skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exploding offers are an exploitation tactic intended to pressure you to commit to doing what the offering party wants ASAP, or else what you want will go away. It's OK for something like a firesale at your favorite retailer, but definitely not good on a more intimate scale, like a job or investment. If they actually want you, they'll let you take your time regardless of what their offer says, and an exploding offer is a big signal that you probably don't really want to work with them.
No one's mentioned Tyche yet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche_%28hypothetical_planet%2...

In searching for Tyche, the WISE missions ruled out the possibility of anything larger than Saturn (95x the mass of Earth) out to about 10000 AU and anything larger than Jupiter (317x the mass of Earth) out to about 26000 AU. WISE was able to detect objects the size of Neptune (17x the mass of Earth) out to about 700 AU, so it should be possible to find the object proposed by the Caltech astronomers here (10x the mass of Earth at around 600 AU). I don't know if WISE's current condition would allow it to perform such a search, as it's completely out of coolant.
Thanks for the heads up, all fixed now.
Sam's relevant comment upthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10941276

So I guess it can be a judgment call. In your case it sounds like you're doing the right thing, though.
I used meteor for 2 years professionally.

The issue that you raise is less important with meteor because updating the server code updates the client code.
surely some crafty 3d modeller has already made the plans for a hyperloop model set so 3d-printer people can play at home :-)
O(N) is not particularly insightful for fixed/limited values of N. This would be more interesting if the author reported sorts/s with the FPGA vs. software. Because obviously, as N grows, the FPGA only performs the full sort in "one cycle" if you are willing to lower the cycle time more and more (until the FPGA blows up).
Just to clarify, because of this one thing that could be obviously turned into an exception ("if you go shooting with a family member, handing them the gun doesn't require a background check"), you want to reduce gun control across the board? Or are these two statements unrelated?
Well as someone who has built a (moderately) successful startup without any outside funding or acceleration I have a different perspective on this.

While I do think YC provides a lot of value to their alumni, people can get fixated on the process of raising funds and not building their business. Build a great business making real money and you won’t need funding.
This post is mistitled. According to the linked email, patches were committed that allow Swift to run on FreeBSD, but it is not included in FreeBSD for the time being.
Apache Maven Compiler Plugin Version 3.5 Released
Unfortunately, it is no longer actively maintained and a bit buggy...

Latest commit 9ce2fa0 on Aug 10, 2012
When was the last time you were inside a hardware store?
Now let me embed the widget in my app?
one of the key reasons why people join accelerators is for network and connections though, not just advice.

Without that conversations, that sounding board, all that written advice just makes another investopedia/venturehacks guidebook. Most startup founders already do the google legwork and required readings. It's great, but not the main reason why people would apply for YC.
Apache Apex Malhar Release 3.3.0-incubating Released
> Never jump on the new thing. Always lean toward the simple thing. Always prefer tools closer to your core competencies.

This is correct, but it is also a balancing act. Sometimes the new thing is better. Sometimes it is simpler in important ways that provide leverage in the long run, despite being complex in other ways that create confusion in the present. Sometimes you need to learn new tools and shift your core competencies toward them.

An analogy: Nobody writes directly in machine code anymore. Symbolic assemblers were new technology that was better. The early ones may have been buggy, and it may have been simpler to just write it by hand instead of debugging your own code and the assembler, but eventually it paid off. Your core competency may have been writing machine code, but once the assemblers became good enough, it made more sense to be competent at using them.

Very few new technologies represent such a massive and obvious level-up as that, and it is unwise to chase everything in hopes that it will be one of those paradigm-shifters, but it is equally unwise to hide your head in the sand, believing that all new things are necessarily complex and unworthy.

I have been, and remain, skeptical of Meteor itself, but the problems it is targeting are real, and I think it and other projects are circling in on good approaches to solving them, which is worth paying attention to.
It was just a joke, people. Lighten up.
It's definitely ready! I can't speak to who's currently using it, but it's got a very impressive ecosystem around it, from when I looked into it months ago.
Ronnie Nader: Ecuador’s One-Man Space Program
I do love YC and what they've done to the startup world, but at the risk of sounding like a YC hater, the initial part of the post seems like bad advice (boiled down to: if you want to be in YC don't join another accelerator before hand). The second portion in which to evaluate an accelerator is great advice.

But some startup founders may want to get into YC, as it is the best. Yet, they may hesitate to join a strong accelerator that can give them a few more months of runway and advice they desperately need, because of this post. Startup founders may take years to figure out the right direction for the co., as the market size or solution may not be obvious at first. And I feel as though this post, and YCs thinking discourages that and discourages competition.

But from what I've seen externally, some startups that go through (a bad) accelerator, don't accelerate, can come out multi-million dollar cos. Based solely on founders persistence on solving the problem.
The engineering required for an orbital launch gun is beyond the scale of anything yet built.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that your space gun's acceleration track climbs the slopes of Chimborazo in Ecuador and releases the launch vehicle at the summit.

From there, if you launch eastward, you get about 460 m/s for free from the rotation of the Earth near the equator. LEO requires about 7800 m/s. Earth escape requires about 11180 m/s from that altitude.

So if you go to LEO, you need another 7340 m/s of velocity. If you accelerate at 3 g, your track needs to be 920 km long. That isn't quite the distance from the end of your track to the Galapagos Islands.

The same length of track could hit escape velocity with constant acceleration at 6.5 g.

For reference, the Large Hadron Collider is 27 km in circumference, and cost about $5 billion. A space gun would be 34 times longer, and portions of it would have to be evacuated and neutrally buoyant at some depth under the ocean. The entire length would need to be powered.

If you built a circular track 920 km in circumference, 147 km radius, the centripetal acceleration required to keep something moving at 7340 m/s on that track would be more than 37 g. That only increases as you reduce the radius. So no getting away with a shorter track.
I think this adds some necessary context to the previous "300-500K" comment.
I tried to use React.js but it felt like Java Swing all over again. While controlling state and triggering render when it changes seems like a novel idea quickly blows up in complexity.

I find it odd that after 5 years developing multiple products with npm, node.js, meteor.js, flask + uwsgi, angularjs & react that now I'm back to just using Laravel + jQuery to build my single page application with REST api. It's easier and cheaper to find skilled php developers and learning jQuery is not a problem.

It's the 2006 formula but it works so fucking well and so much easier. Scaling is going to take work regardless even on AWS so now I prefer reduced technical debt and maturity of tested and true technologies.

I know this will get me crucified by mid 20 something hackathon hackers but this is just based on my own experience rather than blog articles. Something I learned very painfully through neophilism rampant in the industry.
I remember we had a 'challenge' in our algorithms class to develop the fastest sort. I read a paper on how to write a fast Radix sort, and made what I thought was a pretty fast approach (if a little memory hungry). Combine that with some memory mapping and some other tweaks, and it was running in fractions of a second - 5-10x faster than C's built-in quicksort (if I recall correctly). The memory mapping in particular was a huge win.

Unfortunately that professor was a bit of a ... well an odd fellow. On his "benchmark framework" he had a program that ran between test runs that would essentially allocate all memory on the system until it was using tons of swap. So my butt-kicking algorithm actually performed quite poorly due to memory mapping and large allocations not working particularly well on a machine that's in such a horrendous state. That would have been fine, except for the fact that he didn't inform us of this particular detail at all, so I only found out about it after the fact.

Even still, that challenge was tremendous fun, and I learned a whole lot about both the algorithm and the machine in the process. There's lots of optimizations you can make when you know more about the kind of data (and keys) and the distribution of this data. Very fun.
It makes sense to become profitable more quickly then. Github was profitable nearly from the get go. So was Atlassian. There's also that guy who lived in japan and made flash cards for teachers. There's also the guy who made You Need A Budget with just an excel spreadsheet and some charisma.

If your business idea is too big to make without large (seed investment size) amounts of funds then you should pick something else or get a job and slowly build it with your own income.

Suck it up.
It would be awesome to have the code portable across various big data engines.
A simple way of thinking about this is that acceleration only helps if you are pointed in the right direction!

One of the common problems with many accelerator programs is that they are run by people who are not themselves experienced founders. Not surprisingly, their advice is often counterproductive.
To answer your second question, I think the answer is generally yes, because loss of any vdev in a pool means the entire pool is lost.

For example, if you initially created the pool with a single raidz2 vdev, probably the only way it makes sense to add a second raidz1 vdev is if you later changed your mind about how important your data is.
Anyone know why the Dialog from back in September deal fell through?
Care to share some details? It sounds interesting.
Combining LKL and libOS into one effort is a very sensible decision.
I don't buy this argument. This might explain free shipping to France (the country), but not free delivery to the OP (the physical address). There's not way you can make even a short 1km delivery profitable for 3 cents (except if you're delivering for a whole building at once, which seems very unlikely).
I actually find it to be the opposite. Developing with Redux, you can actually throw away most of React's API. In my app, React basically acts like a functionally pure rendering layer.

It definitely has a learning curve, but the very simple data flow makes it pretty straightforward, once you've learned what each layer does.
From the article:

“I don’t think shooting from the car is very humanitarian”

This should be enough to let you know that this man likes to hunt and not to kill.
Paul when you are building a startup are there any necessary distractions (HN excluded).

You really should name and shame the bad accelerators. I know no one likes to be negative, but if there are accelerators out there messing up companies and leading founders astray then it would be best to make this information public. You will take some heat for doing this, but you guys should be able to handle it.
Unfortunately, I can't; it was some idle chatter after a meetup, and I may have had a couple of drinks at the time. :)

From memory, it was based around the way the redux patterns is very top down with a single state atom, smart reducers, and dumb components, but the cycle pattern is very bottom up with smart components and no centralization. So as your app gets complicated with cycle, you can start to lose track of all the different streams and start to struggle with figuring out what your app is doing in total.

Mind you, they may have just been doing cycle wrong, and you have to take people complaining about their tools with a grain of salt. But the impression I got is that cycle is not a magic bullet that makes large, complicated apps with difficult state management problems easy to code, any more than redux is. Cycle is great when you start looking at redux and go "oh shit, I do NOT want to start coding these reducers, can I just break it down into tiny parts and solve each one on its own", but redux is great when you start looking at cycle and go "oh man, I do NOT want to try and figure out how all these bits work together, can I just put all this crazy logic in one place?"

(Disclaimer: Have never used cycle; just talked to some people who have.)
For my part, I'd like to see mandatory liability insurance tied to every gun a person owned. Want to own a hundred guns, stashed in all corners of your house? Sure, better get ready to buy a big insurance policy!

After all, we require cars to be insured, and with cars, violence is at least a byproduct of proper use. It's a no-brainer to do the same for guns.
Work from Home Opportunity
Combining Markov Random Fields and Convolutional Neural Nets for Image Synthesis
This story is very meaningful to me because my late dad had a slip and fall on ice in a public place in 2002 and spent the last six years of his life paralyzed from the chin down from a crack in one of his cervical vertebrae that bruised his spine. An immobilizing injury like that is financially devastating even for someone like my dad, who planned for retirement and supplemental retirement medical insurance carefully and who was eligible for Medicare (of course, like all older Americans) and Veterans Administration medical care. It stresses a whole family when a family member is immobile and helpless. I saw a lot of other patients (many much younger, often injured in motorcycle accidents) at the care facilities that treated my dad with the best available contemporary care, and all I can say is that there is a LOT of work to do to improve treatment of spinal cord injuries.

The experiment reported in the article submitted here is very preliminary and may not work for many patients. It will be interesting to see if this treatment approach can be refined and become more generally useful, or if further clinical investigation and basic science research will lead to other approaches to treatment that are even better.
3 Easy Ways to Style Sneakers
I feel like I've been hopping from bandwagon to bandwagon. First Angular, then React (liked React more), and now I'm like, "ehhhh, some of this React stuff is fairly tedious."

I feel like I'm still waiting for the Holy Grail of JS frameworks/libraries.
Uber will be the exclusive ride-hail app of Super Bowl 50
A followup post on even more detail of this would be incredible if you're able to / have the time. I'm a Linux jockey who simply had no idea modern windows was capable of using hardware this well. Nicely done.
I like to look at the State of the Climate: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201513
> someone who expects to build a tube with no stops across a whole state is going to learn a bit about politics.

The entire thing is a pipe dream
Or http://www.amazon.com/The-Principles-Product-Development-Flo... without the affiliate link...
Sure, but once the truck is full, sending one more letter needs an entire second truck. Average this across the system, and a route's costs per parcel are roughly equal to (cost of running one truck) / (number of parcels the truck carries).
apparently you haven't even seen the documentary. Please go watch it before you start blathering on and on to absolute strangers about their severe lack of imagination, kiddo.
> Are there legal implications to scraping a site that actively tries to prevent bots from scraping it? I mean, if the data is publicly accessible on the web, could they go after you?

When we do projects, the baseline is if Google can see it we can too. So from a legal standpoint if Google is covered so are we.

From a legal standpoint firms do go after web scrapers. And lose more often than not. The exception is when you're logged in when you crawl. In that case you've implicitly accepted the terms of use. Some companies aggressively sue when you're logged in while scraping, so it's best to stay on the safe side. Further reading on the topic:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-legality-of-web-scraping
It Is Now Cheaper to Rent an 1100 Foot Dry Bulk Tanker Ship Than a Ferrari
That's so true. Kudos.
You are right. Nim is not case insensitive anymore, it is case sensitive for the first letter. But in my defense, the last time I checked it used to be! Quoting from the wayback machine:

> Nimrod is a style-insensitive language. This means that it is not case-sensitive and even underscores are ignored: type is a reserved word, and so is TYPE or T_Y_P_E. The idea behind this is that this allows programmers to use their own preferred spelling style and libraries written by different programmers cannot use incompatible conventions.
My personal experience is based in Smalltalk VisualWorks and Oberon.

Smalltalk, well being Smalltalk.

Oberon being the product of Niklaus Wirth, after he learned Mesa/Cedar while at Xerox.

That experience, coupled with lots of archaeological digging for old manuals and papers is how I got to learn about it.

Basically Xerox had three workstation environments, Interlisp-D, Smalltalk and Mesa/Cedar.

All enjoying the fact of the workstation and OS blended into each other.

The CLI was a REPL, so you had full access over the OS. Any public API could be accessed in the REPL, you could interact with running applications, all the same way.

Also the REPLs were graphical with inline generation of data, so imagine something like Swift Playgrounds as the CLI.

Lots of nice documents here:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox

Filtered by language:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox?and[]=subject%3A...

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox?and[]=subject%3A...

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_xerox?and[]=subject%3A...
Behind the Scenes of Tori Black’s Virtual Reality Porn Debut #nsfw
I think the main reason is all seems pretty stupid is because the system, even within one country, is so f'n goddamn huge with a lot of legacy stuff in it, that bad UX is just inevitable, rather than being incompetent.

But an exception to incompetence is the EMV's decision in the U.S. to transition from swipe & sign, to chip & sign, and later (2018?) to chip & PIN. That really is just stupid. In the U.S. my debit card I never sign for whether chip or swipe, I always use PIN. In Europe, that same card when swiped I'm asked for PIN, if I use the chip it wants sign! WTF?

The delays of ACH seem less between friends at least if you use Venmo or Google Wallet since that's effectively private currency (within that system) and then only periodically use a "sweep" action if that balance gets higher than you want.
What’s a Language, Anyway?
I knew Chaz personally in undergrad and a bit since then. Though I have not read the article yet (I'm in a state of shock really) I can attest to the man. He is so kind, funny, personable, and one a heck of a guitar player. Based on his stellar work in undergrad in modeling the orbital path futures of our solar system on the Gyr timescale, I am sure he is sure of the work. (Only non humanities major to ever win the Dean's Award at UCSC, it was great work)

The man would not ever publish this unless he was sure of it. Science and time may tell him wrong, but I'm one to believe him as a friend. Both he and Olga must be on cloud nine right now! (oh wow, nine, wow!)

I mean WOW! Like, a PLANET! A frickin PLANET! None of this dwarf stuff, a full PLANET! (Not to malign all those folk's hard work in finding the dwarves either).

Jesus tapdancing christ gravy! What a day!

EDIT: Upon further reading, it may still be a dwarf planet as it has not 'cleared' it's orbit. Still, my lord, so happy for them both right now!
Additionally, the thread OP linked to was outdated—from before they change to clearer verbiage.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1639473982937255/updating-ou...
Okay - help someone that doesn't truly understand this.

Earth's surface can gain heat through 4 ways I can think of (and this is just what I can think of and is likely wrong):

1) Geothermal brings more heat from core/mantle up. I don't think this is currently any larger than normal, nor do I imagine this varies much.

2) Oceans can give up heat they are storing and provide it on the surface. I don't know if El Nino is this, or if that just means "surface" ocean temperatures are up from whatever source.

3) Solar radiation (including infrared) can be higher than normal. I honestly have no idea if there's any significant variation in this, ever.

4) Earth can retain more heat that it was previously (global warming, be it man-made or not)

When they say the annual variation is usually hundredths of a degree, that sounds to me like 1-3 are generally non-factors, but that's all gut interpretation. Can someone with actual knowledge validate this?
A Quick Introduction to Version Control with Git and GitHub
Incredible. If we continued to break records at this pace we'd be at 2C above preindustrial in 2019.

Not that we will, but it gives a sense of how close we've come to the precipice, if indeed we have any < 2C carbon budget remaining.
We're all for companies doing what they need to do to survive.

However, we've seen an increasing number of accelerators getting startups to join them by saying "we can help you get into YC", and then subsequently hurting the company with bad advice or onerous terms.

Companies should never do an accelerator to help them get into YC. Companies should do an accelerator if they need the money to survive or think that they resources of the accelerator will help them be more successful.
This is very interesting for me. I introduced React (and companions, like redux, react-router, CSS Modules, etc) to a team of 8 who had never used any of this before and they all loved it and picked it surprisingly easily.
one of the things that really struck me when fundraising:

"...that 25k he just gave you, could've gone to his kids' college fund or investing in blue chip stocks instead. It's amazing that you can raise money at all."

Angels give less money than VCs, some angels give low amounts (15-25k) especially in an early seed round. They're doing it for you. Screwing them over for more equity or YC makes you a shitty irresponsible human being and imho, should be considered a type of fraud.

Honestly I'm surprised at Sam's stance. Unless it's really justifiable, this seems like bad advice.
The 2015 global avg temp was the hottest on record – NASA/NOAA [video/animation]
Whether the mailman delivers the 3 cent button or not he still gets up in the morning, does his delivery rounds and collects the same paycheck.