skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apply HN: Programmable ToDo List
We are a manufacturing product company, and we have developed an internal web based software for managing our day to day tasks. After some refinements we would like to publish it for general use.

Features of a programmable task list includes, which we already have implemented.

* you can define a process as a set of task to do. A task from the process definition automatically added to the main task list once its previous task gets completed.
* A process can have another process as task.
* Process supports conditional repeats.
* Starting of Process Automatically every Month or Day or Hour is supported.
* Estimated time to complete a running process based on current completed tasks and remaining task is possible.

-----

Features we eventually going to add..( Very quickly if this Apply HN goes as planned. :) )

* Enable each task/process to emits/save data on to which you can run your analysis, later on.
* Starting of Process from external event.
* Use emitted data of task or process to create document based on templates.
* This Data can also be queried in to task to show dynamic information.
* For a complex task, add "How to?" to the task. "How to?" is a document with sets of images, videos and texts to show the user how to do that particular task.
* Add App Store : App is a group of processes. You can install, remove, update or modify installed version of it to suits your need. You can also publish App which may be installed by other users.

-----

The key idea to this product is, from very simple small process and tasks, you can create a very complex workflow. From user perspective, the software completely hides the workflow complexity by giving them a simple single task to do at a time, along with "How to?" when they need it. We have not publish it, as this is an internal app to the company. Eventually we would make this as a independent product to be used by many.
Apply HN: AirLoop – free digital loyalty platform
AirLoop (www.getairloop.com) is a fully customizable digital loyalty platform that provides the tools you need to optimize and enhance your customer engagement, to create repeat business and increase revenue.

We are on a mission to change the way our merchant partners think about customer loyalty and customer engagement. We help you understand and influence your customers, and help you turn every single customer interaction into an enduring relationship.

Our digital loyalty program is free-forever, which allows any business to download our tablet app, purchase a stand and start offering a sophisticated loyalty and rewards program to their customers. With our sophisticated dashboard, the merchants can analyze the customer data that they capture and optimize their loyalty program accordingly.

The merchant only pays for the outgoing messages when running campaigns to reach their customers. We keep it simple for small business owners to manage their costs and only spend when they need to.
Thanks Mz for the feedback. Freemium could be a potential business model here. "You get X jobs for free, if you are a power user then you pay based on tier".
They can also intentionally acquit someone they know is guilty of the law simply because they don't think the law should exist, this is called jury nullification. My point was that the typical jury is just not sophisticated enough to understand how easy it is to plant digital evidence. I doubt they'd convict in a case like this believing the defendant to be innocent.
Why Buying a Company Can Be Better Than Starting One
Startups shouldn't be handing out equity like candy. If you are asking for 0.05%, you better have a damn good reason to deserve it, because $1k is definitely not enough. Startups give 7% up to YC for way more than just 120k (network, brand name, etc). In fact if all you want is 120k, there are better ways to raise that money than giving up 7% to YC. So your calculation does not hold up, because the value of you as an investor is not the same as the value of YC as an investor. All cash is definitely not created equal.
The good news is depending on your air-gap setup, you can still participate in the global PII market.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/11/beware-of-ads-tha...
`.pptx` is the _Open_ Office Presentation Format. It's standardized by Ecma. It's not what I would call a proprietary file format.
I've skimmed it, but even the appendices alone are worth a look. Not always immediately practical in every situation, as with anything Google, but it's definitely a "handbook" I'll be studying closer over the next few weeks. :)

Oh and while Google Play may be cheaper, it's also on Safari books if folks have subscriptions to that, e.g. via libraries/proquest.
They are when the patent is on a concept, not an implementation.
Initially we're providing an API but the idea of open sourcing it is very much on the table, which of course would allow users to install it on their own hardware.
> Today is also the day where Nostalrius will start being community-driven in the truest sense of the word, as we will be releasing the source code, and anonymized players data (encrypting personal account data)

This will be interesting. Apparently, there are open source reverse-engineerings of the old WoW code already, but having them release the source code may allow for some interesting applications.

I'd love to play around with that data dump as well.
The other are two possible scenarios when the price is too low:

* Someone with a deep pocket decides to buy as much as possible at a high discount, say 1 cent per dollar, and wait 30 days and get a 100x gain in a month. (There are some funds that specialize in this kind of operations with bond from developing countries. Usually it takes more than a month to get the money, but sooner or later the country has to pay, because whatever is in the land is essentially a collateral. (Hi from Argentina!))

* Nobody in their right mind would buy the money, no merchant, no exchange, no other user because all of them think that the value will continue to decrease. So the only option is to save them in a drawer and wait 30 days, and after 30 days they are convertible to dollars. (At the 29th day, you can choose to sell it to someone that will have to wait 30 days or exchange it for a few cents, or wait 24 hours and get a whole dollar.)
> Busses are a lot more flexible in terms of routing - normal gasoline busses can be rerouted at will, and the cost of changing routes for electric busses (like the ones in Seattle) are much lower than street cars, where you basically have to lay new track.

YAGNI.

In Boston, not only are many of the bus lines following the exact route of older trolley lines, but those trolley lines follow routes taken by horse-drawn street car lines, and the tracks laid down for those matches, block for block, the routes of older omnibus stagecoach services.

You really don't need to reroute bus lines very often.

But what about something blocking a track, you might ask? Well, streetcar cities deal with the prospect of an incident blocking a streetcar track by being very, very intolerant of things that might make that happen. And it works.

But... since a bus can reroute easily, it can also be rerouted very easily by politicians for their own ends. Which means real estate investors ignore bus lines. They don't ignore streetcar tracks.
This wasn't them respecting a privacy setting. The content was still very accessible, just inconveniently so.
Oops. You're right.
they are going back to the old version. there seem to be some pains in the reversion since some times i will go there and get the old look and then the next time i go there it will give me the "new" look. (It might be caching or something but it is inconsistent)
I'm not sure your throughput assertion is correct.

As stated in another reply I-5 North congests every single day between the 520 and 45th st exits. Why? Because of a hill. There's a big hill there. And every meatbag driver slows down going up it. Which causes people behind to brake. Which creates a shockwave traffic jam.

That wouldn't happen with robot drivers. Nor would cars slow down when they enter a tunnel for reasons I've yet to figure out. Nor would they slow down when exiting that tunnel when their eyes adjust to the summer brightness. Traffic is actually worse on I-90 on bright, sunny days than on overcast (but not rainy) days! Again, that slow down would not happen at all with robot drivers.

So I disagree. Autonomous cars can very much improve throughput. The maximum number of cars that can cross a stretch of road at rush hour is significantly higher with autonomous cars than with meatbag drivers. In my opinion.

What I really want is Seattle to throw a few million bucks at Google to do a study. Show us a vision of an autonomous Seattle. Build a simulation and present it. If Google gives us a "best case" and we still think light rail is better then great. I'm sold. Let's pick the better option. But right now we're not truly considering all options.
Ah I could see but this is a conscious effort not to make it for recruiters. But it would be great if you could share some more notes from your learning :)
Running a Business Is a Lot Like Parenting
It's the same. TextSecure called it "Axolotl", but the "Signal protocol" appears to just be a branding change.
I looked into the complexity of implementing webtorrent (which is just websocket signaling and webrtc data channel connections to peers rather than the traditional http signaling with udp to peers) in libtorrent and it is kind of a giant mess of C++ :p

The problem is more that every desktop client, for some reason, has also reimplemented bittorrent. Specifically, Transmission, Deluge, and KTorrent all use their own bittorrent protocol implementations, and none of them are particularly or easily extensible enough to provide webtorrent support easily.

But let it be known eyes are on the prize and have at least looked into it, it is just a hard problem, exacerbated by implementation fragmentation.
Pennsyltucky is almost south. :)
This essay is much needed, especially considering the site that it's posted at. The American Heart Association has spent decades promoting bad advice.

The worst of this advice is telling us to use cooking oils which are predominately polyunsaturated, and to avoid as much saturated fat as possible [1]. But the latest science has acquitted butter of the crimes it was accused of. There was never any good evidence for the idea that naturally-saturated fats are harmful, industry just had a lot of seed oil that wasn't needed to make paints & stains anymore. We now know that the Omega-6's are the bad "essential" fatty acid, and that there seems to be little-to-no benefit to supplementing Omega-3's either.

I much appreciate this quote, at the bottom:

> And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as a leader in the introduction of changes. For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only the lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new. This lukewarm temper arises partly from the fear of adversaries who have the laws on their side and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who will never admit the merit of anything new, until they have seen it proved by the event.
"—Machiavelli, 1532"

The other day i posted a link on slashdot to my site about the contamination of the food supply with "biodiesel" (vegetable oil), and the people with mod points didn't much care for my comment.

[1] https://www.goredforwomen.org/live-healthy/first-steps-to-pr...
I'd say the majority still are split into rars for the initial scene release but by the time it comes to the public trackers, and even many private trackers, someone has already unrared it for you.
UGA researchers use single molecule of DNA to create world’s smallest diode
Hmm, I'm a huge fan of sandstorm, but I have mixed feelings about this. I like sandstorm for its promise of easily running my own apps on my own server. My data is private and secure, yet I can still access it from my phone, laptop, library, etc. And a lot of really smart people are spending a lot of time making this happen, so in some ways I'm happy that they have a monetization strategy and strong motivation to keep at it!

On the other hand, until now, I had thought their monetization strategy was their oasis hosting platform. But now that I see this "sandstorm for business" strategy, it seems there's at least a little incentive to hamstring the non-business side to encourage people to purchase the feature key. The incentives aren't exactly aligned anymore. Before, I thought that any development that improved the platform would increase oasis use, and be good for them and good for private self hosters. Now, development on the "for business" features is much better for them with no benefit to people who haven't purchased the key, so I think there might be more developer focus on it.

On the other other hand, I can't think of a better way of going about it. Kudos to them for keeping it open source, being up front about the license check, and having the auto-update strategy. I like that if a business wants to stop paying, they're essentially locked into what they had paid for to that point, but haven't lost their data or access to the features they had. They just stopped paying for ongoing development so they don't get future features. That's pretty neat.

Overall, I don't see anything wrong about this approach, and a healthy sandstorm ecosystem and happy sandstorm devs is good for everyone, including those self-hosting the free version. It's just now I have a tinge of disappointment thinking of all this great development I was getting for free before, that now might be spent on enterprise features not available to me.
Why do you need to patent them rather than just publish the idea? One there is prior art you can't get a patent in an idea (simplifying).
There are actually dozens of WoW private server implementations (called cores) on github, for every version of the game. Their patches will be immensely useful to the various vanilla cores to improve their out of the box support, but this is actually the second shutdown server this year that is dumping its full scripting as open source after a server called Sunwell did it for WoW 3.3, and those scripts produced a dramatic increase in quality among other servers at that version very quickly.
Love the idea. Would definitely participate, for the right startup.

However, I think successful projects would feel more like open source projects on Github. "Develop our Android app for 0.1% shares of our startup" sounds more like a non-technical team or something written by a PM.

"Collaborate with our dev team to help us improve the performance of our Android app for 0.05% shares of our startup" sounds more interesting.
When I consolidated my loans, they became fixed at 6.8%. Meanwhile my wife was lazy and did nothing and then the great recession happened and her loans have been at 3% for years and years.
You might consider implementing the features you seek as a plugin to discourse. As for the hosting expenses, there are 3rd party services that will host it for you.
That's always the risk of making an in-joke, especially one about a niche New Zealand drink-driving ad.
"The alternative to C for systems programming in the '70s was not Modula-2 or anything like it"

The main alternatives were ALGOL60, ALGOL68, and Pascal. They were each designed by people who knew what they were doing in balancing many goals. They, esp ALGOLS, achieved good chunk of most. A subset and/or modification of one with gradual progression for improved hardware would've led to better results than C with same amount of labor invested. On low end, Pascal ended up being ported to systems from 8-bitters to mainframes. On high end, Burroughs implemented their mainframe OS in an ALGOL with hardware that enforced its safety for arrays, stacks, and function calls.

In the 80's, things like Modula-2, Concurrent Pascal, Oberon, and Ada showed up. I'll understand if they avoided Ada given constraints at the time but the others were safer than C and quite efficient. More importantly, their authors could've used your argument back then as most people were doing but decided to build on prior work with better design. They got better results out of it, too, with many doing a lot of reliable code with very little manpower. Hansen topped it off by implementing a barebones, Wirth-like language and system called Edison on the same PDP that C was born on.

"The comment you were responding to reads to me like someone providing historical context, not an expression of an ideal."

The historical context in a related comment was wrong, though. It almost always is with C because people don't know it's true history. Revisionism took over. The power that revision has in locking in people to C is why I always counter it with actual evidence from the inventors of the concepts. Two quick questions to illustrate why I do that and test if it's sensible:

1. When hearing "the programmer is in control," did you think that philosophy was invented by Thompson for C or it was stolen without early credit from BCPL along with its other foundations?

2. Did you know that those were not designed or validated as a good language at all? And that they were grudgingly accepted just to get CPL, an ALGOL60 variant, to compile on crappy hardware whose problems no longer exist by chopping off most important attributes?

If you knew 1 and 2, would you still think C was a "well-designed" language for systems programming? Or a failed implementation of ALGOL60 whose designers were too limited by hardware? If No 1, we should emulate the heck out of C. If No 2, we should emulate ALGOL60-like language that balances readability, efficiency, safety, and programming in the large. Btw, all the modern languages people think are productive and safer lean more toward ALGOL more than C albeit sometimes using C-like syntax for uptake. Might be corroboration of what I'm saying.
I suppose that's right. It's really the Unicode 1.0 standard itself that's to blame here, but the point still stands. It took them between 1.0 and 2.0 to actually include any implementation guidelines, but by then it was too late; the Microsofts and Suns of the world have already implemented a dead-end way of encoding the standard.

But at least in Unicode 2.0 in 1996, the definitions they finally gave were UTF-7 and UTF-8. UTF-16 didn't become standard until 3.0 in 1999, when it became apparent that they couldn't take the first 5 years back, and too much software was already written assuming 16-bit characters.

My point is that UTF-16 is a completely worst-of-both-worlds hack that nobody would implement in a vacuum, short of a need to maintain compatibility with a 2-byte character API. The only reason it exists is because people (the Consortium included) truly for a brief period thought a 2-byte character set would actually be enough, and then had to figure out a way to preserve compatibility later.

Meanwhile the UNIX world thankfully seems to have gone straight from ASCII to UTF-8 without any awkward dead-end in the middle [1], because if you need to maintain backward compatibility with anything, it's a lot more useful (and space efficient) for that something to be ASCII.

[1] Sure, there exists wide-character versions of all the posix standard APIs, but in practice all the other API's you're likely to use in UNIX land have converged around wrapping the 8-bit character versions.
They are saying that teachers/counselors are viewing it from their baked-in perspective formed 30 years ago...back when you could graduate with a bachelor's degree, end up in a school job that gave you a life-long pension and healthcare.

I think it is difficult for someone from my parent's generation, who had so many benefits (no offshore competition, defined benefits pensions, lifetime pensions, etc) to understand how tough life is now. You hear about it, but until you struggle with it it is difficult to know.
$5 million for the cafeteria

Sounds right. It costs a lot to import enough Argentinian beef to feed your engineers two steaks a day.

http://www.idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_d...
I've built something similar. A generic API that abstracts away implementation details of many different APIs into a simple set of endpoints. From my experience:

1) What APIs has your team built before that qualifies them to build this?

2) How will you manage changes, bugs, and obscure documentation issues in the APIs that will be made available through you?

3) Will your API cache results from participating parties?

4) What language will the API be written in?

5) Regarding API access security: How will you handle access to multiple APIs for the same client when each API requires a different set of tokens?

6) What kind of security (aside from having an encrypted connection) will this system have?
Thanks. At its current pace it will be available for testing in four to six months. I'm not sure yet about open source but I'm very open to it. Licensing is still up in the air.
Appreciate the feedback. There were a few interesting ones, esp gaming the system. I'll consider contributing something if next day is less exhausting. :)
You almost answered your own question: the Internet Archive already has a lot of stuff, and with more resources, we could do even more. And yes, there are people uploading Grandma's photos already... even home movies. Great stuff, send more!
Some universities have, and this surprised me, a ratio of student to employee 1:1 On top of that you have the upkeep, all the program costs facilities costs are insane. This is not sustainable. It simply cannot work when many people haven't seen a legitimate increase in their wages for years.
Not sure. Don't know. C++.
This is a great release. Awesome job guys!

The inclusion of the fold command has had me thinking about RethinkDB for an event sourced system. Is anyone using it for this purpose at the moment?

Additionally, are folds usable with change feeds? That could be really powerful for event sourced systems.
Reading this article is a bit lopsided. An excerpt from the book gives a clearer picture. [0] Firstly the company is in tech-marketing space and the company appears to be less about engineering than selling. The observations in this extract appear to be about company culture and selling.

"Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language" [0]

A reference to Lord of the Flies. If you read Lord of the Flies, the disfunction runs along the lines of "insider" and "outsiders" resulting in the ritual killing of the outsiders.

The observations of bias against certain outsiders in this context are valid. The bigger question is why and who is driving this behaviour, the VC/finance industry seeking to maximise profit regardless of the externalities?

[0] "My Year in Startup Hell" ~ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
So all Google services are guaranteed to disappear?
Could you explain what you mean by "Schema-On-Need"? I can just get start using a database with no schema, but I assume Schema-on-Need is different from that.
So what's your analysis of this amicus brief? More of the same, or different?
This is an excellent suggestion – we're actually planning to do basically what you describe.

And you're totally right that the user shouldn't need to switch between the modes manually. There's no UI for that option, and I don't think there should be. That's just an option of the underlying WebTorrent torrent engine (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent), though even that should probably be removed. :)
Being from Wisconsin, I always get called out for how I pronounce "bag" and "bagel".
What do you say is the percentage of their products that disappeared versus those that still exists?

It seems like there are a lot of Google products out there that are 5+ years old.