skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I definitely think there are many mainstream businesses that are pretty easy, but these are usually rental models. Being a landlord or running a Public Storage franchise would be examples.

What other categories of non-tech businesses do you think are easier to run than tech businesses?

Categorically, startups are dealing with a "lit fuse" in terms of their cash and burn rate. Once they're cash-flow positive, things change, but even then, they still have to pay back lenders or investors and there's an intense pressure to grow and become profitable.
> this might be true if you live in the US, but in some other countries it is still hard to actually buy movies or tv shows.

I actually live in Germany, and you also can't get everything here, so this is true for me as well. Sometimes you simply have to accept that something is not available. It's not like there's not enough media out there.

> in some countries downloading media itself for personal use is not illegal.

But offering the download you use is still illegal. But that's all just semantics and doesn't matter that much. What I find more important is the moral issue.

> for example in switzerland, there is a media tax/fee included in the price of every device that potentially could store pirated materials. the income from this tax is then distributed to media producers and artists. in return, copying copyrighted material is tolerated for private use and consumption...

We have a very similar fee in Germany and it's there to allow normal copying in personal use (something that would be called fair use in the US). I guess the swiss fee is there for the same reason and is not there to allow people to get the majority of their media for no additional money. The fee most likely is not enough to finance the media producers and artists. Why spend it on hardware when you can give it to the people that produce what you enjoy?
He defers talking about how to make these abstractions efficient. I'm curious about who would know how to do that and whether there is some material on that topic?

For certain classes of problems that interest me I've resigned myself to languages where I can be very specific about the implementation and leave the higher-order reasoning and problem description to more human-readable formats like English and diagrams.

It'd be nice to know if, though dangerous, we could have our cake and eat it too.

The ideas about interoperation and degeneracy are really cool. The C ABI seems to be a fairly common method of interoperability between languages but also rather restrictive for certain run times. I wonder if we'll ever get to a place where we can have real, robust interoperability.
The grocery store I work at has dummy cameras. I suspect this is because the construction crew broke the security camera system, and nobody is willing to pay for fixing it.

A lady's purse was stolen, and we couldn't do a thing.

I'm still pissed, months after the fact. The manager didn't tell the lady that our cameras are broken, and he only told the officer once the customer was out of earshot (if at all), so the poor lady's probably not aware of the real problem. She could probably sue.
It is precisely because of resource constraints that the open source model would work better. Take education for example. What if anyone could start a school with any standard for curriculum? It would instantly solve the arguments that happen over the democracy of curriculum we have today. It would also allow experimentation into redefining how education is done. We could easily see what works and what doesn't without having to change education for an entire state or the country. How many resources have we wasted following fads? How many good ideas have been skipped because they were too risky to implement universally?

There are obvious downsides as well, but history seems to show that the benefits outweigh the downsides for this type of model.
I work at Stack Overflow. We don't have an SEO team. We don't care about this at all.
Beauty ≠ truth
3 Types of Experience You Need to Pay Attention to in 2016
I agree, but what if the invoice was $1.00 or even $25.00. It would have the same effect, which would be to get the receiver to visit their website?
Exactly:

OSS = Open Source Software

FOSS = Free Open Source Software

OS = Operating System
Yeah. I was a big Opera user (/fan) before that ..
A company that can be 'saved' by Tumblr is in serious trouble indeed.
At least he responded, and promptly. Let's not jump to conclusions just yet.
Is an opiate addiction acquired medically "intentional"?
The opinion, of course, widely varies. Mike's piece was Mike's opinion, so of course it's not going to be very sympathetic to Core developers.

The limits on transaction size have been known since the beginning of Bitcoin. VISA level transaction rates require insanely high block sizes, much larger than those proposed so far. People have come up with many, many different solutions to this problem.

One thrown around a lot is the lightning network [1], but it's not really a "reserve currency" in this case - it's a way to prevent a bunch of intermediate transactions from entering the blockchain forever, but it's based around advanced Bitcoin scripting usage, so it's using Bitcoin for much more than just a backing value.

Keep in mind that Bitcoin currently has a $6 billion USD market cap. Breaking Bitcoin would reduce that to $0. Many people have strong motivations to be conservative with changes...

[1] https://lightning.network/
Hipsters don't exist: http://catandgirl.com/?p=2061
Fixed, thanks. Yay, counting!
Making attribution part of the culture, as I attempted to articulate. Kind of like here on HN: When people quote, they give a reference.
Going to amazon.com or amazon.de?
How two guys make noise in the Dutch software development recruitment scene
80+ Life Lessons i have learned so far
I haven't checked, but are you able to send invoices via API?
This is so well put. It should be engraved over the entrance to a library or public monument somewhere.
Every minecraft guide explicitly says to open file manager and navigate to "%appdata%" often with pictures of where to even input "%appdata%".

I knew what symlinks were but never knew Windows had them. I only learned about %appdata% from a youtube video made by a 11-13 year old kid about how to install a mod for Minecraft. They don't need to know what a symlink is or where their .appdata folder is to know how to navigate to "%appdata%".

The young ones are a bit more tech savvy than adults are giving them credit for. Are they pandered a bit without having to know as much about the internals and how things work? Sure. But they're able to navigate and follow instructions because they've literally been doing it their entire lives.

Many laptops don't have a dedicated function row ("F\d" not FN) keys. So "F8" might serve to confuse some people who have had the privilege of only ever owning a laptop (I know a few of these teens myself!)
how does HAProxy compare to OpsWorks? the HAProxy wikipedia page mentions OpsWorks is based on it
There are some oddities here.

(1) It sounds like the trial started on July 9

(2) These 6 people all started receiving the drug January 7 and all got sick

(3) 90 people total have received the drug, so I assume 84 people safely received the drug.

This sounds like there was a bad batch that hospitalized everyone who received the drug on January 7.
Even when Bitcoin was riding high, Wilson was investing in something he believed was likely to fail. It's what he does: invest in startups, I mean.

I don't see any reason to believe that his position on Bitcoin should be read in any other terms than his investment in Bitcoin companies is not appreciably worse or more risky than other companies in his fund. That his personal asset portfolio holds less Bitcoin than wine illustrates the distinction he's making.

His message is for people invested in Bitcoin companies. It is don't panic, these companies were always risky.
I know opiate addiction and death is a real problem, but do you have a source for the "kills more than saves per year" claim? I've never heard that before.
This is a problem. Tumblr the Community are at the mercy of Tumblr/Yahoo the Corporation.

My partner is also a user of Tumblr, and according to her much of the community are dissatisfied with the direction the company is heading. Actually, now that I think about it, the strategies outlined in this article are more likely to strangle both Tumblr and Yahoo than save either of them.

I'm almost tempted to start working on the-next-tumblr and see if it's possible to tempt all those users over to a platform better suited for their needs.
All machines are ALSO not 64 bit and you have a trivially exploitable buffer overflow on 32 bit machines.
Show HN: My book “Using Docker” was released this week
Hi,

I spent the last year and a half writing a book on Docker and microservices, which was finally released on O'Reilly this week.

"Using Docker: Developing and Deploying Software with Containers" takes a holistic approach, showing how containers can be used as the central artifact in a modern software development workflow. If anyone has any q's or feedback, please feel free to comment below.

The book is available at:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920035671.do (use code AUTHD for a discount)
http://www.amazon.com/Using-Docker-Developing-Deploying-Containers/dp/1491915765/
Show HN: Swindler – OS X window manager framework in Swift
Depends, an estimated 50% of prescribed drugs are proving zero benefit to the patent. Doctors frequently just pick something to get people out of their offices.

So, misuse by someone is very high, but hard to pin down.
Why I Stopped Charging by the Hour
It's pretty cynical to call that knowledge useless. It's learning to do a thing you want to know how to do. That has use to you and often those around you. As for hard engineering problems, just because they're more complex doesn't make the knowledge less available. There's a massive amount of engineering knowledge free online, it only takes the initiative to go out and use it to learn it. The curriculum of many entire university degrees is now available for free online in a way its never been before.
Heh, this 'feature' was the intended solution of a CTF challenge 3 months ago: https://github.com/ctfs/write-ups-2015/tree/master/9447-ctf-...
They are very different numbers. A small number of new drugs get on the market every year vs. every drug that ever entered the market.

One way of comparing these numbers is to look at changes in life expectancy. But that changes very slowly suggesting minimal change per year from one years new drugs. Actual deaths from prescription drugs are also hard to measure, but generally assumed at well over 20,000 per year. http://www.voxeu.org/article/genuine-innovation-new-drugs-sa...

Call it ~6-12 months lost vs. ~1-2 months gained. Though the clear upside is those gains should stack year over year. Just not when you compare introducing drugs a few months early as they would have made it to the market anyway.

PS: The clear conflict of interest is the fairly short lifespan of drug patents.
this isn't my forte but couldn't you memory map the file and use arithmetic to find the chunks to read?
https://distrowatch.com has been around for a very long time and there's no confusion at all. Ditto marketwatch.com, and probably a host of other sites where "watch" in the name refers to "watching" or following something. I think you're just consciously choosing to be pedantic here.
25 best e-commerce blog ideas
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/invoicing/IntroInv...
Ad hominem
Hearthstone Heroes of Warcraft Hack Tool 2016 No Survey
is usenet still used for discussion? how is it?

i know it's used for binaries, are there any frequent usenet users around that don't use it for binaries?
The Lightning network is not based on advanced Bitcoin scripting, in the sense that Bitcoin script makes it possible or something. Bitcoin script is, rather, an impediment which has added a huge amount of complexity to Lightning. The same principle expressed without Bitcoin script can be explained in a few minutes[1]

1. http://altheamesh.com/blog/universal-payment-channels/
It's all the supplements and other homeopathic exemption stuff that worries me. Not only do they not have to prove they're effect (at all, let alone more effective than the standard treatment), but they've had serious safety issues in the past. Ephedra is a classic example. Plus there are so many times people do tests that find supplements don't contain what they claim.
> in fact we don't accept this behaviour in economy or any other aspect of our lives

I think it's simply because this approach is more prone to abuse. A good dictator leaves democracy in the dust in terms of efficiency, but converesly a bad dictator can make everything go to shit at moment's notice. In economy/politics, it's a matter of life and death. In open-source software, the risks of dictatorship don't matter - someone can always fork the project off and do it better, but even if not, no one is starving or dying because of it.
designed for industry

The PR2 has an arm payload of 1.8kg, total payload of 20kg, and a top speed of 1m/s. That doesn't sound "industrial" to me, that sounds like "the absolute bare minimum to be a mobile anthropomorphic robot". And to achieve those numbers, it weighs 480 kilos! That's a payload fraction of 4.1%! How is this anything like a 747?

If it only weighed a 60 kilos, the average weight of a human, then we would expect a total payload of 2.4kg, and an arm payload of... 7.3 grams. Doesn't sound too useful to me. And the damn thing would still cost $50,000!

The PR2 was a VC backed monster, but remember, Willow Garage went out of business last year, because their products just weren't very useful! The technology just isn't there, and won't be for a long time.

Home robot hackers falling in love with
the super low power NUC

I'm sure that's fine for pathing, and Kinect-SLAM, but "getting a beer from the fridge" is picking arbitrary items in arbitrary poses in an unconstrained environment, basically the Amazon Picking Challenge, which nobody can solve with reasonable speed yet, even with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment.

If you honestly think you can build a cheap robot that can do all that by 2020, then by all means, launch a startup and earn billions of dollars. But I don't think it's going to be done before 2040.
yes and four squares is in the union square ventures portfolio, he would have knowledge of and may have been part of the decision making process.
Making GitLab Better for Large Open Source Projects
Because their price is appaling.

Star Trek on Neflix US: part of a 6£/m subscription;

Watching a complete series (TNG) on iTunes (renting): not available;

Watching a complete series (TNG) on iTunes (buying): 280£;
there aren't many humans who can grok that kind of info and truly understand it, that's why they were supposed to be rated accurately by ratings agencies.
Obama Proposes $4B Investment in Self-Driving Cars
Yes, it's all valid feedback. I kind of felt a gap for a timely updated and focused news source focused on "open source". At this point I don't plan to shift to an existing news aggregator, but if you don't mind sharing - do you have any in mind that would allow such filtering?
The problem with bitcoin, as I see it, is that discussion of problems that may exist can lower the value of bitcoin- whether the problem is real or not. If you're heavily invested emotionally with bitcoins, you need to discuss these problems so that they can be solved. If you're heavily invested financially, you need to make sure no one talks about these problems, at least until you have a plan for how you're not going to lose your fortune.

Those invested financially have very good reasons to believe in solutions that will retain their investment, and dismiss solutions that put them at risk.
I meant in cases where the drug is already FDA approved e.g. Phase I trial has already been completed in other cancer types.
There is no need to do another Phase I trial just because it is another cancer type.

The restrictions on using an approved drug for a new cancer type or stage is silly.

The original NCI program for treating Leukemias worked pretty well. The FDA is extremely risk adverse which is not what you want for terminal cancer treatment.
All valid points. For point 1, we should assume the tool is near release. Once it is, that point evaporates.

> Once the tool exists, how much code will actually use it?

Any number of the 10M+ C++ developers and probably a large number of Open Source projects. I remember something like 20% of C++ (projects|programmers) are using C++1/4. If half of those use the tool, that is still 1M programmers using a much safer system. Not the same as Rust, but better than the old way. In the near term, the total quantity of safer code will come from C++ adopting better static analysis than from the adoption of Rust, even if Rust is the better way.

The biggest impediment to Rust adoption with C++ programmers is the non-ability to incrementally include Rust in a project. But this is true of C++ in general.

Rust has the advantage of mind share, witnessing the mistakes of C++ and the ever increasing torrent of new programmers who will choose Rust over C and C++. Every problem that a C++ programmer has, a Rust programmer has. A Rust programmer just solves it slightly differently.
> @AskPayPal: I recommend deleting that tweet, it has your personal info

> @troyhunt: It has my email address – I get email by sharing it with people who might want to send me email!

This is golden. Hilariously incompetent tech support trying to make someone delete the tweet complaining about their spam.
Which makes total sense when you need to consolidate inventory at the end of the month/quarter/year.
Google Has Toughest Interview Process for Developers, but Not the Worst
Interesting concept. Are you able to whitelist domains?
Django website code for curve and surface fitting
Django website for for curve fitting 2D and 3D data that can output source code in several computing languages and run a genetic algorithm for initial parameter estimation. Includes orthogonal distance and relative error regressions. Generates PDF files and surface animations. URL is https://github.com/zunzun/zunzunsite
101 DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites List 2016 (Updated)
It's possible to fake volume, maybe, but faking 'price' is just flushing money down the toilet.
Well, because it is. What scares me is those constant attempts to turn software projects into social gatherings.
The problem of affirmative action is complicated by several things.

One, it is by definition discrimination by race. You are giving preferential treatment to people based on skin color.

Two, it creates distrust between students of different colors. If you know that some black students are accepted based on skin color rather than ability, then you'll start to suspect that the black students in your class didn't earn their ride to college, so to speak. In extreme cases, if you've been denied entry to Harvard, you may suspect that you were left out to leave room for a less-qualified but more "diverse" student.

These two issues combine to not only make affirmative action hypocritical, but also to make it actively harmful. Affirmative action doesn't "fix" racism, it encourages it.
Yeah I have no issue with project managers/creators choosing a democratic process.

Just issues with users who demand it...
They celebrated by sending spam email to past donors.
A collection of top NHL players grouped by position and year
Simple PHP package to handle response properly in your API
Молочная кислота купить – Компания Оптхим
Please make it possible to block/ignore postings by specific usernames (e.g. "listbot"). That's 75% of the front page right now and I already get a number of those in my inbox. For me, at least, it's pretty annoying.
Manage Session in Express
Primum non nocere (first, do no harm[1])

Medical research is conservative, cautious, and regulated because we strive to move beyond the ugly abuses of our past[2]. It should not be the Wild West.

For insight into modern medical ethics, read the Belmont Report[3]. It's what contemporary researchers must read before conducting any studies involving human subjects. Where I work, we're tested on it.

(This is opinion, but...) Harm today is in research guided more by profit than by benefit. Chronic disease is more profitable than cures or prevention. With rapidly-emergent antibiotic resistance there is little private incentive to develop new antibiotics. We must rely on and expand research in the public interest (funded by NIH, philanthropy, and so on) to balance private biomedical research.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_ethics_cases

3. http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/humansubjects/guidance/belmont.html
I've been interested in this for awhile. Could you post some of examples or open source examples?
There is plenty being done in JS/node communities (plural! because there is more than one) at all levels. It just turns out that change doesn't happen over night.

Conferences already reverse discriminate by aiming for a gender balance in speakers (despite the submissions they chose from being very imbalanced). User groups have adopted CoCs to protect female and minority members. There are even female-only special interest groups. There's also this: https://github.com/nodejs/inclusivity

Besides, the list you're referring to is not an exhaustive list of important JS projects. It's a list of maintainers who have signed this open letter. What does their gender add to the conversation?

Inclusivity in programming comunities and JS/node in particular has drastically improved throughout the past decade. But structural changes take a long time to show results. The distribution you're seeing today represents what was being done in the past, not what is happening today.
Huh, I didn't even know you can edit titles.
Rescuing Resque again (2015)
Pretty cool, reminds me of CHASM:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
I have some issues with this statement, primarily because I don't know how you can ascertain the number of lives saved from new drugs.

If someone is alive, are they alive because of the drugs? How could that even be quantified?
It's even better when you set up the alias to disappear or reappear every other login
Node Generator for Couch and Express
React.run – Fast browser prototyping for React components
Although I would also favour ML over C++, if you look its derivatives, OCaml, Haskell and so on, they really aren't much smaller than C++.

C++ biggest problem are all the design decisions to fit into C's tooling and its compatibility.
Personally, I like the idea of air marshalls as well. It makes feel safer while flying. The TSA, on the other hand, definitely makes me feel less safe.
Making no point about whether further control/regulation is appropriate, I'm not sure I like your logic. Treating lives as some fungible resource where the ends justify the means and whatever process results in the most living people at the end shouldn't be correct.

I sympathize with all the sick people who will die, but they were mostly selected for death naturally. The man who died (or will, as soon as life support is removed) was healthy prior to this study. Much like our justice system is supposed to value not punishing the innocent over punishing the guilty, our medical system is supposed to value not hurting the well over helping the sick. The hippocratic oath embodies this "first do no harm" principle.