skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the past few years I've increasingly started thinking that 'free' can be pathological.

The problem is that it's a lie. Everything takes effort to produce. Nothing is actually free. Sure you can give something away-- that's a gift. But it's not free.

Sometimes it's okay if the person or entity releasing something for free is intentional about that: "I'm going to do this because I feel like it and I expect nothing (tangible) in return" or the corporate equivalent of "we are going to make this free because it's part of our strategy or because we have nothing to lose by doing so."

Then you get one of two scenarios:

(1) The original honest intent was to make X free but now it's getting so much attention that it's becoming demanding. Now the person or entity releasing X has a choice between a number of bad options: keep it free and continue to sink time/money into it, abandon it, change its status to non-free, or find some indirect way to monetize it.

(2) "Free" was a lie from the get-go. It was just a growth hack, a gimmick. The intent was always to find some way to "flip the switch" and monetize.

The difference between these two scenarios is the original intent, but the end result is often quite similar.

Abandonment is always an option (at least with scenario #1), and that's how a lot of free things end up after the burnout sets in. But if abandonment isn't an option you're basically faced with the choice between making something non-free and indirectly monetizing it.

Revoking free status is unpopular and will probably lose you a lot of users. The strong temptation, especially given the success of this model, is indirect monetization.

That's where things get pathological. Indirect monetization means ads and surveillance, and on a bidirectional medium like the Internet ads basically mean surveillance. You're turning your users into a product and selling them out.

Unfortunately we've raised a generation to believe that "all information should be free, man!" This is leading us directly down a terribly Orwellian path-- to make the free lie work, vendors have to treat the user as a product.
Just like you need to be a licensed hotel operator to rent out rooms?
I think the concern may be that the total space of hashes for valid email addresses, especially ranked by domain usage, is small enough that SHA hashing doesn't meaningfully obscure content.

From the article:

Hash It!

The first instinct is often just to hash the contact information before sending it to the server. If the server has the SHA256 hash of every registered user, it can just check to see if those match any of the SHA256 hashes of contacts transmitted by a client.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work because the “preimage space” (the set of all possible hash inputs) is small enough to easily calculate a map of all possible hash inputs to hash outputs. There are only roughly 10^10 phone numbers, and while the set of all possible email addresses is less finite, it’s still not terribly great. Inverting these hashes is basically a straightforward dictionary attack. It’s not possible to “salt” the hashes, either (they always have to match), which makes building rainbow tables possible.
When asm.js came out I ported http://wry.me/hacking/Turing-Drawings to use it. It would've made as much performance sense to do the same for WebAssembly. This is not quite the same as hand-coding WebAssembly -- it's making a custom code generator for a little language.
Awesome work! Feature request: swipe through pages of recommend podcasts on the front page (would be especially sweet on mobile).
To support this wouldn't you have to encode in the language spec the exact set of constant folding optimisations applied? Just 'false' is a trivial example, but maybe your compiler can see that 'true && false' is false, but mine can't? What about if the expression is some massive operation that could theoretically be found to be constant, but no real compiler is actually going to do that.

You'd have different compilers determining different types based on optimisation which are supposed to be transparent. Doesn't seem desirable to me.
It's worth listening to the audio to hear how surprised David is with this blunt charge. Clearly unexpected.

Also: parallel construction (i.e.: the NSA doesn't want to reveal it has already done this)
The best option is to get warm introductions and develop relationships early. Getting people to hear about your product, give you feedback and feel invested before you launch is critical.

However, that's not always possible. If you're scrambling and haven't had time to do that, you can always reach out blind or use services/agencies to help. There's a YC company called PRX that helps with this and does it at a very affordable price. Another cool site that was on Product Hunt recently ranked a bunch of media outlets - http://presshour.co/?ref=producthunt. Lastly, take a look at your competition and who covered them - those are probably your best targets.
That is one weird, buggy application. Maybe one of the EIR's can help redesign it.
I agreed with your points until the last. :( Assumption of good intentions on the part of all comments usually produces a more productive discussion.
I've lots of embedded linux experience. It's less consumerist products but more embedded systems experience.

Where do I find people's problems to solve that can be addressed by HW?
Could this be true? Can Facebook really 'predict' future events?
Feathers 2.0: A minimalist real-time framework for tomorrow’s apps
The argument has the exact same form as the advice "don't talk to the police without a lawyer", and for the laws that support this protocol (right to silence/counsel). That is,

"I don't trust you to be an impartial seeker of the truth who's 'only' concerned with solving this murder rather than railroading me on random charges, therefore I will not answer even simple questions that you deem necessary to conduct your investigation."

(With that said, I really, really don't like the whole "don't talk to police" circlej---, like how it gets overapplied or dangerously applied ... but within a very narrow interpretation it's correct and well accepted enough to carry the implications over here.)

Edit: Correspondingly, the advice would carry a lot less weight in counties with a much better government that actually could be trusted not to look for petty reasons to arrest people. And so a government that prices itself a better steward of privacy could be trusted with key escrow.
No, it is pretty bog-standard analysis.

Over the long term, this is necessary but not sufficient to build a business line that makes sense. You also have to control all the other costs... which can be difficult if your business model requires large scale growth.
I guess it's almost as remarkable as the number of people in the USA who actually get killed by police.
Build a really great product! We envision improved versions of the shower, and after that other products that use water in the home. The product development cycle is realistically 18-24 before you get something to market, so it is a long timeline.
I replaced it myself. Actually, I didn't bother to ask Dell for support ;-)

Regarding their general commitment to linux support: frankly, I don't know. Everything just worked out of the box (besides the Broadcom WIFI, which gave me a hard time), so I have not spent much time to investigate this further.
It boggles my mind, with the understanding and technology we have, that we have not leveraged our entire world economy to the single goal of establishing human colonies off world and sending generation ships to nearby stars.

It is the single most beneficial act to the survival likelihood of the human species that seems available to us.
Open source it is a substantial investment of time and energy in my opinion.

Some products will just not have a big developer community behind it also.

But again, online community is one of the biggest defense as a company and I definitely software should be a focus in most IoT companies.
>The fact that so many employers treat candidates like this tells me that the whole "it's hard to find good developers" line is a lie.

That is correct. The market is so flooded with workers that ageism is easily affordable.

You can keep trying if you want but the suggestion "it will all work out if you just try harder because the system is ultimately rational" is inaccurate and unproductive. If you glance around the work place and count the percentage of people 10 years older than you, you can guesstimate the odds of continued employment.

dfraser992 advice is, unfortunately, they way the world really works: neither ageism nor the flood of workers is going to be widely admitted to let alone addressed in the foreseeable future.
16,000 Unique Private Jet Routes Visualized
Great hardware has the tradeoff of being "built to last" but then not re-engaging the customer for new purchases for quite some time. How do you think about re-engaging customers who purchase a Nebia shower?
I recommend doing as much as you can to automate and scale your outreach to the press. I recommend Pitchbox.com for this - it's a sort of CRM for press outreach. It takes some time to set up, but it's worth it. Great support, too.
Top Investor Tuesday – Edtech
About 6 hours of heavy use.
Thanks, I tried to differentiate between hosts and guests early on but there are too many false positives so I switched verbiage. Working on this though!
I think his point was that accelerators have the same problems: it used to be that 18 month's ago's accelerator is obsoleted by today's due to Moore's law. This is no longer true, so todays accelerator is as good as the next iteration. Of course, I guess what you mean though, is that the future is in developing different, new accelerators for specific niches. So your future compute system is modular, with an accelerator module bus, and plugged into it cards for managing graphics, physics, fluid dynamics, I/O, crypto and so on. You could build a system tailored to your workload...
Is it a good idea to sell your first small batch of functional prototypes as-is while still in the market research stage to get user feedback?
Most important is to deliver our product (both hardware and food). However, we'll also be able to run some testing on our website to see what content/messaging/copy converts best into additional pre-sales.

We (Tovala) will also be hiring for some software, operations and food roles :)
Fun gizmo Andrew! So much cleaner than the one I wrote that pretends it is an animated GIF. Next up you'll want some sort of reflection UI so that user's can mouse over the graph and have it pop up the values from the colors at that point (that feature is in most (if not all) of the plot packages out there. It does look a lot easier to just plop in and go for simple live displays, excellent work.
Check out the common part libraries released by Octopart / Seeed , and consider getting a resistor / cap library from your neighbors at Adafruit. Hackerspaces can be good resources for spare parts (and finding potential partners).

You're in luck: prototyping is mostly software:)
Great hardware has the implicit trade-off of being "built to last" and consequently not requiring the customer to upgrade the product for quite sometime. How do you think about re-engaging customers in the short to medium term?
A hardware cofounder :D
> Free content entitlement, that’s what.

From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen. Sure, everyone still pays for the bytes, but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.

Want to communicate quickly and cheaply, without paying for stamps or surcharges for expedited delivery? E-mail.

Can't find a publisher willing to take a golden-master and create thousands of CD-ROMs? Sell your own software online.

> This sounds sober and serious, but it omits one crucial clause: the people who create free online content expect to get paid.

The real issue is that there are middlemen who promise "I will convert your consumer-visits to cash" that also expect to be paid. Many happen to be ad-networks, and the profit motive (both from producers and middlemen) has led towards practices that harm consumers and (indirectly, long-term) the producers.

Privacy invaded, malware distributed, computers slowed, load-times skyrocketing, etc. Absent a reaction from producers or consumers, the most-ruthless ad-schemes tend to rake the most profit, so it becomes a race-to-the-bottom.

In this sense, consumer-driven ad-blocking is ecologically-necessary to make that "Visitors-To-Cash" industry refocus on other mechanisms and better ways of interacting with their two main stakeholder groups. In a very broad sense, it's their job to find a better solution.
Well, you'll need a garbage collector anyway, and with AOT compilation it would have to be conservative (which isn't that much of an issue, but precise collectors are generally a little more efficient).

The problem is that you can't fully trust your type inference. JIT compilers can get away with this because they can escape to the interpreter if a type check fails. With an AOT compiler you can optimize for your inferred type but you still always have to include complete code for the slow path too. At that point 80%+ of your instruction cache is gonna be probably-unused code. You can never eliminate as many type checks as a tracing or block versioning JIT.

TypeScript doesn't help either:

function foo(a: int, b: int) { return a + b; }
window['fo' + String.fromCharCode(111)]('nice ', 'try);

Whoops. TypeScript is (intentionally) unsound, which doesn't help your compilation much.

If AOT compilation were a way to get JavaScript faster than V8, V8 would compile ahead-of-time (well, it would probably compile in the background and use an interpreter on first load, but you get the idea).

asm.js is a different since it is strongly typed and explicitly controls memory layout. It's not JavaScript from the perspective of implementation.
Most cyrillic-writing countries have both a "typewriter" and "phonetic" keyboard variants. The typewriter one is a direct translation from the layout used on typewriters, which usually is well thought out. The phonetic one just assigns keys to their phonetic latin equivalents or when there's no equivalent, to a letter that kind of looks like it, or is just free. Since cyrillic has more letters than latin, you lose the `, [, and ] keys (at least in Bulgarian phonetic). All keyboards sold here have two letters on each key - one for the US layout and one for the typewriter layout. And still the majority of people prefer to just use the phonetic layout simply because it works with their existing muscle memory. For a while the most popular Windows 95 and XP program was FlexType - it let you type cyrillic letters using the phonetic layout back when Windows only had the typewriter layout available.
Not really, but we have added a scan_endpoint method which not only checks the uri signature but does a GET request and checks the body of response too.
I'm currently porting the linked outlier detection system to Mantis at Netflix and I could not be more excited about the things this platform enables. It provides a platform on which I can run analytical code, scale it, add new data sources. I think about as little ops as possible, I'm now monitoring jobs instead of services, my code base is even more focused on the analytical task and not supporting infrastructure.

Rx* is a great paradigm for data applications, something I feel is a serious advantage over similar software like Samza. Their choice to use the JVM has allowed me to write analytics in Scala, and I've been mulling over the idea of writing Clojure on top of Mantis as well but not having a use case is stopping me.

I have for some time been pushing to have the opportunity to move more of my products onto this platform internally at Netflix.

Cheers Ben, Chris, Neeraj, Nick, Sharma, and Justin!
Depends on what you are trying to prove. If there are questions as to whether people will pay for your product, then yes, proving that that is the case with a functional prototype will go a long ways. If, however, you are trying to get feedback, build up brand evangelists and learn, then selling your prototype is not hugely important.
DevOps + Microservices = Software Delivery Nirvana
It's C++ first as a convenience, since LLVM is best at C++ and emscripten w/asm is a solid benchmark. It is NOT primarily about C++ just because that's the v1.

https://github.com/WebAssembly/design/blob/master/FAQ.md#whi...
The guy who wants to get you ignored due to potential competition is not likely to frankly admit that you are better. He will have some excuse, like you didn't use enough design patterns.
I like feathers! It's awesome framework for building microservices for me.
Let's chat again about it when oil reaches $100 again
I'm not sure about the percentage but it's about 50k podcasts.
Watch the recent coreos post/video, the CTO is probably a smart and nice guy but he looks about 16.
> Even if you're appending lines to a text-file, if you do it from multiple concurrent threads, you're going to potentially corrupt individual lines.

Not true; the write(2) syscall is atomic. You just have put the the entire line in the buffer you pass to it.
Now Lyft drivers need not own a car: Lyft and GM start short-term rental program
That was exactly my thought as well. Who else is just going to send e-mails to random people from Github repositories?
Lenovo Startpage Pushed Angler
Hell yeah! You'll learn tons especially what you should build and refine about the product!
We decided to give everyone a laptop so hopefully we just need to hand her the wifi password and she can enjoy the unboxing and new laptop smell!

Great idea on giving an industry/market intro! I was also thinking of trying to give a large overview on a whiteboard of the architecture of the entire system then slowly cover each area so she has an understanding of how her pieces will interact with everything else.

Do you feel it's important to have a production-running commit (no matter how small) in the first week to start feeling ownership?
Great question. With Tovala, our model is a little different. We anticipate most of our customers will order our meal delivery service - and be delighted by the experience and taste. That'll give us a touch point to our customers throughout the life of their smart oven.
terrorists and lone wackos may both engage in mass shootings, but their threat profiles are different[1].

The San Bernandino shooters fit the 'terrorist' threat profile; Dylan Roof, et al., fit the profile of 'lone wacko'.

[1]http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6943
How to Speed Up Your Life and Business at the Speed of Light
I'd start with thinking about things you deal with as a consumer and have problems with. After that, start asking other people about their experience with the same problem/issue.
>>Would it eventually permit library sharing between, say, a Python runtime compiled to WebAsembly and JavaScript in the browser?

The hard part there is the "eventually". They do state that the missing pieces will come some time after the
"Minimum Viable Product", but none of it sounds high priority.

- The current course omits features that would be needed for any dynamically typed language (including Python) to work. (garbage collectors, polymorphic inline cache, etc)

- The current course also prevents anything running in the WebAssembly space from accessing the DOM. You can call your WebAssembly from javascript, but that's it.

I suspect it will be quite a while before there's more available than "call LLVM created libraries from javascript". Technically, you could, I suppose put the entire cpython codebase into webassembly, but that seems like more of parlor trick than something useful.
Google Faces Challenges in Encrypting Android Phones
One of the non-breakout members of the on demand food delivery space dies as capital consolidates towards winners and we're in for an apocalypse? We VERY well may be in for one but I don't think this is a strong sign of that.
I imagine there's a Venn diagram of overlap between what a nutjob thinks is worth hiding and what would be of interest to law enforcement organisations. For example I doubt many of these extremists would both trying to hide information that could be used for psychological profiling of future attackers
I find that while I love the variation of keyboard layouts and keyboard types, what really slows me down in the composition. I'm trying to say that for me the real bottleneck is having something to say rather the speed of getting it out.
Thanks. Already tried pitchbox. Did you sent the whole story in the first reach-out or how much information do you recommend to send the first time?
Oops. I accidentally downvoted you by mistake, there's no way to undo that. I mostly agree with you actually! Except we shouldn't devote all our resources to it. Actually about 1-2% of our resources would be enough. Currently we expend less than 0.1% or so of global resources to space exploration (not just Mars). A tenfold or twentyfold increase would make a really big improvement there, enough to establish a foothold and grow.
You can already do some of that without the dynamic linking feature. There is a JS API to instantiate a WebAssembly module, providing JS functions that are callable as external functions from within the WASM module. Conversely the WASM module exports functions that are callable directly from JS.

This allows rudimentary interop between JS and WASM, and dynamic linking will make it possible to deliver your WASM application in separate pieces, e.g. a large, rarely-changing library that is cached, precompiled, by the browser, and a small, often-changing application piece.
It boggles my mind, with the understanding and technology we have, that we have not leveraged our entire world economy to the single goal of eradicating poverty of the world.
Define "make profit from the users attention". Would HN have to charge? It's certainly a valuable resource for YC, even if the profit is indirect. What about Wikipedia? Do donations count as profit? Should search engines have to charge?

By the way, you'd be destroying a whole lot of community-driven sites that charge for certain extra perks to keep the lights on.
Sprig (pricey + limited selection), Bento (very limited selection), HealthyOut (super generic and not enough relavent results), Thistle (very limited selection).
My only complaint is that the PDF is formatted for print and uses typographic ligatures. To me, HTML-first makes sense for anything intended for widespread digital sharing. Reflowing and screen reading text are minimum design accommodations for a large number of people because of physical or hardware limitations.

Or to put it another way, I think that over the long run, such features are more important than the license because there are non-technical work arounds for the license that don't require duplicated effort.
Thank you, will check that out! Did you sent the whole story in the first reach-out or how much information do you recommend to send the first time?
What is your approach to low-volume prototyping? Do you use same components for prototypes that you intend for volume manufacturing? How do you source them? (for example LCD panels, where there seems to be nothing in the intersection of "long-time available", "available in unit quantities", "available in bulk" and "reasonable quality")

And another question for the business side of things: where is the line for consumer products that are not meaningful to crowdfund? niche-ness? complexity of installation? does it make sense to crowdfund what is essentially an B2B product?