skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honestly, the only stroke of genius at Nest wasn't the self-learning aspect of the thermostat, or the fact you could set pre-programmed times, or control it from your phone. There had been other products on the market that did this, albeit somewhat poorly.

I'm convinced it was the industrial design, of making something that normally is a beige box sexy and nice to look at. Something you put on your wall, that is a necessity is now a piece of high-tech artwork that you can admire.

This is evidenced by the fact their smoke alarms, if their "connected home" story were to hold true, haven't done nearly as well. People could care less if their smoke alarms are smart, because you rarely look at your ceiling. You often see your thermostat every day, with most being located on the wall when you walk into your house or apartment.

Evidence: I have many non-tech friends and family who own a nest. They do not use any of the advanced features, maybe rarely. They all say the same thing: they bought it because it looked cool and wanted a "finishing touch" on their house. Maybe did so after a kitchen remodel or something else they did to their house, indicating it was more an emotional purchase fueled by aesthetics and ego.

Based upon this, it is now unsurprising the hype hasn't scaled. The business was kind of a one hit wonder and it's not shocking the company is floundering.
Apply HN: GriditX – real time live event fan engagement mobile platform
If you're overwhelmed with apps today, fear not, you are not the only one.

Our philosophy is that there are simply too many applications for events. From music discovery, to professional conferences, to sports; all have their respective apps to serve its purpose.

What if we hyper-increased the value of the app to enhance the fan experience though? What if we allowed fans to cross platform message other fans, regardless of social network? Instead of you responding to your event-app, what if our platform dynamically responds to you and your experience in real time?

At a music event - launch GriditX to load hyper relevant information about the event, be able to connect and message other fans, and be able to access event exclusive items for purchase or sharing. At a Sport event? GriditX will respond to you, your experience and instantly load what you're experiencing on our mobile platform...

This is precisely what we're building here at GriditX - a dynamic mobile platform that caters to the fan experience at live events in real time.

Initially, we're targeting live music events and focused on helping low-tiered artists build their fanbase; we want to use technological know how to improve the lives of artists who have been negatively impacted by the rise of streaming music services. In a nutshell, streaming music services (Spotify, Youtube, Apple Music) simply do not pay, live music events do. There's a negative correlation of the rise of streaming services to artist income (especially the hundreds of thousands of independent artists).

We'll be revolutionizing live events, and we hope we're considered for YC!

Ask us anything!
I did macro tracking a couple of years. At the end, "listening to your body" is just a unconscious way to track macros.
I dearly hope they aren't "cautious" about enjoying beer and pizza. It's a perfectly normal thing to have at an event for adults.
Isn't this just outsourcing the "hard work" that is writing?

I mean plenty of authors do voice transcription to build the core of their books - the hard work part is all the stuff that is #3-9 on the list of what they did.

Seems like the advice he gave in the beginning was right, and that he just added more overhead to writing a book. Or said another way, made a process for people who don't want to put the time/effort into the book creation process a way to get a book published with a lot more moving pieces.

I'm not really seeing the innovation here outside of just making a service.
I do not understand your reply; Lorem ipsum text is tangentially related to Cicero, but he's Roman, not Greek.
This is the second case in a week involving the Seattle PD raiding an exit node operator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11431128
If I was in that situation, I'd sit on the floor.
In the old days IE had a feature for saving pages for offline reading that would ask you how deep to recursively traverse. It was considered hilarious to set it for 99 on the school dialup connection.
I'm really disappointed about what they did with Dropcam. The dropcam was such a great product that Nest basically destroyed by pushing out the core team, making the product worse (but hey, it's slimmer), and stagnating development. I believe we are missing out on great things that would've happened if Dropcam had stayed independent.
The best VC firms do make that in their best years. VC is a strange field in that the winners have outsize performance, while the rest fight to break even. Unlike Mutual Funds and most hedge funds, the performance of top VCs persist over time too. Remember that this is a field that disproportionately rewards the winners. (Look at Google's early investors making 1000x [0])

The 40% isn't what investors see. Take away 2% per year for expenses and 20% of the upside and you're down to 30% for investors.

[0]https://www.quora.com/How-many-shares-did-Andreas-von-Bechto...
Seem that the author of the article is comparing information dense interfaces with those that aren't. Not really a fair comparison.

Of course they look 'messier', in as much as there's more on the screen. People use spreadsheets --yes, in 2016!--because they're the best way to see some types of data, even if the interface is horrid and outmoded.
The final results are public information via UTIMCO, so no backdoor calculations are necessary: https://www.scribd.com/doc/277150709/UTIMCO-PrivateMarkets

UTIMCO invested $22.25m and was returned $280m in cash with $33m still active in investments, resulting in a cash-on-cash return of 12.57x and a 66.7% IRR (after fees).

Overall fund size was $125m, so $1.57b cash-on-cash returns for the fund after fees, assuming no LP tiered returns
> 1) Fingerprints are left everywhere anyway. You aren't going to be able to hide these.

Most people don't leave their name/address/uid along side those prints. Imagine this scenario: you are hanging out at your friend's house, for whatever reason you find yourself handling his dildo, he sells it on ebay, 4chan buys it and lifts your prints, your mother gets a call...
Yah, Apple had NFC first! And large screens! And pressure, temperature sensors! And GPS! And a native API!

Their competitors have useless features like replaceable batteries, expandable storage, AMOLED screens, waterproofing, non proprietary headphones, multiple app marketplaces, and a wide variety of choices.
English, an official language, and British culture are still pretty strong in HK though declining. Still, I get your point. I live in China and I while I don't work remotely, I just don't interact with the expat community. It's much easier if you have local friends and co-workers. I can't imagine being here as a remote worker -- China can feel pretty isolating. I just find your reference to HK odd because I go there when I don't want to feel isolated/alienated. HK is an extremely "western culture" place.
Can any practitioners / experts out there comment on the range of topics? For example, I understand the book to be introductory, and so the scope is likely somewhat limited. But how close does it get you to the ANNs currently in use, at least conceptually if not in complete detail? Thanks!
Can't believe this "don't have time to write a book. Hey, I had a brilliant idea you can dictate and outsource the rest, we are entrepreneurs!" is in the front page (or anywhere) in HN.
If you like the idea of making music by "drawing" it like this, and you have access to a Windows Machine, I'd recommend playing with FLStudio. With other DAWs I've found that it is more difficult to make music with just a mouse, not requiring real instruments, microphones and (maybe multiple) MIDI controllers.

I've been a Mac user for almost ten years now, but the lack of FLStudio for OSX makes me question that decision every six months or so.
Some cities (Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York, New Orleans, etc) have licensing and testing requirements for tour guides. Will you verify tour guides are licensed, if required? Exclude those cities? Disrupt?
Making ones dance music sound loud and biting rather than lethargic and boring requires deep wizardry which lisp alone cannot provide.
The HTML source contains this:

<!-- Created by pdf2htmlEX (https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlex) -->
>>> avoid planning macros contrary to your appetite signals

This. Same for planning ahead gym workouts.
Very late, but I just got an email from the 1Password gang. They've also adopted a subscription model, with the key difference being that it's 100% optional. The free version still gets you a completely usable product complete with syncing through iCloud, Dropbox, etc.

For about the same annual fee (actually less because 1Password gives you a permanent upgrade discount), I can share Netflix passwords with my kids and bank passwords with my wife. That's tremendously more valuable than the possibility of sharing a email signature snippet with her, and 1Password didn't gut their app to force upgrades on anyone.

Two companies launch subscription plans, for the same price, at the same time. One is universally praised and the other widely trounced. Some b-schooler will be writing a compare-and-contrast case study on this in the very near future.
i'm sure what you said applies to me as well, but i also procrastinate more when i'm tired, which only compounds the problems.
It's amazing to me that he designed a program (METAFONT) to design fonts for him, and that the various outputs of this program actually are pretty good fonts.
In my case too. I guess it is related to the wkhtmltopdf version and the woff fonts.
SPD. What a bunch of Barney Fifes.
This is the correct answer. You could certainly make a better product (including betterinterface) but that's not enough to beat Craigslist.
> As close to its natural form as possible is invariably best.

The problem is that these simplifications and generalizations are invariably broken. According to this, for example, raw meat should be better than cooked meat.
Sugar free for almost two years now and I avoid it like the plague. Really glad to see more and more articles like these.

All the naysayers should continue to eat sugar, and let nature do it's "thing".
Any possibilities for part-time?
I'm pretty sure you can use only public interfaces to implement this subsystem. You can do quite a lot to NT via the public interfaces, and it helps that the stuff in the linux subsystem basically only needs to work with itself (i.e. you don't need to send signals to Windows processes... but even if you needed to, you could use public interfaces to do that from the kernel...)
The Blockchain Application Stack
nvi? https://sites.google.com/a/bostic.com/keithbostic/vi/

Sure it doesn't have the features of Vim or Emacs (and some would say that's a feature!), but it's perfectly serviceable if you're okay with vi's modality.
Startup Funding Deals Fall to Lowest Level in Four Years
Lost Cities VR is here, and what a journey it's been
I've used mine in a similar fashion on many occasions. However, I have more of a death-grip on it, where I rest it over my forearm horizontally, and grab the right side of the base with my left hand.
I have, they didn't give me a red cent after firing me. Also the majority of people in this world have trouble eating day to day. I could probably live the rest of my life on less than a million and never have to work again, so I don't really feel a whole lot of pity for a guy that I don't know, getting paid more than the vast majority will make in a life time simply because he was fired.
And coincidentally, the person has the same name!
What are the differences between Taza and any of the other messaging platforms?

If anything it is less secure because your traffic isn't mixed in with everyone else's.

If you are using Taza and I'm a government, then all I have to do to get real time tracking, that can include locational data, is get phone companies to send me all the metadata on phones that emit this type of message/packet.

This is making tracking easier, not harder.
For certain kinds of site this look could be a positive - thinking of Pirate Bay, 4chan etc. Not the sort of things that get VC funding granted, but where a non-corporate, amateurish design gains you street cred.
All you've really written here is that you want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, but then you jump to happily taking MathML because it already exists in some places. None of that addresses the critiques of MathML as a bad standard, one that fits poorly with the layout and display of the rest of the web.

The author here is saying we want a spec and support for properly displaying math content in the browser, so let's make a sane spec that works with the way the web works, not as if it's in an embedded foreign object viewer.

SVG is actually a great parallel In many instances it is easy to write by hand, until you go to any level of moderate complexity and hit the brick wall of SVG's usability. And that's when you wish it had a sane design, because there are a few aspects that are quite close.
>>> 'real food' is a term that means nothing.

Please see my post above.

>>> you're simplifying to the point where you aren't any help at all.

Completely possible. It has helped me tremendously though.
Meta, the lack of https and the outdated copyright is a bit embarrassing imo.
That may be precisely the intended strategy, here. :(
"That's all it is, tbh, without resorting to hyperbole. This happens even in capitalist economies -- companies have little incentive for maintenance at the best of times."

Have you actually looked at the maintenance budget of US utility companies?
I don't get it. What is the point of a breach like this?
Blender had an interface that was, to some people, very messy, but other very experienced, knowledgeable users fought tooth and claw to keep it - and ultimately lost. The changes were performed, and, after a while, ~everyone was happy.
These kinds of interfaces get some effort to get used to, and afterwards, you learn to love their quirks and don't want them to change. New ones get added / moved / removed organically through the life of the software, so the user and the UI change together. And all of that creates an emotional attachement.
Yeah, but if they've got a patent on using a knob on a thermostat, and changing it remotely, and getting power from the wall. It's pretty hard to produce a competing product that doesn't infringe.
Guess you missed something.
"The second group was graded on only the total number of pounds of clay they threw."
Toronto proposes different rules for taxis, Uber drivers
The UK had a strong Amiga magazine contingent, probably around a dozen mainstream titles with respectable sales figures. Every newsagent would have at least four or five titles on their shelves.

Those magazines lived on top of a flourishing ecosystem of businesses, everything from Amiga hardware sellers to public domain software distributors.

It was a system just waiting for Commodore (and their replacements) to utter anything useful. It was so disappointing to watch each owner screw up and see different parts of that ecosystem fail one at a time.
I recently got a pair of headphones and downloaded some podcasts. Listening to something has helped make the commute smoother. It's still not as ideal as I'd like.
Apply HN: DAYS, One exceptional product a day
DAYS is an (iOS) app that features one exceptional product in women’s luxury fashion, every day.

--PROBLEM--

The problem here is that the fashion world is now moving at an unsustainable pace: with hundreds of new products released online weekly, the constant churn has left consumers and aficionados overwhelmed and unable to keep up.

--SOLUTION--

We believe that this situation has left our audience wanting for a more personal, curated experience: one that brings back the magic in fashion and adapts to your life, not the other way around.

This is where DAYS comes in: by narrowing down the best thirty products each month from thousands of new releases, we are able to present a collection of the most thoughtful, intriguing and well crafted products in fashion, all this only a tap away.

You can think of DAYS as a crossover between 1) a digital fashion "magazine", becoming part of your daily entertainment routine, and 2) a shopping edit/catalog: inspiring and influencing your next buy.

--TEAM--

You might remember us from our previous idea, Skyler, the fashion weather app, and our (failed) subsequent attempts to save it and ourselves: PepperPrank (Send your enemies pepper through the mail) and AskJemima: ask Jemima, our virtual psychic, a question for $1).

Me (Olivier) and Henrry have been working together for almost two years now (the last 6 months from two different continents) so I can confidently say that we have a really solid team: neither of us are going anywhere until we make this work.
We operate like this: Henrry is our fashion editor and I design and develop the app.

We just launched our app two days ago in the App Store (iOS only for now) so you can check it out there: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1097827734

Ask us anything!
--Olivier
What's your business model?

Currently, hosting fees. We pay 3€/month and charge 10€ per 10GB instance. That could change and expand, though.

Will you be open sourcing the backend server?

Not initially but I'm very open to the idea. I think it would remedy a lot of the concerns voiced so far in this thread.

Why would anyone want to us this over the plethora of other choices for a persistent storage layer?

Someone else above wrote, "Everyone wants a faster, lighter, more energy efficient, and reliable car, am I right?" indicating that everyone would want it but doubting that it can launch. If you're using MySQL, Postgres or SQL Server as your database right now, you would be hurting your project to not change. To pick just two features, Schema-on-Need allows you to extend and expand according to the data, not your pre-conceived notion of how the data is structured, and the query language, which leads me to the next question:

Honestly, your example syntax doesn't look that appealing.

Maybe, to you. Here's the thing I'd like you to consider: it's not about you. The majority of users that we've talked to who don't know SQL find it easier to work with. The bigger reason still is that it maps nicely to BI tools. The key here is that we need to open up data access to more non-experts.

Who's the target user for a new system like this, why would they use it, and why would they pay you?

Target user: SME, startup currently using a relational database

Why would they use it: "Everyone wants a faster, lighter, more energy efficient, and reliable car, am I right?" (The longer answer is in that same paragraph above.)

Why would they pay: Because it pays. It gives them the features they want and at the same time saves them money. It can cost a startup several thousand every month to run a SQL Server Azure instance, for example, that would cost less than 50 with Brodlist, with more features.
How to run for office using the internet
That's a great way to do it. There's so many benefits to intermittent fasting. Research shows it can: reduce oxidive stress on DNA, thus reducing Cancer. Plus it helps you eat fewer calories in a day. It reduces inflamation. It reduces the chance of type 2 diabetes. It even helps you produce BDNF which reduces the chance of mental disorders like parkinsons! Plus many more benefits, too many to list here...

Right now, alot of dieticiens are still behind the research, but they're slowly getting caught up.

Even the new york times published an article admitting that breakfast was not the most important meal of the day. they showed metastudies that showed there was absolutely NO evidence that showed breakfast was better for your health (other than some correlation based studies). It's time to jetison breakfast and live as our ancestors lived - the way we evolved to live. Nobody back then ate 3 meals a day - this is a new phenomenon started recently within the last several hundred years. the roman army conquered all of europe on just 1 meal a day: called lunch, and they got more excercise than any of us. And before that, people ate infrequently because the food supply was so unstable, often going for days without food.
Yes, and I am saying that when you do get to Bill Gate's money, you will have other problems to deal with.

Never being able to go anywhere spontaneous without your security guards. Everyone looking to take your money. Having to watch your words in everything you say because you are being filmed by strangers 24/7. Can't walk into a coffee shop without being recognized and hassled for a selfie cause some vain dude/girl wants to show off to his friends and get social network "likes". Etc.

The only way to get away from all those problems is probably to buy a private island, build a big house, and trap yourself inside. Which a lot of wealthy people kind of do in one way or another.
Using docker means that you don't have to install any of these dependencies on your computer, and, if it's setup correctly, it runs sandboxes from the rest of my system. So it's not just about the "overhead".
I time-travelled 100 years in China
So excited it moved to github and away from SourceForge

By far my go to app for downloading anything. aria2c [link] downloads anything and is also the fastest bit torrent app I have ever used.

EDIT: I also use aria2c for the backend of my Arch Linux package manager pacman. Gives me multiple of connections per host and speeds up updates by at least two folds. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=192072

2nd EDIT: Windows works but I have had better luck with uGet portable app for Windows.

http://ugetdm.com/downloads-windows
> I hear that Europeans are lean compared to North Americans)

A lot of them [us] are catching up, especially in the UK, where the diet has been Americanized.
I believe education is a commodity market. Sales happen in bulk and large sales via public bids, government allocations, and lobbying. I suspect that in the first world, textbook companies are likely to be harder competitors than Wolfram Research: the market is a finite pie and the businesses are relatively low margin.

I don't think the technical challenge of building a symbolic algebra problem changes much with two cofounders, i.e. if there was a business person one person would still be writing all the code. Which is to say, developing a symbolic algebra package is audacious no matter how it gets sliced.

The solo founder challenges are not so much technical as social and psychological. The educational angle means piling the study of pedagogical research and analysis of pedagogical methods on top of all the business stuff. Because middle school age children are minors it also means it's going to be hard to get direct access to end users, comply with privacy laws, and separate willing use from mandated use.