseum until we've optimized our culture's stupidity.

In reality, there are obviously multitudinous different streams of media one can partake in. But I would say that the existence of any mass/popular/mainstream vein still makes the above a concern.
Beach Pneumatic Transit
Could be that the author is going for the mainstream, or the largest audience. Personally, I know few people doing a paleo diet, and none strike me as the types to give two turds about their diet's environmental impact. The rest of the folks I know do, indeed, think that paleo's stupid. So you validate a the opinions of a large number of people to rope them in, and they read the rest of the article.

Not that I know the mind of the author, but in summary they insult people that wouldn't ever even click the link, while cozying up to those that do.
Brand new iPhone 6s Plus 128gb run over 17 times by cars and trucks
I'm pretty happy with this solution from Strongauth.

http://keyappliance.strongauth.com/

You can secure the root for it with TPM or HSM.
If you want a real laugh Google highschool or college highlight reels of current NBA or NFL standouts. You usually end up with clips of monstrous kids single handedly wiping the floor with hopelessly outmatched opponents.
Not being able to imagine how method A may produce result B is no evidence against method A. It may very well be evidence towards lack of imagination :)
You will have a difficult time squaring a pure preference theory away with the implosion in the number of female computer science graduates over the past three decades. Whatever the cause is, it wasn't there in the 1980s (or at least not nearly as pronounced).

I'll also note that there are plenty of other options that have been discussed and that may be turn out to be one of the root causes, not just the two you are considering.
I'm not sure there's a parent-child bond being disintegrated in modern American culture -- if anything, a lot of parents seem more intentionally involved in their kids lives than past generations. However, I do think we need to look at a slightly higher-level problem: an adults-children bond.

As a father of two small children, I have noticed (along with my wife) that a lot of people in various social settings seem rather uncomfortable having our kids around. It's almost like this unspoken question is hovering around us, like "why aren't they in preschool" or "why aren't they with a babysitter" or "why do you have to bring them in here? This store is for adults only!"

A lot of businesses don't have good facilities for taking care of kids (changing tables, etc.). Only recently have we seen local malls remodel and include private nursing areas, etc. So sure maybe there's some progress here, particularly as a result of greater awareness of the needs of breastfeeding mothers and so forth, but I think there's still plenty of prejudice against kids in certain sectors of society.

Somehow, and I could be mistaken, it seems to me that in past cultures (particularly in rural or tribal settings), it was a given that children were heavily involved in the "business" of home and community. Children would work the same farm as the parents, for example. Obviously a lot of that kind of family cohesion was lost during the Industrial Revolution, so maybe it could be argued that things were worse off in 1916 than 2016. I don't know. It just "feels" to me, subjectively, like children and teens need to feel more included in "adult" society, and adults need to be more actively interested in the world of children across the board.
Is there something like this for Vim ?
From their description in the iTunes store: 'Pay Nothing - Signal is supported by a team of dedicated developers, community donations, and grants. There are no advertisements, and it doesn't cost anything to use.'
As their first game Eve:Online is a very complicated game it is encouraging to know they are thinking about casuals from the beginning,

> "We don't yet know who our audience is. It would be crazy to assume everyone who buys an Oculus is a hardcore gamer; I don't think that's the truth," Willans said. "We're going to have a really diverse cross section of people who are buying the technology."

I am most excited about this game so far and have tried another space sim in the DK2 and it was COMPLEX (elite dangerous). Not just because of the game but because moving in 3D space first person is not first nature to many... Even flying around though, not knowing what I was doing, was one of the most immersive fun experiences I had.

As long as they have a way to get casuals to know the basics and have fun play they should be a great start to VR.
Downgrading from EE to CE is officially supported. You can find the docs here: http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/downgrade_ee_to_ce/README.html
Docker's commercial offering DUCP (Docker Universal Control Plane) offers this feature as well. Out in the wild, you can find Docker volume drivers for Keywhiz etc [1] that makes secrets available as files mounted to a container. I think Kubernetes does this, too.

If you are running on cloud, you would probably want your cloud provider to give you service secrets and rotate them somehow. AWS/Google Compute metadata service or Azure Key Vault are capable of doing this but I don't think they entirely map the microservices world because ACLs are set on the VM instances, not microservices specifically.

[1] https://github.com/calavera/docker-volume-keywhiz
The book I used on speed reading claimed subvocalization (internal monologue) was a "bad habit" that can be eliminated with practice. As far as my personal experience, it does.
Rolling Update with AWS CloudFormation
The general gist of RAMCloud makes sense, but the value is hidden by the academic perspective.

The notion of fitting tons of data into memory is happening. As one of the founders of MemSQL, a YC company that ships a distributed in-memory database, it's been my focus the last 5 years.

In addition the growth of IMDBs, Apache Spark is another cue that main-memory processing is the next phase of Big Data.

In-memory processing is enabling the creation of real-time data pipelines next to existing batch systems like Hadoop and other data warehouses, and is critical for real-time recommendations, personalization, and decision-making for businesses.

Call it a side effect of the sharing or 'on-demand' economy, but companies are now moving faster to meet higher expectations from their customers/userbases.
> Somehow, the majority of principals in elementary education are white men.

No, they aren't.

From http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013313.pdf

"The percentage of public school principals who were female was 52 percent overall, 64 percent in primary schools..."
We never interview people to test the salary waters, we know interviewing is serious for you and it is serious to us too. We're very aware of the salaries in SF (writing this from SOMA). But since we're a remote first company we can hire for anywhere in the world and because we're open source we get a lot of great applicants. So the bar is high and for the Bay Area it is even higher. Feel free to email me at sytse at company domain if you want to discuss your application.
Color me skeptical, that looks like a pretty strange design to me, a database on top of a database [1].

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GodTable
It also depends on how secret it needs to be.
For most of our secrets (those used for configuration) we use Consul.
The point is that the ability to land is much harder to develop than the ability to stand up after landing. Improving the leg locking mechanisms is relatively trivial compared to developing the ability to turn a booster around in space, fly it back to earth and land on a floating platform.

If I was involved in SpaceX then I would be proud to have helped solve such a tricky problem, and optimistic about fixing the far less difficult leg locking problem
Depends on what "major contracts" are for you. I can tell you that we don't have any "major contract". We to have several "very nice" ones.

The main way clients came to us is through our website, Dribbble, Behance but also through referrals - people that worked with us in the past, and that recommend our work to a friend. This latter is the oldest but definitely the best marketing you can get!
You'd be surprised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogrid
It's a bit better than green threading since out of order engines are imperfect at extracting parallelism and you can often use a second thread to fill in spare functional units that the first thread isn't using. There's also the danger that the extra cache pressure from two threads on a core will cause enough thrashing that using SMT will decrease performance on net. So it's more complicated but of course you're right that green threading is a much better first approximation than multiple cores. I suspect you already knew that but just didn't want to go into it.

One technique I've heard about is to schedule producer and consumer threads on the same core so that there's zero data transfer overhead and no extra d-cache pressure.
Same could've been said about every aspect of human progress, if we had asked philosophers to opine (they opine anyway, but the civilization moves forward regardless).
Apple bought Cambridge UK startup VocalIQ that does this (in part, they also did recognition work) a year or so ago.
I'm one of the co-authors of the Dear GitHub letter. This is the type of response I want so badly from GitHub (but wasn't expecting).

GitLab still has a ways to go in terms of performance/reliability and polishing their product, but GitHub aught to be very nervous about them.
> Not that I have any desire to go back to collared shirts, ties, and dresses, but the author caused me to wonder if it wouldn't do something to dial the "frat house" dial back a notch. Because, gawd, does it get old.

> I gather that I'm about the same age as the author.

Fwiw, and I'm not sure that's much, I'm probably a lot younger and male to boot, and I think the same when visiting the offices of some companies that are popular these days.
I am not a business man, but I am a developing scientist who's trained his graph reading bullshit detector. "Flat" is relative to the scale of the graph, and when you have a maximum on the graph (the 2001 bubble) that dominates, and changes that are not on the scale of the peak look like they are "flat".

To fix this, change the time period from after 2002 to remove the offending peak. Then, you see pretty much a rise from the 2009 recession onward with wiggles in the number of deals. Of course, the only issue is as a non-business man, I don't know if 300 deals per quarter over ~7 years is a significant increase or not. Also, I don't know what is considered "normal" as I assume the minimum at 2009 is probably below the norm, so for all I know, we could be hovering just above 0. Still, there is definitely an upward trend there at least for the aggregate category (if that is what we are discussing).

EDIT: 2016-2009 = 7, I can't count
A farmer who decides not to grow food for the city isn't going to be around long enough to tend his garden. It's not just the city's population that outnumbers the farmer 49 to 1, the city also has all of the resources and power needed to force the farmer to farm and trade, by threat of violence if needed.

I wouldn't envy the farmer; being in a position where a potentially violent and desperate brute depends on you is not stable in the long run. You might start out feeling that you've got the power, or that you're at least on equal terms, but that only lasts as long as you can keep the brute content.
Why the snark? What I said wasn't politically correct in some way? Use of stereotypes? Please elaborate.