skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"as opposed to binary file formats like .docx"

.docx is not a binary file format unlike the .doc files from the past.

.docx is a plain text xml based format that has an Open published standard.

Most people don't know this, but you can simply unzip the contents of a docx or xlsx file and inspect its plain text contents.

Archival and long term accessibility of the document contents should not be the deciding factor in opting out of .docx
Nobody is trying to overtake bitcoin.

If Bitcoin Core did the sensible thing and started to increase blocks and working towards that goal, no takeover would happen. Quite the opposite, Bitcoin Core is now taken over by developers from Blockstream company, pushing their own (vaporware) product and doing changes to Bitcoin that will help them. And also adding, with little (non-censored) discussion, controversial features like Replace-By-Fee.

How can you talk about decentralization when the few important people, who can decide about the future, can literally sit to one table and decide. How can you talk about decentralization when there is one person controlling all discussions and actively censoring all negativity against him, or against current bitcoin core.

There is no long-term solution for scaling than resizing the blocks right now. SegWit is great, but only a one-time thing.

The only thing that is missing from your comment is that there is conspiracy by Big Banks and Evil Statists to silently destroy bitcoin (by making it more usable).
Hopefully he gets a bunch manufactured and resells them-- This is the guy that bought up most of the world's db19 connectors for an old apple floppy emu, leaving NeXT computer enthusiasts to use such alternatives as chopped off db25 connectors/19x pin-to-pin wires as monochrome monitor/bus cables
Well it would certainly make for a hilarious interview.
On iOS, you don't even need the App Store. You can add _any_ URL to your home screen. The only difference with 'real' apps is that URLs on your home screen all run in the same Safari app and share its cache.
Also certainly it will be in Fedora 25 (in under a year). From there it will be in everything else. Good to see this problem about to go away.
The scala type system is incredibly strong (and undecidable) but the implementation itself is not conducive to compilation speed. Two of the primary motivations for Dotty are 1) reducing the complexity of the language and 2) starting clean slate on a more reasonable compiler.

Im of the opinion that most groups don't want the complexity that scala brings, and we're going to see that in the community growing around spark. The databricks style guide clearly avoids a lot the complexity of the language, and the people who are coming to scala for the tech and not the language are going to follow their lead.
And according to this spoofing, I think my assumption is right.

I did an investigation of its internet traffic in Chrome and see this http://imgur.com/XI3Rpy0 and this http://imgur.com/EEutJ6a .

It shows that Manymo uses Ajax and Websockets to talk with clients. Ajax for fetching materials and websockets for keeping persistence.

I did several projects using both/either Ajax and/or websockets, this web tech is so familiar. But what I am concerned now is what behind the VMs are and how they implement those VMs.

Using QEMU??
And that expansion was done for the revenue it could deliver now, not in 2108. If the original Suez Canal had not been constructed in 1869, then this new one could still have been constructed now and it would be for the short-run gains, not gains a century-plus away.
> “I try to spend about half my time doing engineering,” she told me. Frequently, she broadcasts that process on Twitch, a live-streaming site, narrating the decisions that go into placing each capacitor and orienting each pin.

The most interesting part of the article IMO. I want to see her design and build products. I assume this is the stream they are referring to? There are some #deskofladyada videos, but not actual product design AFAICT.
IMHO GTD is right in two key things i) put everything into inbox; ii) distinguish between tasks, tasks with deadlines and events (e.g. a doctor appointment).

But it doesn't give us some key insights needed to prioritize and to avoid getting stuck into executing unimportant things. IMHO, the kanban concept of work-in-progress limits is crucial.
Free code and tutorial on using the Facebook API for competitive analysis
French parliament votes to jail tech execs who refuse to decrypt data
Sharing data and interopability between applications is a hard problem, but Apple is on the right track. In any case, starting out with something with sound fundamentals and then improving usability is a much better approach than starting with something that is fundamentally broken and adding kludges to make it more secure.
Ask HN: SaaS Moving from Contract to Pay-As-You-Go?
Hi Folks,

At my startup we're struggling with the current cost structure of the company. We spend a lot on sales and they're struggling to produce a return. We're rapidly burning our small cash reserve.

We have around 250 customers currently, all on longish term contract (most are 3 year contract). We have pretty good traction with our smaller customers, but a contract like that is typically 5-7k/year. We aren't the cheapest offering, but we are near the lowest price offering in the market. All competitors currently deal with longer term contracts right now.

I'm strongly considering a move to pay-as-you-go which I think could be fairly disruptive (not a huge fan of that word) in the marketplace. Does anyone have links for posts or stories about making a move like this? People aren't terribly candid about this and I'd love to read up on some experiences.

Just a few notes:
1. I think we can limit the current software in a such a way to prevent cannibalization of our current customers.
2. This would allow for direct monetization of our support services as well.
3. This is a bit of a risk in that we don't really know the size of the market for these smaller customers. Marketing to them will be challenging. However, word of mouth in the industry is pretty strong.
4. The customer's use of the software is highly cyclical, so we're considering allowing them to 'pause' their subscription as well to further reduce the price point.
5. This would also help offset a similar cyclicality in our cash flow that puts at risk at certain points in the year despite have significant 'guaranteed' subscription revenue.
A Networked Time Traveller with TypeScript and Redux from Scratch
This is my biggest pet peeve with iOS. That and the way background services act. Why can't I have an app that syncs my photos to my server run at night without the location hack? Ugh.
Users want

1. A well designed product.

2. Easy online help.

3. If that's not enough, easy to contact knowledgeable people to call who know more than the FAQ.
Show HN: Retrieve the size of an image without downloading it (iOS)
Seconding this, I'd love to see it.
The Art of Manliness has a great set of booklists. If the website's title is not obvious enough, they are all completely centered around manliness, so be forewarned. By this, they mean manliness as opposed to boyishness, not womanliness. Heres some good lists and a link to their landing page for all their book related content:

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2008/05/14/100-must-read-books...

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/06/24/36-books-every-youn...

http://www.artofmanliness.com/category/travel-leisure/books/
Similar questions 1 year ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9413204
Alan Turing and Ada Lovelace Take a Walk and Discuss AI
Toll prices never come down. They only go up. When was the last time a government lowered a toll on a bridge or road?

Same thing applies here.
Do you get paid overtime? If not, why are you working 10 "free" hours a week? It's people like you that are ruining it for the rest of us.
>why wouldn't some ad-tracking mechanism that's part of some apps simply collect everything it can and radio it back home?

Because the vast majority of GUI software installed on Linux comes from curated app stores (or 'repos' as they used to be called). It's also mostly written without any expectation of making money.

Web apps being sandboxed is a plus point for users in the sense that it increases security (on the local machine - the web app vendor is still free to do whatever they want with your data). It's also a negative since it means any code you want to execute on your own hardware has to be approved by the browser vendors (web standards don't really provide any user controlled way to break out of the sandbox[1]). The standards generally operate in a lowest-common-denominator way such that the vendor of a browser your don't even use can prevent you from utilising your own hardware by stalling web standards indefinitely.

[1] the old plugins interfaces like NPAPI do exist, but are being phased out and aren't supported at all on web-only platforms like ChromeOS and FirefoxOS, as far as I'm aware
Risk arising from technical implementation details are very different than risks arising from aspects of human nature. One could look at the housing market in 2006/2007 and know that something was very wrong without understanding all of the underlying details: home appreciation, the kinds of loans offered and who was getting them, etc. ... all without understanding details of credit default swaps and the like. One can also have a sense, without specialized knowledge, of how human nature may influence policies and financial decisions. That doesn't mean everyone has access, but a reasonably astute observer without specialized knowledge can at least see that "something is wrong" even if they can't tell you why or how exactly. This is not true with crypto-currencies. Why the transaction processing scaling problems? The decisions are much more abstract and the impacts can be removed in time and have to do with the way math works rather than a human decision.
I have a hard time taking them seriously when one of the Blockstream founders is an avowed scammer and fraudster http://betakit.com/montreal-angel-austin-hill-failed-spectac...
Happy to answer your questions, if anyone is curious about this project.
With the recent improvements in voice recognition and deep learning algorithms, machine-driven support is just about to happen soon. Plus there are many companies actually working on that field, ie. http://www.artificial-solutions.com or http://www.anbotogroup.com/en/index.php
Same here, I can't believe we're a few years late. Much better than the apt-get / apt-cache stupidity.
I like what they're doing, but applications have to be written from the ground up knowing that they live in a sandbox, so they can ask for the appropriate permissions in the appropriate places explaining why the extra permissions are needed. Otherwise the user experience is going to be pretty bad. Security doesn't work as an add-on.
It's an anagram and then he also "Russianized" it apparently, adding the -ff as what we now mostly transliterate as -ov.
This gets mentioned lot, not just with spaceX but other similar sized organizations as well . It is simply not true, for two reasons

a) The scales are not the same in aerospace as in software, they are still very much the minnows in that industry.

b) It does not matter if they have 5,000 staff or $1+ Billion revenue today,What matters is the high growth plan they are following, In the next 10-15 years they could be easily doing $100 Billion + i.e. if they are successful with cost costing and can expand the market for it support companies of that size.

Any company looking to 100x or more their revenue is a startup. Size notwithstanding, simply because whatever they do now will be nothing similar to what they need to do to get the remaining 99%. Every single business and technology process would have to be continuously innovated and thrown out to get there. That really requires a startup mind frame and startup culture
So the core of the argument is

> The number of lines of code that need to be written for this across the entire industry will be several orders of magnitude more than a scaling solution of changing 1MB blocks to 2MB blocks. This was explained to core developers at the conference and it didn’t seem to change their opinion of what the best short term solution was to scaling.

Aka, the author knows the day to day challenges of writing core better than the core developers. I believe reading the piece only validated my original heuristic.
Do you think the programs themselves should do the rest too? Tilde expansion? Quoting and escaping arguments? Word splitting? Variable substitution? Etc?

I would go mad working in such an environment.
Outside tech/Moore's Law type companies they offer guarantees by making the products actually durable. A very different model.
That's a very broad question, so I read your comments to get a feel from where you might be coming from and/or going to and where you and I might overlap:

* Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile, things that gain from disorder http://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incer...

* Jared Diamond. The World until yesterday, what can we learn from traditional societies http://www.amazon.com/World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional-Soci...

* Frans de Waal. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates http://www.amazon.com/Bonobo-Atheist-Search-Humanism-Primate...

* John Higgs. The KLF: Chaos, Magic... http://www.amazon.com/KLF-Chaos-Magic-Music-Money-ebook/dp/B...

* Joseph Jaworski. Synchronicity, the inner Path of leadership http://www.amazon.com/Synchronicity-The-Inner-Path-Leadershi...

* Piero Ferrucci. Your Inner Will, finding personal strength in critical times http://www.amazon.com/Your-Inner-Will-Personal-Strength/dp/0...

* William Irvine. A Guide to the good life, the ancient art of stoic joy http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/01953...

* Chogyam Trungpa. Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior http://www.amazon.com/Shambhala-Sacred-Warrior-Chogyam-Trung...

* Tomas Malik. Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing In Us http://www.amazon.com/Patience-God-Story-Zacchaeus-Continuin...

* Nick Winter. The Motivation Hacker http://www.amazon.com/Motivation-Hacker-Nick-Winter/dp/09892...

* Chas Emerick, Brian Carper, Christophe Grad. Clojure Programming http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Programming-Chas-Emerick/dp/14...

Fiction:

* Peter Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction

* Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon (his other hit: Snow Crash is surprisingly more history then SF now...)
High-Speed C++ MVC Framework for Web Application
What Would You Say to a Principal Who Shows Your Kid a $1,639.88 Laptop?
Isn't Wayland supposed to address this kind of issue (X applications being able to read/control what others do) ?
IncomeClub Launches Platform to Help Millennials with Reliable Investing
Why wasn't a charge back an option?
Because they only need to be trusted until the transaction is complete. Banks must be trusted in perpetuity. The trust model is much stronger when any breach of trust can lead to instant reaction, moving all funds away in seconds and blacklisting them.

That's why friendlier hardware and software wallets are being developed, and protocols to automate most of the tedious work.

Look at for example the payments protocol with the ability to verify the identity of the seller (via TLS certificates), transmit your delivery address and get a digitally signed receipt in one click. With support for extensions it can even do things like silently negotiate for who to use as a trusted arbitrator and the time period for settlement (after X time without it being contested, the seller can withdraw the money without need for interaction).

Bitcoin can emulate everything banks do, and still have far stronger security guarantees.

Banks simply can not do the same without adopting public cryptographic logs like that of Bitcoin.
v1.1: https://mvogt.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/apt-1-1-released/
Harsh, this must have really upset you.
Could you elaborate on what parts of go-like tooling you like? I also find it interesting given that golang is a much simpler language specifically to allow for the kinds of automated tooling they have. If you want that, then the complexity of scala is going to have to decrease.
Why not just alias apt=aptitude?
It's interesting, because that immediately makes me question the QA behind the product, when I a see the web QA being poor like this. So I poked around the site, and the main picture shows "29 colours to choose from" and several of the cases have chipped paint. I guess it goes back to what my grandma used to say about girls with dirty fingernails.
All fully validating nodes must still download all the signature data. The total can not exceed 1MB per block without forking. SegWit does not reduce transaction sizes.

SegWit is not a compression technique, it is a bandwidth redundancy reduction technique. It simply makes it so that some nodes doesn't need to fetch all of the transaction data.
Your marketing should go way beyond just listing the software in an app store, this is where most developers fail.
You can run a blog on a cloud platform, set up auto-scaling, and withstand a reddit / hn / slashdot crowd.

You will likely run out of the free tier and into significant spending during the spike pretty soon.

If you ran a highly interactive page that required a lot of non-trivial server-side processing, I'd understand.

But blogs serve the same static content to almost every request. I don't see why burning a whole lot of CPU and IO on it by running python/php/ruby and hitting a database many times is worth it. Serving a set of static files automatically generated by a blog engine (like Jekyll) seems much more reasonable to me.

Regarding comments: Disqus or something like that could help. Or you could turn the comments off during a spike: seeing the content without comments is a much better user experience than seeing a 500 Server Error page.
It's funny because I generally regard Atlassian products as at the worst, not bad. That is to say, I don't feel like anything they do sucks, some things I really like, some things I'm meh about. Except SourceTree. Maybe because I'd been using Tower for nearly a year by the time I came across SourceTree. Maybe because it's such a Windows feeling application. I don't know. I'm sure most of my dislike is illogical at this point, but it still is there.

I don't feel like $70 is very much for something that feeds my family. I use it all day every day and the work I do with it allows my wife to stay home with my kids. If people didn't pay me to build the software that _I_ build, this wouldn't be possible. It's the same reason I choose IntelliJ over Eclipse or other IDEs. If the price difference is justified by my effctiveness with your tool, I'm spending the money without hesitation.

The only caveat I have is, even if your product is the best, if your company is shifty or a bad actor- I'll do whatever I can to avoid it.
> I want to call a support person that's actually more knowledgable than me.

Amen to that. Unfortunately, it is not a common option any more.

Leggett's article is at best ambiguous over this, and she gives the impression of not understanding the issue. Firstly, 'voice' is not a unified category: on the one hand, there is informed-human voice support, and on the other, there is the combination of voice automation and uninformed flunky. Leggett shows no sign of understanding that people are not abandoning the former out of choice, but because it is not available.
CPU runs at reduced maximum clock speed with no battery installed
DeepDrumpf: The Donald Trump AI Spoof Bot America Needs
Personally, I'm leaning slightly in favor of increasing the block rate to 2 MB, for what it's worth. But I wouldn't risk fracturing the ecosystem to do so. I consider the opinions of the Coinbase CEO to be ill-considered and foolhardy, and here is a good reason as to why: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/double-billing-is-not-healthy-...

I also don't see many parallels to the MtGox implosion. There is no outright fraud or staggering incompetency here, just differing visions of the future that are being advocated for by different sides. If the weight of numbers accumulates on the 2 MB side and that eventually ends up happening due to sheer inertia, I don't see how that will expose the 1 MB faction as "true charlatans". Merely losing a policy debate does not make you a charlatan.

In other words, you're over-dramatizing the situation.
Yes, of course. The implication here is that someone would stop running in order to enable a defection, but that's a fallacy. People can (and do) defect for reasons other than knowing when the game will end. The problem is not the defections per se (those happen all the time), it's the fact that if the end of your term is known then not only does that force you to defect (if you are rational), it also forces everyone else to defect if they are rational.
Someone posted a blog post of mine that reached the 3rd-2nd spot on HN for much of a day. The aggregate number of unique views I received on it were about 200k. I say aggregate because the number wasn't entirely from HN directly, but it being on HN led the post to be picked up by other channels such as Reddit, Gizmodo, 'ifuckinglovescience' and many other outlets. Several other outlets later reported the news that my post did but didn't link directly, making it so that more people were reading about the topic then my numbers reveal, but I don't think I could take credit at that point because these other outlets were probably doing their own independent research on the topic by then.

What was interesting was that 2-3 days later when its spot on HN was probably on the 3rd or 4th page or maybe more, the page was still garnering a considerable number views from HN.
That may be a roadblock but the primary reason why smartphones are relatively unproductive is because a touch only interface has the disadvantage that you can only interact with things that are visible on the screen. When your screen is less than 7" big and 30% of that space is wasted by a virtual keyboard then the only way to design a UI for a smartphone is to have as few interactions as possible, otherwise we end up having to constantly scroll up and down. The end result is that a lot of apps are hiding core functionality behind the hamburger icon.
Sounds like you're mixing ideology with technology.
Just wait until the payee has a comma or a quote in the name and you download a CSV and the programmers can't even properly format a CSV and it's broken in Excel.
This means that the notebook is wasting battery cycles even when it is connected to AC if you use the original adaptor.
http://rpi.edu/
My top 4 recommendations (full list and notes at http://www.dotnetsurfers.com/books/)
The Power of Habit,
Search Inside Yourself,
The Willpower Instinct,
Zero to One
Subway Systems at the Same Scale
And, my comment above was marked dead by the moderators!
Yea... My thoughts as well?
Feel free to email me if you think I can help you in any way!

anders(a)timeblock.com
I've never understood why debian insists on having these be different commands. It would make sense if install, search, upgrade and uninstall were all discrete, but the way it is today feels half implemented.
But they're owned by about 6 companies: http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/democracyondeadline/media...

The web is vastly more open and representative.