skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would use this service regularly. I would recommend it to everyone, and I would be deeply interested in the results. I am a woodworker and do a fair amount of work with found materials. If simple toxin tests were available I would love to be able to regularly run test on material dust that I work with (MDF, hardwoods, other sheet good material).

I also live in SF, in an older home. I would love to know what kind of stuff comes out of our aging carpets - how much of the dust that I vacuum up is the carpet. what is the average makeup of the dust over time, i.e. is the dust changing to include more mold? Less? are my cleaning routines helping?

I have a mold allergy, detecting mold spores would be really good. Existing tests are not great, and not user friendly.

Companies like Zillow might also be good recommendation engines, since most people buying a house probably want to know the answer to these questions.
Interesting idea! A few thoughts to share: I would love to see a few "pre-built" themes/templates to choose and draw inspirations from. I once saw a youtube clip of a Star Wars-themed wedding and thought "hey that is not a bad idea for my future wedding", so I think it may be interesting for your site to curate those information first and build different themes.

The benefits are twofold: customers can get a flavour of what your platform can offer (say, for my case, I would think "oh hey that Star Wars wedding theme is listed here! My idea of such a wedding wasn't so crazy after all); vendors that specialise in certain niche themes can have a chance to be featured in your platform, which hopefully leads to more sales.

Well, best of luck to you! It's unusual to see couples building tech companies together :)
DevOps is the anti-silo... It's funny and a bit ironic that traditional corporations have heard some vague information about DevOps and immediately decided that they should create a DevOps silo/team, while apparently missing the fact that the entire DevOps philosophy is about breaking down silos and having everyone build Ops into their codebase...
Apple's aging Mac Pro is falling behind Windows rivals
I love Doom, but what I've always respected about Carmack is the fact that he actively tries to get better by learning all the time.

This guy could easily have just learned C and called it "done", and no one would judge him for it. Instead, he's giving speeches talking about how cool Lisp and Haskell are and that he thinks functional is the way to go.

Whether or not he's right about that is a matter of preference, but I think it's cool that he's not content with "knowing enough".
The Diverse Geography of High-Tech Industries
You can find thousands of people making a positive difference. The reason people live there in the first place is they don't have significant power. Volunteering at a food bank is not going to change the situation.

In the end community action is often pointless at a larger scale.

PS: Not to be overly negative but guess where the poor area is on this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_map#/medi...
And, don't forget "Yüz Kitap".
I still see login pages over http sometimes. I will be happy when I rarely see any http pages.
I wonder what would happen if Chrome made all http pages red to indicate insecure...
I encourage you to support candidates that vigorously support single payer (I do).
Ask HN: How to make the podcast listening experience better?
I love listening to podcasts, and there is a lot of great content out there. Despite the fact that podcasting has been around for a decade, technology and consumer engagement mechanics seem very rudimentary, especially compared to web/mobile apps. Many good publishers struggle with economic sustainability (like lots of people in the publishing industry).

My question is open-ended: what problems do you have with podcasts? What have you found useful? What are some suggestions on improving the consumption, production, and monetization experience?
FWIW, you can sort the list of subreddits alphabetically at the top of the subreddit list.
Chartd: responsive, retina-compatible charts with just an img tag
That's the thing though. Errors can be data in plenty of other languages. It's just that it's not the only tool you're given, and there's other things you can do without having to reimplement it all from scratch every time.

Where a lot of people will say "go is opinionated", I keep feeling that Go is just not providing facilities I feel are part of what you should get out of the box (much like a standard library is one) and just shifts the burden to me to reimplement them all correctly. In doing so, you also lose the opportunity to have a well-designed approach that gets rather uniform adoption through the community.
An enterprising guy named Ali Hamed is pursuing this model with coventure in NYC!
This is a terrible article. It takes something HRC said decades ago, contrasts it to something she said recently (out of context of course) and presents it as a concrete cause and effect scenario. The ACA took a monumental amount of effort and wasn't even particularly groundbreaking in terms of legislation in its final form. Single-payer really is a pipe dream right now.
It looks like we agree Go has "special comments", not "executable comments".

I recognise that Go' special comments can be seen as a hack, but honestly they are not so different from Rust's attributes or Haskell's pragmas, which can look clunky too.
Conversely, the disadvantage with go is that errors have to be handled right away by the thing that may have caused it.

Sure, with a `try`, you may have no idea which line caused the error or why it did so, but that isn't what matters. After all, if a function returns an error, you don't know what line of code actually caused the error. (Especially in go, since errors lack backtraces.)

With "exceptions" you know that something within the block failed and passed the information about what went wrong to the catch/except/rescue block. Problems arise if the block fails to tie up its own lose ends, but that's a problem that exists without structured exceptions: if a function might return an error you still have to take it on faith that it arranged for clean-up of any state that, outside the function, would be problematic.

Fundamentally,

try {
foo()
bar()
} catch e Fred {
cleanup1()
} catch e Barney {
cleanup2()
}

isn't really any different from

if e := (func()error{
if e := foo(); e != nil {
return e
}
if e := bar(); e != nil {
return e
}
return nil
})(); e != nil {
if _, ok := e.(Fred); ok {
cleanup1()
} else if _, ok := e.(Barney); ok {
cleanup2()
} else {
return e // assuming this function returns error
}
}

except that one of them is far more readable.

It's potentially different, of course, inside foo(), where it might unexpectedly call a function which raises. But because recover exists in the language, robust functions must assume that any function call, or various built-in operations[1], might result in code further up the call stack recovering from a panic, so it must make sure it will fix its inconsistent state when the stack is unwound.

Additionally, go is inconsistent in that some errors - e.g. array index out-of-bounds - cause panics instead of indicating errors normally. That's understandable, since having to type

if c, ok := array[i]; ok {
err = fmt.Errorf("Array index out of bounds")
return
} else {
// do something with c
}

every time you wanted to do

c := array[i]

would be really tiresome.

[1] Such as: comparing non-comparable objects via references of interface type; dereferencing a null pointer or interface; out-of-bounds array/slice/string indexing; division by zero; sending on a closed channel. All likely occurrences.
Also, YouTube red is only available in some countries.
Yours is great, though! The more the merrier.
So the US spends a ridiculous percentage of it's GDP (15-20%) on health care. Many treatments for serious diseases are far too expensive for a family living on a median income to afford, so health insurance is a requirement in order to avoid bankruptcy in the face of a serious health problem.

My question is, are we getting something for this money? Does healthcare research and innovation in the United States justify what it's costing us, or does the whole system need a reboot?
Ops teams are more useful when they're analyzing data and improving architecture based on the results of their analyses. The ideal ops role is beginning to phase out the "overqualified support engineer" framework and usher in the new idea of being an "infrastructure architect".

To me, this article is more about the architectural/business decision of outsourcing as much as possible to 3rd-party services instead of reinventing the wheel in-house. How many Chef repos have the same stupid passenger cookbook vendored in? How many times have you had to fuck with that cookbook because it broke or something got updated? My websites for http://psychedeli.ca, http://brother.ly, and http://www.waxpoeticrecords.com are hosted on Heroku and, apart from the occasional Redis issue, they've been chugging along quite smoothly. I've had little to no issues with my development and continuous deployment process, which give my apps the same safeguards that I get with work (even more) with no one needed to "watch over" the project...other than me of course.
Sberbank is owned by the Russian government.

It's not the fact that Sberbank is simply "owned" by the Russian government that should be of interest; its what Sberbank does for the Russian government.

And it is these activities that the recent leaks have shed significant light on.
Ask HN: CMU or MIT?
Not to say this is a bad thing, but I'm sure Wordpress just broke a lot of links on their user's sites. For example, any embedded images from other servers not using HTTPS means that they won't load anymore due to browser policies, essentially breaking the links. It also means that any embedded images/videos/etc. will only work if the remote server has HTTPS. Again, not a bad thing, but it's pretty painful to have to deal with this with a lot of users that aren't experts on HTTP, and I'm sure it's a similar story at Wordpress.

I can flip the switch for default HTTPS on Neocities in a day. The hard part is figuring out how to not break user's sites in that process. Ideas welcome.
Responsive CSS Grid – An Exercise
They plan to:

https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http...
To start, here are some problems that I've noticed:

DISCOVERABILITY:

- The best way to discover new podcasts seem to be through curated lists, word of mouth, or recommendations from other podcasts. Haven’t come across a recommendation algorithm that surfaces little known podcasts.

- iTunes, probably the largest distributor of podcasts, has strange algorithms. For example, “New and Noteworthy” is based on # of new subscribers, not # of downloads or reviews [1]. Android users don’t have iTunes.

- A particular publisher’s content is usually organized episodically instead of by topic. This makes it harder to dive deeper or learn more about something that piqued your interest.

REVIEWS / RATINGS:

- incentives to write a review is very low. Lack of reviews contribute to discovery problem
Reviews are scattered across dozens of platforms, few of which have mass adoption

EPISODES:

- Most episodes are long -- 20 min to 2 hours. This makes previewing, skipping, and embedding into other forms of media harder.

SEARCH:

- Can’t easily search through an episode -- this is a general problem with audio searching

- Are podcasts even being indexed by any search engines if there is no transcript on the website?

PLAYER FUNCTIONALITY:

- Sharing an episode on FB/Twitter is hard -- users often don’t even need to sign in to use the podcast app. Sharing a segment of an episode is nearly impossible

- The “Skip” button is contextless and usually just jumps ahead a predefined number of seconds. It should be “skip ad” or “skip to next topic”
While driving, operating the player means gambling with your life.

ANALYTICS:

- Primary metric is # of downloads, not # of listens.

- Ability to know when listeners drop off is nearly impossible

- Whatever little data is out there is scattered across every distributor.

ADS/MONETIZATION:

- Monthly subscription model means losing 95%+ of your listener base. Often this is still economical.

- Ads are doing well-ish ($10-$50 CPM), but fail to attract many advertisers because there is no tracking (unless there is an accompanied coupon code). CPM might be at its peak

- Too much free content available for a “netflix of podcasts” to work

PRODUCTION:

-High quality content, esp storytelling, is expensive or time-consuming to produce

ENGAGEMENT

- Users can’t do surveys, click on links, add tags, “like” or “share”, comment, rate/review, etc through most apps/players.

- No easy direct line to engage with publisher. Nobody goes to the website and writes a comment

- No easy way to engage with the community of listeners

- AMAs and live broadcasts are seen by a small % of fans

- Engaging with the content while passively listening (ie: driving, at work, at the gym, etc) is hard
"This work was supported by the NSF under grant CNS-13-18415"

I think that means you might be able to get source code via FOIA or similar :)
To me, containers seem to be a perfect way to have a reasonable contract between Dev and Ops. The Ops team just has to maintain a secure, stable, and performant infrastructure that can run containers, and Devs can put whatever they want in the container, and not have to worry about anything below it.
What silly names?
Google has been making significant visible investments in GAE, even with the advent of Compute Engine. There is also a hybridization of the two going on. While I can't claim to expect my code to live unaltered forever, I'm not worried about having an upgrade path. Also: I do have a lot of GAE apps that have been running nearly unaltered for several years. So there is a good track record.

For a point of reference, when Google rolled out the High Replication Datastore, they kept around the Master/Slave datastore for years and even built a pushbutton tool to automatically migrate apps. GAE has been around since 2008; this is not an experiment like Wave.
Gamification, personalization and continued education are trending in edtech
I had to look it up. That's a very useful sentence... ;-)
Nice.

However, they could have shelved out a couply of hundred of bucks for a wildcard cert before.
Pretext: I also work in this field, have for the last 5 years.

- The flip side is that 90% of the software in this market is 5-10 years old and "cloud" solutions are novel and strange to them (cf fear about data storage)

Actually I'd have to disagree with that to some degree. I do agree there is some what of a stickyness for doing things the way you were doing things, but its also pretty regional. California is a very different audience then Indiana. Additionally more and more states are mandating the move digital products.
I wish they'd put a bit more effort in making it faster (outside the US/EU) (and feel more native)
I'm not sure that using C# inherently turns you into an architect. You can write the most direct and legible code in C#, just as you would in other languages. I think it is a mistake to conflate the two. In fact, I've seen it.

I am sure that as you work your way up the Objective-C chain, you will run into patterns and practices that have brought the best results over the years. They will feel burdensome after a while. At that point, you will be right back where you were with C#, except in Objective-C and will be happy to be a beginner at another language so that you are free of the burden of experience.
I interpreted the parent comment as a plea to journalists to actually listen to what the residents of ENY are saying, rather than simply relating the changes happening around them.

I don't think they were implying it's the fault of the people in ENY [ie they weren't suggesting they bootstrap themselves], just asking to hear their actual perspective.
It's a bit more than 1% in SF, getting close to 1.2%

http://sftreasurer.org/online-property-tax-payment-faq#taxam...
EasyPay Xpress MetroCard is what I used living in NYC for years; I still use it when I go visit actually. I never stop at a kiosk, it always has a balance from the attached credit card. I used full fare card, but you can also do unlimited monthly. Skipping the kiosk is great.
The site notes that bathrooms aren't in the nest but on premise and renters can use them. How will you address the fact that while many people may be open to renting out an underused garage because it's somewhat detached from the house, they don't want strangers in their homes (except when renting out whole house)?

Are you paying for any/some of the house-owner's renovation costs or how will you encourage them to remodel? Renovations are costly and the potential revenue may not be high enough to entice an owner to redo their garage. Most garages are bare by default.

What is the rental price point?
> I'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS.

The main Chinese-Github DDOS was the Chinese Goverment/Great Firewall of China was it intercepting Chinese websites for non-chinese IPs, and inserting a script that DDOSed Github. Chinese users weren't relevant here.
Except for conference papers, which are even worse. There's so much "secret sauce", only few are independently reproducible. Sadly, in some research areas they are the dominant way of publishing research output.
1. Do you have any competitors? Doing something very similar?

2. There is an insane amount of startups in this space. who would be your first customers, and why them?
Or use those images: http://imgur.com/a/K4RWn :)
I was thinking of a plan exactly like thus yesterday.
A neighbor within 5 miles should be able to help with quite a few things.
Need a haircut? Ride to work? How about just a comfortable person to talk to? This should crush the social statusquo and make for a much more engaging and productive human experience.

Neighborly

A craigslist for services. I am going to download Runnr right now.
FWIW, borax will likely help you combat mold regrowth more effectively than bleach. Another trick here is to constantly use borax on laundry like towels which tend to carry mold from being hung up wet. Finally, add a strong borax solution to a carpet cleaner/washer and do all the carpets in your house. This has REALLY helped me deal with mold in our house. Since starting this regime, old coffee grounds in the compost bin that used to grow mold in a day or so no longer grow mold, even after a week (this was a test, not a typical situation for my house).
> For example when you enter a store in France you are expected to say "Bonjour" upon entering, and "au revoir" upon leaving.

> In north america there is no such custom, so we just walk into stores and do our thing and it bothers no-one.

Maybe not in New England, but in other parts of America it's standard to say 'hello' and 'goodbye' to the properietor.
C2s and C1s are bare metal. VC1s are virtual.
Or you could buy an entire system for 700 euros?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z420-Workstation-E5-2670-Xeon-RAM...
Relay was built to address concerns that our developers faced with managing data in complex apps. Needing to reimplement solutions to the same complex problems (error handling, request coordination, caching, etc) could take time away from focusing on building products. Relay helps to solve these common cases, and it sounds from your comments above ("my productivity has skyrocketed") that you've seen the benefits too - great to hear!

> Without such an explanation, we're essentially taking it on faith that these libraries are written by people who value good quality lean code.

We built something that works for us, balancing feature set, runtime performance, maintainability, code size, etc. We're continually focusing on performance - see https://github.com/facebook/relay/blob/master/meta/meeting-n... for more about what we're focusing on - but so far file size has not been the most impactful thing to work on.

As far as understanding Relay's functionality, we've covered the more obvious aspects in talks (http://facebook.github.io/relay/docs/videos.html) and in a conceptual overview (http://facebook.github.io/relay/docs/thinking-in-graphql.htm...). But an analogy to React is probably simplest. React converts declarative UI descriptions into imperative updates on the DOM. Relay is superficially similar - it converts declarative data descriptions into imperative calls - except that there is no DOM for data, so Relay also implements the query representation, object graph for cached data, networking, mutation queuing & rollback, etc.

We're also giving a tech talk about Relay internals (https://relaytechtalk.splashthat.com/) which may be of interest.
Indeed. At troubled companies, executive compensation (via severance package) is often tied to a successful sale of the firm, and this is the case with YHOO:

http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/07/technology/marissa-mayer-sev...

If getting the deal done is the only objective, exaggerating the direness of the situation might help shareholders get on board for a deal, perhaps out of fear. It also makes a lower price more palatable.

Of course, I have no details of what is actually going on, so what I've written could just be rampant speculation.
This sounds like precisely the sort of investigation the author should have included in the article.
First of all, congrats on the venture and I wish you the best of luck.

For the streaming portion - you can use YouTube but you can't hide the video (it violates their terms), so be careful.
It's a sentence (albeit a bit of a run-on). If you omit the part between the long dashes (which act exactly as parentheses), it's perfectly parseable.

In simplified form (subtracting a few subordinate clauses here and there):

"Sberbank engaged the Podesta Group to help its image, and specifically to help lift the pain of sanctions placed on Russia, which have caused real pain to the country's financial sector."
But can it run Crysis?
Thus, you as an IoT manufacturer can take advantage of a trained algorithm instead of you developing one from scratch.

This puts you at a strict disadvantage--without your own IP, you basically are just a hardware manufacturer, and that race to the bottom is already pretty well finished due to Shenzhen and whatnot.
I'm just going to nuke this post since the consensus seems to be its offensive somehow. :P
I am not going to use mobile voice <anything>. Not unless we have local AI processing natural speech on my own device. No cloud voice fingerprinting for me, ever.

I imagine there must be companies already buying voice prints and cross referencing them with voiced heard in stores to identify/target customers somehow.
U.S. Post Office Makes Stamps Cheaper for the First Time in 100 Years
In the current scheme of things, I believe Apple was able to pay the extra dividends using its income. The activist shareholders agitated for a bigger return to shareholders and Apple complied, as I understand it. I don't believe cash repatriation was required in this scenario. It seems that Apple was also "encouraged" to perform stock buybacks by these investors.

ref: http://learnbonds.com/124673/apple-inc-aapl-is-preparing-to-...
3M sells these lead test swabs for surfaces:
http://amzn.com/B009NQNL0I

Once again, not exactly "analyzing your dust" but I think this is the current consumer-grade solution to the problem of "are there dangerous levels of lead in my wall paint/ceramics/etc?"
What's important to you? Do you want to learn or do you want to make money? Or some mixture of the two? Is it about the journey or the destination? I've found that the journey tends to be most important for me so I temper my aspirations with the knowledge that I will likely not continue on after I've answered whatever vital question was driving the effort. It keeps me from being disappointed with the result of not finishing.