skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That is rather interesting!
Show HN: 1dollarthings.com – an internet dollar store
Yeah I disagree when sending a cover letter to a big company. When you send in your resume, it will take on a life of it's own and honestly this can work in your favor. The resume gets passed around by HR and hiring manager to hiring manager. It would be hard to avoid poisoning the thought process of the hiring managers if you have a cover letter attached.
Show HN: Lets Encrypt on Netlify – Static CDN Hosting with Free SSL
Hanlon's Razor dictates to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".
Let's Be Honest in Interviews
For sure. I don't have a strong opinion either way on whether medicine is too conservative or liberal right now, which probably means it falls within the happy medium ground for some reasonable definition.

Mainly, I think it's worthwhile to point out what appears to be dogma on both sides of any debate.
This isn't true.

Actually I can trick the game by holding down click, moving my mouse to the box, and letting go--but at that point the game doesn't start. No winning or losing, either one.
I don't really understand why they need to grow quickly. You only need to grow quickly if you take millions of dollars and need to distribute a profit to your investors before too long.

Whatever happened to growing slowly, proving the revenue stream before you throw millions of dollars at something? Why is that such a bad thing?

I understand from a VC's point of view why it's a bad thing, and that's the point of view which YC and other incubators are coming from. But why is it a bad thing for the entrepeneurs?

Taking time to consider what you're building is important. Taking time to grow is also important.
> The GitHub issue tracker does need to change.

Popular bug trackers suffer particularly from a curse all popular software faces: a constant barrage of criticism from a variety of user bases with disparate needs.

Appeasing any one of these alleviates a tiny portion of that pressure, while permanently ratcheting up complexity, which leads to accusations of bloat, steep learning curves, and eventual abandonment. Faced with that fact, it's understandable why GitHub wouldn't just throw in new feature requests wantonly.
So we can safely say that IMSI catchers have been used as a matter of routine since 2002.
> Now my day job (SourceDNA) is building tools to reverse lots of code at scale. A never-ending stream of apps provides a ton of "wat?" moments as you never expect developers to make the choices they do.

Can you give an example?
There are many ways to cause brain damage, e.g.

increased blood pressure leading to a stroke
localised inflammation of brain tissue (which can be caused by an autoimmune response)
oxygen deprivation
enzyme degradation, where an external chemical blocks some of the chemical processes that keep brain cells working (drinking mercury will do this)

The second one seems to have happened here. The may have drug triggered a wildly excessive autoimmune response called a cytokine storm, which is the immune system's equivalent of a firework display where everything is launched at the same time. This basically poisons you from the inside in various colourful and unpleasant ways.

There's nothing about oral ingestion that makes it more or less likely to cause brain damage. Many chemicals can survive stomach acid and pass into the blood stream. The drug on trial was one of them.
Retention and NPS seem orthogonal.
I wonder if there's a good strategy that lets you store the dead batteries long-term and wait for the price to get high enough, or recycling technology to bring that cost down enough that it's worthwhile.

Storing is is dangerous (search youtube for 'lithium fire'), and takes up space, but I'm sure there's a clever way around that.

The only potential for a real bust is if other, better forms of energy storage get invented before your garbage dump's profit margin becomes positive. Or if a new source of lithium is found (isn't it one of the most abundant elements in the universe?).
It matters how many of these tasks can be completed in a fixed amount of time. Creating 50 processes requires more resources than 1 process with 50 threads.
No, because he who collects isn't interested in random mobile phones, and whoever tries to spoof "other" phones doesn't know the phones of interest of the collector. And the collector is interested not in knowing the presence but in the whole traffic, so the spoofing is even more obvious.
While this is truly a sad event, there are some things to note here, primarily:

This was a Stage 1 trial, whose sole goal is to determine the minimum-tolerate dose. The idea here is that after we've identified a possible drug, we do preliminary tests in animals and follow some well established dosage-scaling formulas to determine human dosages.

They then scale that waayy down, and gradually scale up the drug in different patients until side-effects are noticed.

Although the article describes the patients as being healthy, people who volunteer for these types of studies usually have exhausted all possible alternatives and aren't usually given good prognosis.

If a study is conducted ethically, they aren't given any hope that the drug will positively effect them in any way, and that they are truly doing this for the possible benefit of Stage >1 patients.

Usually, toxicity is found before patients die (although that happens). What makes this unprecedented, imho, is that so many died. What makes it personally disheartening is that one is brain-dead, which is a special kind of hell for a family to go through.

While these patients weren't told "this drug will murder you, or maybe leave you brain-dead, with high-likelihood", however, in a Phase I trial, that is very much the risk you're running at such an early stage of drug development.
I noticed some strange behaviour on that website: When I mouse-select text sometimes a word later in the same line would begin to wiggle around.

For example in the paragraph 'Gadget Upgrades'.

A short google search brought up nothing. Any clues?
Sure, that's a possible solution.

I wasn't trying to convey a position that something shouldn't be done, I'm just expressing that I understand the wide breadth of possibilities for why it hadn't been done.
If you can keep your email address off the front page of the internet, I figure that will help reduce spam.
Hmm so the response of the GitHub is to post a single generic response of "we will look into it" and then spend time and resources arranging this marvel of a letter.
Because the point of starting startups isn't to create a successful business. It's to trick VCs into giving you money to burn! /s
Efforts to plug Porter Ranch-area gas leak worsened blowout risk, regulators say
I love the idea of having augmentations and neural implants but the potential social ramifications, which the article gets slightly into, scare the living daylights out of me.

From the Deus Ex alternative universe, year 2022:

Antoine Thisdale, an un-augmented oil rig worker sues for the right to have both of his fully functional natural arms amputated and replaced with cybernetic arms in an effort to compete with mechanically augmented workers in his profession. The Supreme Court rules in his favor, clearing the way for elective augmentation. In response to the ruling, William Taggart creates Humanity Front, a political organization that opposes augmentation.
Although this is not universally accepted. This old DFW essay on the topic is good reading.

http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...
4 Rules to Prepare for a LONG Journey
If you're in a situation where you need specific implementation details of floating point arithmetic, then may the devil have mercy on your soul, because god certainly won't.
Sure it does, only too aptly.
I can understand your argument that it might be a strength of the idea behind Bitcoin (I personally disagree), but I believe it becomes a clear weakness because it is such an impediment to wide scale adoption. A system can have a great theory behind it, but it is nothing more than a good thought experiment if a real world implementation is impossible
Pirating is not stealing, at most it is a lost sale for them.

If I want to watch a movie, am willing to pay and they don't make it available to me, what can I do? They wouldn't get my money either way. They are hurting themselves.
I've seen proposals to allow EME to control access to any browser resource: images, fonts, scripts, even HTML itself. The proposals I've seen look a lot like Service Worker, but with an opaque obfuscated container running a blob.
I think it's a false distinction. Institutional capital, distinct from Angel money, is part of the same ecosystem.

VC's are part of the larger global equity market, taking funds from LP's such as pension funds in the same way that Goldman and the rest do. The fact that they are smaller in total dollars doesn't mean they have structurally different goals.

At the end of the day a VC has to show returns to the LP in the same way that Wall street does with their private equity departments.

In the case of public companies, the company itself has the power over pricing as long as they are doing well (see: Amazon) when they aren't it's private equity that makes the difference and you are back to where you started.
Did you end up changing your routine or did you stick to it? I started stronglifts 5x5 a few months ago and the weights are heavy enough now that I'm failing sets in most exercises each session. It's hard to get the motivation to keep going.
Here is a simple but opinionated answer:

If you are not growing by C% every month, you're a "dead" startup.

Now, do you want to pivot to being a small business, or traditional enterprise? Are you spending VC money that demands results? Is your business funding your own lifestyle?

Answer those questions and you know what to do next.
The European right and the GOP
Two months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10495402 (Altman's previous blog article)

How much or little has changed?
Scaling, and why unicorns can’t survive without it
The people who would very likely sway a decision on the block size are currently opposed to increasing the block size because (1) there is no immediate need to do so and (2) there is risk that there can be unintended consequences (one of which is making the network more centralized).

Some people, including Hearn (who is more vitriolic than the average) believe that #1 is false and #2 is a necessary risk.

If you are coming at this from reading Hearn's words, you are coming at this from an extreme perspective that would be balanced by reading Gregory Maxwell's words. I recommend http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/blocksize-conversation/ for a critical, outside and rational perspective.
Ah, majority rules. Which is an excellent system, as long as you are in the majority. Hopefully the majority doesn't decide to remove what is not their agreeable mainstream.
Cybernetics will just change disability insurance into hardware insurance.
That's a really great point.

I suppose what I meant was mainly regarding the current issues going on in the bitcoin community- as you say, with any investment discussion of problems can lower the value. And it just so happens that we are in a situation today where the people most heavily invested in it financially have the power to censor any discussion of problems with bitcoins.
I'd say for large companies(Google, Fb, MSFT, etc), theres no need to send a cover letter. These companies get thousands of applications every single recruiting cycle. Is it even possible for HR to review every single cover letter? Anecdotally, I've had many friends get interviews with big companies without sending a cover letter so not having a cover letter probably won't hurt your case.

For small companies/startups, a cover letter is probably a good idea though.
So his advice is to build a great product?
Hyatt Card Breach Hit 250 Hotels in 50 Nations
Because it ignores the velocity of money and total amount of transactions.

If the USA suddenly adopted bitcoin as the official currency, you would see insane deflation. If people stopped using bitcoin as much, you'd see strong inflation.

Central banks manipulate money supply to keep prices steady.

That's why I can sign a loan for a house in dollars. But you would be insane to sign a loan for a house in bitcoin. The federal reserve will keep inflation from 0-2%. We can count on it. Bitcoin who knows.
Salvaging the Blocksize Discussion, in Two Questions
The Most Heartwarming Tale You’ll Ever Hear About a Girl and a Drone
The cars are self-driving but not self-manufacturing :)
Microsoft Announces Limited Support for Windows 7 with Skylake CPUs
Bitcoin will one day be known as 'the grandaddy of them all' just like the Rose Bowl. Bitcoin suffers from centralization, the very thing it was designed to circumvent The Bitcoin cultist are emotionally wrapped up with the idea that it has to be everything for everyone. Money has a way of making us emotional.
Bitcoin has to be a payment machine for payment processors, It has to be a store of wealth for investors, It has to be a currency for libertarians. It is so caught up in trying to be everything that it does none well. Bitcoin developers dont be afraid to go your own way. They should branch out into new areas and create new coins, applications and opportunities. Why does it have to be Bitcoin or bust. Proponents attack new ideas. They wake up at night in terror that something new might emerge that meet needs in better ways. What would the Stockmarket be like if there was but one issue to trade. It is no wonder that Bitcoin companies struggle to make money. The market is being restrained from growing by those that seek to control the golden goose and make certain that there is no other options. Yes, new things are coming and new financial markets will come into being whether Bitcoin changes its protocol or not. Centralization leads to waste fraud and abuse even with the best of intentions Bitcoin
At this point, that's like trying to reduce flooding by not dumping a bucket into the river. There's so much spam out there that your only hope is effective filtering.
I think many people overestimate the importance of currency because of the visibility it has. Because it represents the stored wealth that people have, people confuse it with wealth itself.

The actual game of business is played out in the provision of goods & services that people want. Currency is the score. You need a means of keeping score in order to play the game, and when one doesn't exist, it will be created. And it helps if more people agree on the means of keeping score; it makes it easier for them to play together. But it doesn't really matter whether that's dollars or euros or pounds or drachmas or cigarettes. People use the currency that the people they want to play with use; the dollar is popular because many people want to play with the U.S. They don't adopt a new currency unless there is no alternative way of keeping score.

The problem with Bitcoin is that most mainstream goods & services providers didn't really want to play with the people who used it. When they did, they went through intermediaries like Coinbase who immediately exchanged it for dollars. Bitcoin caught on because there was a vacuum in the currency space for people that wanted to trade illegal drugs or move money out of China. It fails because this vacuum doesn't extend to the majority of the population.

It's worth remembering this when evaluating other emerging technologies. Look for what people want, places where there's a current lack of available solutions, and ignore the ones that theoretically could change everything if only large groups of people did things that aren't really in their personal interest.
PayPal employee here (and I'm hiring Node.js developers :P ).

I actually got two of these messages while I was out for the holiday break. I don't work on the team that handles invoicing; but, I (among others) made them aware of this issue and they are definitely working on a fix.

The challenge, of course, is that there are plenty of legitimate reasons for sending $0 invoices and we don't want to artificially make our product worse for our many legitimate customers by going too far in trying to stop this spam.
> A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with ‘growth hacking’. That sort of works—at least, it will fool investors for awhile until they start digging into retention numbers—but eventually the music stops.

But by then, the startup has already won. They already got the funding thanks to their sleazy marketing, and the social validation/connections that comes with it.

The essay doesn't contradict the "it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" idiom, unfortunately.
Once you have another job offer, your acceptance could be with a start date more than two weeks away so that there is more time between letting people know you are leaving and your last day.

Two weeks notice is often discussed as a minimum amount of notice, not that employers feel bound by it when letting people go. But you can always give more notice...or less.

Anyway, there's no reason to feel bad about leaving other than missing the people or the work. It's a team that people are paid to be on. If it can't survive one person leaving the company is in trouble.

Finally, your relationship with the CEO appears not to be such that the CEO anticipated that you might leave and proactively taken steps to prevent it or at least discuss it.

Good luck.
If you're already using Resque (the audience for the blog post), you're already using Redis, so Sidekiq would make more sense. Additionally, a quick glance at the syntax for a que job appears that you'd need to change more code (I could be wrong), and the available UI seems to lag Sidekiq's.

Reading this: "Que's job table undergoes a lot of churn when it is under high load, and like any heavily-written table, is susceptible to bloat and slowness if Postgres isn't able to clean it up. The most common cause of this is long-running transactions, so it's recommended to try to keep all transactions against the database housing Que's job table as short as possible." I wonder what consistutes "high load". I throw hundreds of thousands of jobs atop Sidekiq often; if you're using the same database to manage your jobs, it seems that would dogpile your database (since each of those jobs is likely making db calls, and if it's a Rails app, you're typically using the same database)
Standardization provides endorsement. If DRM requires a non-standard plugin, and plugins themselves become increasingly verboten, at least some folks who might have used DRM may decide that they want to reach a wider audience instead.

Consider what happened when Apple refused to allow Flash on their platform; that certainly accelerated the decline of Flash, or at least forced the development of Apple-specific approaches for that platform.

So what would happen if Chrome and Firefox had stood together in solidarity and said "no"? I don't think the answer would have been a mass exodus to IE; for that matter, what if IE had gone along with it? (Edge already bans plugins.)
And I don't have that installed either.
Another another C++11 ‘countof’
I think this comment still stands without the "/s". The extension is that VCs pawn the company off to the public markets, take their money and are long gone when reality catches up (Twitter, Square, GoPro, Zynga, Groupon...).
Look, man, there's a reason this thread is all the way at the bottom of the page. If you actually think that your "literal definition of profit" (that any returned Y in the future, minus X loaned now, exceeds 0) is at all meaningful in a world with inflation, risk of default, and the commonly accepted practice of charging interest, I don't know what else to say.

Please see any [1] of [2] these [3] to understand why it isn't as simple as "Y - X > 0", considering things like where the repayments are coming from, comparing the nominal annualized return to Treasury bond rates, all the fraud that will never be accounted for, etc., etc. Even pro-bailout articles [4] have to include weasel phrases like "on a risk-adjusted basis, even [such and such proposed Y - X] isn’t that big a profit, given the huge downside the government had," speaking directly to my point of how it's hard to properly account for risk, which is what any other lender would have done. Arguably, since there weren't any competitors to the US government for providing bailout money, the interest rate we use to judge whether it was "profitable" should be sky high.

[1]: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395822/overselling-tar...

[2]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/tarp-profit-a-myth_...

[3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/halahtouryalai/2012/04/25/dont-b...

[4]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/bailout-high...
Also, something passing state-wide in a populous state like New York or California can be regarded as an end-run around the difficulty of passing such a law nationally. Vendors won't be willing to lose sales in large markets, so everyone else will get New York-compliant phones. Compare how Texas controls the market for primary/secondary school textbooks in the US.
The difference is that a government currency still has some value to dampen that fluctuation because it's backed by a sovereign state. The government of Venezuela can horribly mismanage it but people will still need to use the Bolivar to pay taxes, the government can require shops to accept Bolivars and ban foreign currency, etc.

That can cause huge problems but short of the government collapsing it does serve to limit the volatility of a currency. In contrast, Bitcoin has absolutely no value beyond the social consensus. It's very easy to imagine scenarios where the value of any stored Bitcoin you have craters overnight: major miners run out of VC cash & shut down, you're on the wrong side of a fork, a major competitor launches, etc. In every case, the floor price is zero and there's no recourse if you fail to convince someone else to accept it at the price you think is fair.
> I'd go a little further than that. Their strategy, while good for some FOSS projects, is a common marketing tool. I can use Wunderlist, Evernote, and Dropbox for free in a limited capacity as well. The thing about those strategies is that they last as long as it's in the interest of the company to provide them.

It seems to me like the solution to that is for the git protocol to extend to encompass the Github tools FOSS projects have come to rely on, so Github can never hold open source projects hostage (not that they would, but as the saying goes, "Trust but verify")

Git + IPFS [1] + GPG = distributed Github. The hard part is someone building the tooling.

[1] https://ipfs.io/
Write and execute c# code online
How a crazy idea increased activation rate by 30%
Apple and Amazon managed to change the practices of the music industry because they had enough power. Netflix has started down the path of building more power, by having their own content. Perhaps when Netflix has enough power they can push back on the video industry.

At least in public, Netflix has claimed that they don't want DRM themselves, and would remove it if they could, but that their content providers require it.
> This shouldn't come as a surprise; "mental" and "physical" aren't distinct entities ...

In one critical sense, the mind and body are distinct. The body can be scientifically investigated because it yields objective, empirical evidence. For the mind, you have to ask the mind's owner what he's experiencing, and that leads to all sort of well-documented distortions.

> ... our bodies function as a whole.

Most of the time, yes.