skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nobel prize winning scientists can go rogue. Until these same rogues hire incoming professors based on their own biorxiv papers this is a small advance.

This whole thing needs to start at the level of the funding agency, namely NIH. Publishing in a good journal is a prerequisite to getting a grant. Try getting an R01 on a Biorxiv paper. Not gonna happen.
The Filter Bubble – Facebook’s Booster for Radicalism
Lots of great questions! Thanks for joining us. Email me ( luke@ycombinator.com ) after you apply for YC with your next big hardware thing:)
A lot of the advice seems to be geared towards B2C startups. Most startups http://www.ycombinator.com/hardware/ seem B2C too. A lot of the reports/blogs/opinions of the Interweb suggest that connected hardware will make the most sense in industrial and smart city kind of environments (which are probably more B2B than B2C) in the early days. Would you advise differently for people working on B2B?

- Getting early prototypes out there has kind of been decremental for us. Even the smaller bizs are willing to pay higher for a more "field-tested" device. Which seems like a recursive problem ;). Should one spend more time on getting v1.0 done ?
- Is there anyone who you'd recommend to handle global shipping and taxes? The way that Pebble had tied up with distributors in different places depending on your country, etc.

(We are building talking posters. One's with BLE play prerecorded messages, and you can interact with them, and the one's with WiFi are connected to the Internet and are more interactive.)

Thanks !
The best candidate we had just asked us to work for free for a month to see if we would like him. We could not say no. And today he's a co-founder :D
That's an orthogonal issue, though. I had the same experience during a whiteboarding somewhere else...
Guilty until proven innocent, I see.

> It is Travis County, the liberal mecca of Texas.

There are lots of liberals who act in racist ways.
They could (and do), but the prospect is longer-term and riskier, which makes it far less appealing.
I think he was suggesting that when something falls apart it's always at the last minute for that something. Kind of like how you always find something in the last place you look. I guess it's kind of accurate since you wouldn't describe an early stage deal as having "fell through".
> Once again, not clear to me why this much data transfer is needed. I just checked my phone and 359MB of data has been sent in the last 30 days.

Odd. On my system -in the last 30 days- Signal has transferred 1.15MB of data. I'm using it on Android. Are you on iOS or something?
Your situation is just one of the many reasons for why hiring by GitHub is bad. It selects for people who are willing and able to work for free.
Poker? Daily sports betting sites? Stock markets?
I subscribe to Pandora to block the ads. That's a viable business model. I am stunned by the amount of crap that comes my way when I happen to browse without an adblocker. Advertisers went too far, and now there's a counterreaction. I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model. The problem is that it's easier to dupe advertisers into thinking consumers will like content than it is to convince consumers to like content. If consumers really like content, they will subscribe to it. All that has happened is that the curtain on advertising effectiveness has been lifted, and buyers of ads are getting a better deal along with consumers. The media enjoyed decades of profitability due more to a lack of competition than a high-quality product. I don't pity them.
Makes me wonder about Gobble. We've used it a couple of times and the food is awesome. Healthy, attractive. Very much enjoyed it.

But we only tried it because they offered a Groupon that put the price where we thought it should be. I've heard that in fact, they are doing very well, and I hope that is the case.
Even with as risky as opening a restaurant is I think getting VC-level returns out of a startup if far riskier.
Non-Cloud Save and Privacy-Enhanced SmartHome Product
The market clearing price is higher than many buyers (employers) would like, that's for sure.
And that means?
Is this Romanian man really 'GhostShell'? If so, he risks arrest
I mean, if somebody includes the name of a gene in their text, the goal is to annotate (then use the annotation) the gene in the text of the paper. It's often nontrivial to extract the meaning from the text without having a full experiment human. A typical case would be a reference to a gene by name, where the paper authors really meant the transcript or the protein product.

The semantic parsing part is an annotation process. AI algorithms are required to make accurate annotations - a huge amount of context is required.

So if authors instead marked up their papers such that each mentioned entity's semantic meaning was obvious, it would make it much easier to AI that scans all papers and generates hypotheses.
Interesting, seeing a gmail domain gives me more confidence that my email will get to the recipient.
I'd love a UI way to enable `?w=1` whitespace mode, especially for html/json/yaml files. I have a feeling a lot of reviewers don't know about it and spend an inordinate amount of time squinting to see what changes when it was a whitespace-only change.
This is how the existing type checker works, from primitive types and combination rules. Some rules are more precise than others, though. I think in Scala the type system does not depend on the implementation, but it is specified by the language.
Makes you question what exactly they were doing before the letter came out.
The comment you are responding was what the scientists in the article concluded, not something I was saying.
World’s most influential universities
It's interesting that you mention checking off of review points. I had begun to do that in an informal fashion by updating my pull request with notes in the form of a checklist:

- [x] Refactor _

- [ ] Rename variable x

- [ ] ...

Now that you mention it, it would be very nice to have something like Google Docs's ability to mark comments as resolved.
What he/she is saying is that the pace of research & publishing is such that it's impossible for researchers & academics to stay current the only fashioned way (reading, writing and attending conferences). It would be beneficial to have an intelligent bot that could be trained to browse for content of interest as a mechanism to augment an individual human's capacity to do this manually.
I ask them to give me a full design document with their coding style guide. Since it's an 'easy test', this is my 'easy test' to check their procedures.

They should already have a coding document in place and they can use their boilerplate document to quickly whip up a design doc. Right??!!?
KTH and Wikipedia develop first crowdsourced speech engine
Who hires the Bs in the first place? :)
Offshore Gambling Site Laundered $2M in Amazon Gift Cards
Fixed no, variable yes (or else they would just be profitable).

An explanation with an example can be found here[0].

But let's throw out some easy (but completely false numbers).

Assume:

The fixed cost for the entire operation for one month is $1000.

The operation makes 1000 widgets in one month.

A widget can be sold for $2.

Analysis:

If the company sells all 1000 widgets that it made in a month, then it will have revenue of $2000. If each widget had no variable costs, then each widget sold 'contributes' $2 to paying off the fixed costs of the company. $2 is greater than zero, so the company has a positive contribution margin.

Take the same assumptions as listed above, but the variable costs for each widget is $3. If the company sells all 1000 widgets, then it will have a revenue of $2000. However, each sale of the widget contributes -$1 towards the fixed costs of the company. Thus the company has a negative contribution margin.

So the first situation boils down to "we sold a widget for more than it costs to make", and the second situation boils down to "we sold a widget for less than it costs to make". Where "costs to make" includes just the variable costs. Which is what the article implies, "SpoonRocket had reached a positive contribution margin — it was selling meals for more than it cost to cook them."

Note also having a positive contribution margin also doesn't mean the company will ever realistically be profitable. Imagine a scenario where the fixed costs are $100.000 per month, and the contribution margin of each widget was $0.01 (ex: variable costs per widget $9.99, sale price $10). Each widget has a positive contribution margin, but the company would need to sell 10.000.000 per month to actually cover the fixed costs and become profitable.

Edit: had fixed/variable backwards on the first line.

[0] - http://www.accountingcoach.com/break-even-point/explanation/...
There was no paywall for this page, so I refused to read it.

It's what the author would want.
The Keys to Successful Real World API Strategies
>To make matters worse, everything from the smallest start-up to the largest tech company is adopting the same 'exclusive hiring practices' while they sit back wait for the resumes to roll in and/or send in work samples.

So true. I've found myself back on the market recently and what I'm finding is a large number of companies resorting to HackerRank pre-screens where they pick out anywhere from 3-6 puzzle-type coding challenges, give you an hour or so to complete them and if you don't nail them all, you're out. And that's just for the initial screening - there's no guarantee you'll make it past the N phone screens and in-persons you'll have after the initial screening.

Insanity, indeed. I hope someone writes a book on the crazy hiring practices in our industry, compared to other fields. Maybe I will someday - have to land a job first, lol :-/
Its like write(2) was designed for perfect logging.
How Listeners Will Pay for Free Streaming in 2016
Ah, awesome!! Makes complete sense!

Thank you very much for unpacking it and all the best in your career in Biology! I am in tech now, but studied Biology at Texas A&M for undergrad so hearing the words in your response reminded me of the good ol' days!
Did they kill commit-level comments?

I can no longer make comments on a given commit - the entry box at the bottom is gone. Looks like you have to scroll all the way back up to the top, switch to the "Conversation" tab, and then make a PR-level comment instead of a commit-level comment.

I hope I'm missing something here, because as it stands now it's a big step backwards.
That's a dodgy looking commit, wonder what else is lurking. https://github.com/fungosforks/icq-desktop/commit/eced2373c6...
Crooks exploit Oman websites in typosquatting attacks
The spam source of my inbox are open source DLs because apparently they are based on either google groups or mailman and they almost always require registration. sigh
Or is it really just 320GB and they are calling it 314GB to go along with the pi-based promotion?

Either way, I'm in for one. I have an extra Pi that I was trying to decide what to do with, and this harddrive will be perfect.
The Awesome Privilege of Artistic Failure
Create your own Heroku review apps with dokku
>Do people really think their handgun is going to help them resist a predator drone strike?

No, but as a group the people of the US would most certainly defeat the US military. As others pointed out much less armed and smaller groups have held the military at bay, and for long periods of time. But there are two much bigger factors in US military vs US people.

1) Telling soldiers to attack their own people is not going to be as smooth as telling to attack foreigners, especially in any size.

2) The biggest issue by far is that the US military needs a massive functioning economy to provide support for them to function any length of time. Look how much war costs - that represents acquisitions, salaries for civilians, replacement, etc. If they disrupted their own economic base they'd fall pretty quickly.

So comparing a handgun to a drone is shortsighted. In reality the people are a massive check on the current form of the military.
It's almost like we need a glassdoor for folks who've just interviewed at companies.
I was thinking more about Ruby, Python, or go
* Assuming you are a good coder, your biggest problem will be convincing others of that with neither work experience nor academic credentials. Smart employers won't care, and will ask you to do some small piece of take home work to establish your abilities. Shitty employers will ask you about bigO notation, and silently wonder how you ever tied your own shoe laces every morning without an Ivy League degree (often, I believe, because that's what they went to college to learn).

* Build stuff you can show people.

* Don't get caught up in formal learning systems such as courses, lectures and classes. They are incredibly useful, yes, and certainly you should use them, but many people cling to them because they are easier than actually teaching yourself to code, and provide sense of security and accomplishment. When I point out to people that they haven't been actually coding, I'll often be told, 'well, this is how I learn,' and then they go on to show me how little they did.

* Don't fetishize the libraries and tools you are learning now. You will throw away many toolsets in your life: get used to learning new things as a permanent part of your job. I had one coworker who came through a bootcamp, and he tried just about anything to get us to add jquery to our dependencies, because he'd spent so much effort on it and felt so comfortable with it. He was more comfortable adding the entire jquery module to our app than bothering looking up the argument structure of the already included helper method from lodash: not because he was lazy, but because he was scared of the trouble involve in learning something. Neither you nor he can afford that.
Yeah this is my #1 feature request, and the main reason that a number of companies I've worked for/chatted with have switched to using Phabricator for their code review.
Michael Redmond was talking on the broadcast last night about his childhood and attempting to learn to play Go. He lived in Santa Barbara but nobody near him played Go whatsoever, so he would have to drive hours to L.A. to Koreatown / Japantown when they held tournaments. He also had to regularly fly to NYC to play.

All of the difficulty in finding regular matches is what prompted him to move to Japan and become an 'apprentice' (apologies if this isn't the correct terminology). He eventually became extremely proficient and is a 9-dan player now.

One wonders how good he might have become if he had access to the internet to play against other strong players from a young age. One further wonders how good he might have become if he could play against an AI of Alphago's capability.
"HANDFUL of biologists going rouge"

Rouge? They're positively crimson, darling.
Google Launches HTTPS Transparency Report
Yup! It's been updated to use tmpdir so that isn't an issue anymore
You google the candidate. You find a webpage that matches. It talks about the candidates works for the gay/lesbian alliance. You don't hire the candidate because he sucks. He sues your company, alleging that you discriminated against his gayness.

In the specific case it is probably overblown, but HR fears aren't entirely rational.
It was probably in reaction to the Dear GitHub letter. People were considering migrating away from GitHub and so they got their hands out of their pockets. We all benefit, though, GitHub becomes a better platform for us and they probably become a more successful company.
Code review is something all of us do, but all of us do differently. Anyone know of any nice frameworks, articles, or blog posts for code review? I'm particularly interested in the case where knowledge transfer is a high priority in the code review.

My current side project integrates feedback theory [1], to provide scaffolds and other cues to help and remind reviewers to give high quality feedback. Thus, my interest.

1: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22The+Effects+of+Feedb...
That's a great thought. For my own edification, which third party apps come to mind?

At present, the "official" collaboration tools in the GitHub integrations directory are here: https://github.com/integrations/feature/collaborate
Monitoring the media monitors
The zero admin is coming :)

However being everything simple and open you can write your own implementation and not be locked inside any infrastructure
Bug #1:

Instagram of https://www.podcat.com/people/7IkZED-bobby-lee is assumed to be https://www.instagram.com/BobbyLee/.
It probably won't happen in V1 but yes, it's incoming. We'll be able to pretty much use whatever we want. When wasm was first announced Brendan Eich made this clear, and a lot of the JS-All-The-Things folks who bet their careers on it were upset.

I'm not sure why, if you like JS, people can keep on using JS indefinitely. My theory on programming is to use the language that I prefer, and worry about everything else secondary. For me that's Python. I've mostly avoided any deep dives on learning JS so it'll be nice to be a part of a budding Python web frontend community when the time comes.
Native ads are less likely to be malware vectors no?
NIH means "not invented here", referring to the tendency of some engineers to build their own tools from scratch rather than learn or adapt an off-the-shelf tool. Can't comment on the context as I'm not experienced with these different *xives.
For all the complaining about it, I think I will actually be a little sad to see Javascript go. It wasn't perfect, but it had a powerful unifying effect on the Web Community when we could write, share and learn about our code in a higher-level scripting language that we could all read. (Even if there were some surprising little quirks that took a while to get used to.) Despite the stated intention from WASM - there is just something fundamental about AST trees - no matter how well you pretty-print them - that doesn't allow sharing and shared learning the same way. As a run-of-the-mill guy who makes my bread maintaining websites as much as greenfield-developing them, I feel like I'm in for a bit of a rough ride trying to decipher and debug binary/AST code compiled from Perl (or whatever). Guess I'll have to suck it up and learn to do it, though.
Interesting. I stand corrected, thanks to HN for teaching me something. Contribution margin is only for variable costs, it doesn't cover fixed costs -- so it doesn't mean positive CM goes to free cash flow, only to fixed cost coverage.

Which brings up another interesting point...I'm not sure how companies like this do cost accounting. When running a traditional business, say, a restaurant, variable costs (labor, food inputs) dominate vs. fixed costs. On the other hand, places like Microsoft spend a ton of cash to build a huge fixed asset (Windows) that gets sold to millions of people over time without any depletion, practically the very definition of a "fixed asset".

I wonder how Spoonrocket allocates their platform R&D in unit economics; how they do this will make all the difference in whether their "contribution margin" is in fact, positive, or not.

It's important to realize that even if a business is, strictly speaking, "profitable", it doesn't mean it's a good business. I don't stand on the corner selling newspapers because it's not a valuable use of my time vs. other pursuits, and a comparable argument can be made for use of shareholder capital, too.
"Your degree is not from a good school"

Next time they do that, I hope the candidate says whatever profanities they feel obliged to say to the interviewer's face. And then walks out.

By all means, keep posting + telling your friends about this experience.
Some similar option for enabling patience diffing as well would be amazing. Those two options in combination would certainly make a not insignificant amount of PRs much more readable.
YC and many other incubators provide startups technology incentive programs (Digital Ocean providing $250k credits, Azure providing $500k in credits, etc.). Are any of the hardware startups here utilizing any of the incentive programs? If so, how so? Very interested to hear about cloud strategies, especially as they relate to hardware companies (APIs, IOTs, etc.).
Love this idea, doesn't take a lot of time and I think it's a pretty good measure. Anyone have anything against this?
The problem is, there are no realistic 2-hour, or really even 4-hour, coding projects that faithfully map to on-the-job skill. 2 hours is too long for a data structures riddle, but way, way too short for anything of even a tiny degree of complexity. Let alone writing some unit tests, mocking up a design and then scrapping it for something that makes more sense.

Timed coding tests are just a waste of everyone's time, whether it's a weekend take-home thing, or a 30 minute whiteboard thing, or anything in between. They do not account for individual developers' needs, like privacy, their own editor or IDE, and they exist in this ether between bullshit trivia and an outright working internship that ought to be paid.

The other huge thing is that in a lot of firms (I doubt Digital Ocean is like this, but many firms are) "programming" is a low-status, junior activity. In these companies, if someone asks you to write code in an interview, especially if you are an experienced candidate with a GitHub profile, references, and project experience, then even merely asking you to code is more like saying "dance, monkey, dance" and setting the whole atmosphere of your negotiations and interviews in such a way where you are the lucky low-status person who should be so grateful as to receive a job.

Unless you get a really great cultural feeling from speaking with technical team members first, the best general advice is to simply reject employers who ask you to write code. If they ask you to write code before even speaking with you, absolutely reject. Full stop.

I also think all candidates should fully reject internet-based timed "exams" as well. Things like HackerRank are designed to commoditize software labor, which is a creative design activity and if it even can be commoditized at all, it surely can't be boiled down to data structure trivia that you have to code around in a browser-based IDE with a literal clock ticking down.

Anything like HackerRank immediately screams "quantity not quality" and is straight rejection-worthy, no questions asked.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11289345.
But 'false' isn't a type, it's just a value. The Scala type system doesn't encode boolean values as far as I know (not an expert).
Taking naps in big piles of cash? Heh.. Enterprise-only stuff?
... Or you could use the excellent Bookmark Manager for Chrome, by Google: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bookmark-manager/g...
this happened to me last month ..
I'd say JavaScript instead of a strongly typed client-side interpreter. Or maybe the ability to execute binary blobs that's cross browser compatible (similar to Flash, yeah I know, ActiveScript is essentially JS, or ActiveX) but sand-boxed fully and is open source to be integrated across browsers vs independent development.
You can see them on Amazon if you look for flash drives. A few manufacturers will have really large drives (256GB or more) for ridiculously low prices, along with a 1-star rating and a lot of people claiming they are fakes.

There are plenty of legit companies selling devices that are legitimately those sizes, but you will pay a lot for them.

Of course, since flash media prices seem to drop by 25% or more every year, it won't be long before there are real devices at the prices of those fake ones mentioned above.
I think the biggest thing I want is pagination for extremely large commits. Any ideas if that's gonna happen?
> "Is anyone working on a Go to WebAssembly compiler yet?"

I don't think that'll work until WebAssembly has GC, which isn't likely to be ready for a while.