skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems to assume that the number of customers would stay steady if marketing costs drop to zero. That strikes me as implausible.

It's sort of like saying, "If we stop investing in R&D and machine maintenance, our factory will be much more profitable." In an accounting sense, yes, sort of. But in reality, no, because you're eating your seed corn.

I grant that Salesforce is still in a "let's buy market share" mode, so we shouldn't expect to see a profit. So they could be just growing happily. But they also could be in a highly competitive market without much competitive advantage. Or it could be that they are using marketing spending to boost revenues well beyond what's sustainable. From the numbers, we can't tell. Which, I believe, was ericabiz's point.
The home page looks like a scene from the Teletubbies TV show. It does not look like something designed to appeal to well-adjusted adults.
so no https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcpcrypt ...
Lifelines – Survival analysis in Python
Gmail seems to have a robust policy for dealing with exactly these errors. Thanks for pointing it out.
Okay, I can see where you're coming from but the sentence was "raining downpour in front of over a hundred million people." How does that NOT imply a live audience of a hundred million? I can't believe people are downvoting me for this. The sentence is absurd as written.
Hey! I'm the author of Nodal [1] and I think this could be a really neat platform for open source communities. Gitter / Slack tend to be the default for live, realtime chat and GitHub is central for issues and contributions, but I'm looking for something fun to direct developers towards where we can organize community events and the like. I'm a startup founder myself and would love to connect with the founding team, is there an ideal way to reach out?

[1] http://github.com/keithwhor/nodal
An interesting point but I'm not sure that it does. The ultra-finitist says that numbers above a certain limit don't exist. In my view numbers don't "exist" in the first place. The theory of numbers is a tool for making predictions. The statement that numbers above a certain limit don't exist turns into the statement that examples to test the theory don't exist above a certain limit, because you won't be able to find that big of an example in our universe. IMO this is a much more sensible statement. An ultra-finitist may worry about an intermediate number in a calculation not existing, even though the start and end number may be small (for instance consider log_2(2^n) = n). This is silly in my view, since the theory of numbers is a prediction tool as a whole, and there is no need to physically realize intermediate numbers. As long as you're using the rules of the theory you're good (for the same reason you don't need to be afraid of using infinite sets in the middle of a deduction). One might also worry that the theory of numbers may fail to make correct predictions for very large numbers, but this is really a different question about generalising from examples. It could already fail for very large examples that we can test in our universe. The possibility of it failing for numbers larger than we can realize in our universe is precisely what you don't need to worry about.
Of course, there are opponents of free speech on the left and the right. There are also proponents of free speech on the left and the right. And when speaking strictly of the US political spectrum, it's fair to say that the neither side is more opposed to speech than the other.
Thank you! Cautiously excited. Hopefully the moderation tools will be excellent:

- Private groups, for anonymity.

- Maybe limit upvoting privilege (to certain users?), if it's used in a strange attack.
Everything about their homepage seems to signal that it is in fact a social network for 9 year olds (or people with the social maturity of 9-year-olds).

* "Fun" graphics? Check.

* Cartoon characters? Check.

* Whimsical name? Check.

* "Safe space" marketing? Check.

* Close control of who can access it? Check.

Literally the only thing they need to add to be a children's website is a note about parental controls.
That was Tim Starling:

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=PoolCounter...

https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/User:Tim_Starling_(WMF)
Thanks, I'll check it out. I didn't know they build a humanitarian organization around the open source project. I remember reading about the great work they did mapping Haiti after the earthquake to help first responds navigate the roads.
This appears to connect to the left side expansion port on the Amiga 500. See https://github.com/endofexclusive/greta/raw/master/greta.pdf

For the 1000, it has almost the same connector, but inverted in gender.

Not sure about the 1200.

For the 2000, there's the Zorro slots, which serves the same purpose, but is an entirely different type of connector.

I don't think there's a ready made adapter available for either. There was an adapter to use Zorro cards on an A500, but not the reverse case.
>on contentious issues HN will still reward quality participation

Maybe the problem is what you consider "contentious"? I certainly wouldn't put ad-blocking in that boat. I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat. How do they fair?
I know, but there are even competitions where people write RTS AIs that can do micro like that, and humans still often beat them. Some game developers have great lengths to make good RTS AI that plays fair and like a human, and they are still easy to beat for skilled players.
I wish there were footage of a large urban area in China. Would there actually be too much pollution to get a clear shot in most areas?
Skinheads are not necessarily Neo-Nazis, many are apolitical and there are leftwing movements e.g. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinheads_Against_Racial_Preju...
This is what surprised me about Uber's recent efforts to not have their drivers become employees. I was expecting them to use the lawsuits to extract favourable terms from the drivers and lock them into exclusive employment contracts. If they had done that their network would be hard to break, but as it stands now any new competitor is one app away from entering the market.
I hear marijuana is a gateway drug too.
The question that should be asked in that case is what purpose does excessive paperwork cover?

In my experience, it's usually poor management looking to cover their own ass when deadlines are missed and/or establishing a track record so if they need to fire people they have a legally justifiable reason.
Who defines hate speech? Who defines genocide?

Are we going to say that the settlement of the west by the US was a genocide of American Indians? If so, doesn't that mean the whole ideological basis of America is genocidal and should be banned?

What if some religious ideologues got control of the government and used hate speech laws to band criticism of religion? Or defined abortion as a genocide against the unborn?

I'm not willing to risk allowing anyone to define what is rightthink and wrongthink for my country.
Yes, Alex thinks that way, but he also satirizes himself by exaggerating "must always work" culture a little bit.

In reality Alex does not really work all the time (for example he spent quite some time on his blog) and he does not require his employees to work all the time too.
Healthy, positive, and upbeat are not synonymous.

My real world academic community is "healthy" in the sense that we get along, have great conversations, and don't deride each other needlessly.

It's also upbeat. We're all mostly excited about what we're working on and happy to be working together.

It's not positive. If you say something stupid, we'll call it stupid. Some days you will feel stupid.

If the goal of a community is to keep everyone always feeling positive, it's never going to be healthy in the long run.
It's like hearing. I can hear, but I cannot explain - how. My English vocabulary is not enough to describe it in details (I am from Ukraine, I learned English as adult).

Before that, I used some techniques to better control my body and feelings for years, so I was able to notice subtle differences and gradations of my feelings. I also know (poorly) body language (because I am amateur ballroom dancer), so I can notice subtle changes in behavior of others.

I feel warmth at my face when I do that, like warmth after warmup, and not like warmth when I self-heat a part of my body by concentrating at it.

It is much easier to stare at somebody, if I have feelings to her/him (e.g. when I like or dislike her/him).

It works without eye contact: from target back or when target is sleeping.

Targets always know direction from which I stared at them.

When effect is strong, it is easy notice it: it feels like something happens at skin ("burning") but without pain of any kind, i.e. nerve system sends strong signals about something ephemeral, but nothing happens in reality. When effect is weak, it feels like warmth, so it is easy to mismatch it with self-heating with concentration. So, to test effect properly, you must not say to targets that you testing them, otherwise they will concentrate at their body and will feel warmth.

IMHO, it is kind of "i like you/i dislike you" sign language used by animals and then forgotten by humans.

I had similar feeling myself, but two times only:

- in train, from girl: after about hour of staring at her (experimenting) I got exact same response. :-)

- from soldier, when we talked about how to free Crimea of Russian soldiers. :-)

It is all.

I stopped doing that because it was hard to stop looking without staring. Random people started to like me for no reason, remember me and my name for years, etc. I unlike that.

PS.
I saw a film where I was able to track at which girl operator/director is looking when filming, because of girl reactions, so I am 100% sure that I am not alone. :-)
The author mentioned DJI, creator of the phenomenally popular Phantom line of quadcopters, as a company which combined software and hardware to open new realms.

From my personal experience, their software is absolutely atrocious. Talk to anyone who has built more than a toy app using their SDK and you'll be regaled with stores of insane hacks. For example, at least in the Phantom 2 days, they didn't provide any method to determine the capabilities or model number of the quadcopter that you were controlling. As a result, my friend's company had a hack that would rotate the camera gimbal until it hit a limit stop and use that angle to determine the model.

On the flip side, their "range extender", a required component if you want to talk to a Phantom 2 from an Android/iOS device, is really just an OpenWRT router acting as a 802.11g bridge.

There's a lot to be said about improving quality of Chinese hardware and software, but it's definitely not up to western quality levels yet.
We made something that makes us happy. Will it appeal to every single human being? No, of course not, nor should it. And that's okay! Nothing on the internet has that power. Not even cats.

We chose to go in this direction because it made all of us happy to go to work every day, and whenever we showed people different versions of our site, whether it was family and friends or in more formal user testing, people tended to like it more with the dinosaurs than without. It's okay if you don't like it, or even if a lot of different people don't like it.

Though, fwiw, once you got off that page it looks more like a regular site and there aren't as many dinos.
Three months = 60 working days.

Two devs, so 120 working days.

300k lines of code. So, 2500 lines of production code rewritten per day. Sustained for three months. No holiday. No days off.

And this code was tested to be equivalent of the old code. So, let's say, being conservative, another 2500 lines of test code per day. (It's a lot more that, of course, in most cases.)

So 5000 lines of working, tested code per day.

Plus, the team of two were checking in with the users to make sure everything was hunky dory. And the new team was designing a new "model of the world far better than the original developers ever did".

I'd have gone along with that bullshit until the final sentence: Working code people want to use trumps everything. No, no, young ninja, rock star, Jedi: Working maintainable code trumps everything.
#TheRoundUp No. 39
The phrase I've heard is "Practice makes permanent."
Quite a few. Going back to 1990 it looks average-to-slightly-high.

Not sure what your point is; if you try to use P/E as a predictive metric, you're going to have a bad time. Maybe there are people out there who have a higher rate of expected earnings growth than you do, and are will to pay more for it in a period of unprecedented low interest rates?
I'm bilingual. My thought process is a mixture of words, ideas, and other things that are relevant. The words nowadays are in English, even though English is my second language (Polish is my first). And it definitely does happen sometimes I do forget a word.
Who is your target audience though?

If this is the Reddit for 9-year-olds, spot on! I also think there are some other (older) demos who would be attracted to a space like this, but I'm interested in who you think it is.

Also, I'm sorry for the negativity (some of it from me). While I largely agree with the commentary here (that the world doesn't necessarily need a safe space community), I know how hard it is to put anything new out there and commend you for trying to improve upon Reddit. I genuinely wish an HN for "other things" existed and hope you can succeed.
The thing with "Brave New World" is that it's not a sad future. Everyone is happy. Everyone is conditioned to be happy with their situation. Alphas are happy to be alphas and enjoy a lot of privileges, Betas are happy to be betas and not have to deal with as many responsibilities as Alphas, etc. And this is the scariest part to me in the book.
I see it benefiting web applications a whole lot more than advertisers?
>yet having someone you don't know initiating conversation just to disagree with you is rather unpleasant

Eh why is that exactly? This is pretty much like calling people who object to the ideas that others present on Twitter as harassment.
When you go on a public forum and present your ideas you open yourself to a public debate, hearing things that might be "unpleasant" should fall well within the realm of expectation in this case.
I've grown to be suspicious of getting too comfortable. And to appreciate becoming uncomfortable. So maybe this:

For the first article you read every day, take 1 minute and pay attention to how it made you feel. Are your biases and beliefs affirmed or challenged? Can you argue the other side of it fairly? Are there ways the author could be fooling himself or fooling you?

If you try that for a while, my guess is that you'll notice particular biases and develop reactions to them. E.g., lately I've been working on in-group bias. I'm more likely to agree with authors I perceive as "us", and more likely to disagree with authors I perceive as "them".
Make your own subreddit about bikes, and crosspost good pieces from unmoderated ones.
Curious if this only applies to visuals. What about voices or music? For example can you accurately reproduce your parents, siblings, or friend's voices in your head. Also, what happens if you take psychedelic drugs which produce visual hallucinations?

Also, I would assume the lack of visuals holds true for dreams as well? For dreams that you remember (if any), what were they composed of? Interestingly, some people dream in B&W and other people dream in color. [1]

[1] http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.de/2008/11/new-studies-on-b...
To follow up: I personally see some extra subtlety here, in that even if a prediction machine did exist, we could still have a meaningful form of free will, because that machine would be governed by Rice's theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice's_theorem), which says that in general the only way to predict the outcome of a computation is to run the computation. (this is closely related to the halting problem).

That is, even if I could capture the relevant aspects of your mind state on a computer, i.e., the no-cloning theorem is not a barrier, it's still the case that the only way for me to predict what you will do in two minutes' time is to actually run your mind inside the computer for two minutes of subjective time. This would constitute a prediction machine in Aaronson's sense, assuming the computer could run faster than realtime. But since the computation that occurs is literally following your thought process step by step (Rice's theorem says there are no shortcuts), there's a real sense in which the decision was not determined until you -- the version inside the computer -- actually made it.

Of course this account depends on a functionalist/computational theory of mind, which can be quibbled with in all sorts of ways. But it does seem important for the philosophical discussion on free will to at least take into account the things we now know about the nature of computation, the character of physical law, and other scientific/mathematical questions, that were not known decades or centuries ago when the philosophical battle lines were being drawn. Yes, scientists can be arrogant and are often just wrong or deeply misinformed on philosophical questions. But that doesn't remove the responsibility of philosophers to engage with the frontiers of knowledge on these issues, which means engaging with people like Scott rather than just dismissing them as "confused". (as if anyone thinking about free will has ever not been confused!)
That "avoid undue negativty" stuff went out the window, eh?
>Structurally, the site just doesn't do enough to incentivize high quality contributions. //

As the parent intimated people don't all want your idea of quality. Reddit seems perfectly capable of quality within its structure - AskScience and AskHistorians seen like good examples. In other subs [SERIOUS] tags seem to work quite well.

>The problem for Reddit is that they're front and center, not at the fringes. //

It's primarily for entertainment the low SNR subreddits being most prominent seems to be a consequence of that.
How is your comment relevant to the grandparent comment in any way? A_COMPUTER was talking about the graphic design?
Παίρνουν αυτό που θέλουν
I literally said the same thing to my wife after reading this article out loud to her.

"I guess I will have to buy the book!" Laughing as I assumed there was a book.

I will likely research this topic further whether there is a book or not.

Slightly related, I'm trying to learn how to read faster. My first goal is to become an average reader in terms of speed. My wife is an elementary teacher with a master's in remedial reading. I'm going to see if she can help me.

One issue that she noticed with my verbal recitation is that I stumble when reading sentences with conjunctions.

Now I have something to work on and fix which I hypothesize will increase my speed, and likely comprehension, and should reduce my chances of stopping and rereading sentences.
Thanks for this. If you wanted to get started doing this kind of analysis in python check out the examples for the maturing pyMC3

https://pymc-devs.github.io/pymc3/stochastic_volatility/
Thanks for the link to that post. I'd also advise to read through its comment though - some people there, especially Pascal Costanza, point out quite a lot of problems that basically reduce it to ranting of a person who doesn't understand the language and the culture he's writing about ;).

Also, the influx of enterprise patterns into JavaScript is quite a recent phenomenon - personally, I blame Google (who, for a reason I can't understand to this day, embraces enterprise-level Java as their primary platform for everything...), but regardless, the problem with JavaScript culture is mostly that of very fast growth coupled with lack of experience and (probably unwilling) ignorance of the past. Since this community basically controls the Internet, it's hard for voices expressing some restraint and thoughtfulness to get trough the noise.

And I really do recommend The Unix-Haters Handbook. Funny thing is - over a decade ago, when I was acquainting myself with the Linux world (after many years of DOS and Windows experience), I've been noticing and complaining about various things that felt wrong or even asinine. Gradually I got convinced by people I considered smarter than me that those things are not bugs but features, they're how a Good Operating System works, etc. Only now I realize that my intuition back then was right, but I got Stockolm-syndromed to accept the insanity. Like most of the world. The sad thing is, there were better solutions in the past, which once again shows how IT is probably the only industry that's totally ignorant of its own history and constantly running in circles.
client <-> cloudflare and cloudflare <-> server are the same.
> I would put "sexism in tech", "H1Bs" and "finance crimes" in that boat.

For the latter two, you see a diversity of perspectives. There are plenty on HN toeing the populist line (H1Bs = evil, HFT = evil), but also people willing to go into the nuance and give oppositional evidence. Well-substantiated comments rise to the top even when they defy the populist thinking.

I'll concede that the former doesn't have good discussions, but I'm not sure it's possible to have a quality discussion about "sexism in tech" in any online forum. Saying the wrong thing will lead to you losing your job, but full anonymity brings out the trolls and the sexists.
> The approach that he took, which we will call "purposeful practice," turned out to be incredibly successful for him. It isn't always so successful, as we shall see, but it is more effective than the usual just-enough method — and it is a step toward deliberate practice, which is our ultimate goal.

The article then concludes with a description of purposeful practice. Where is the promised description of deliberate practice?
Uber has actually created the market for new competition to enter. Since they can't stop their drivers from driving for a new competitor, all any new competitor needs to enter the market is an app and a lower price / bigger split with the drivers. Given any new competitor will not be carrying the capital costs of building the network in the first place they will be able to outcompete uber. The eventual winner is going to be the consumer as the market becomes a profitless commodity service.

I have to say that I am surprised that uber didn't use the driver lawsuits to lock up their network. If the drivers were employees then they could have prevented them from driving for other services.
Satellite dishes are illegal in Iran or at least were up until 1996. I lived in Iran during the 90s and I recall my uncle's dish was confiscated and he had to pay a hefty fine. But you don't have to take my word for it. There is all kinds of evidence to support that: http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-iranian-police...
Cronicante13: Escritofrenia
Circular progress with fab integration
The Tools of Campus Activists at UC Davis Are Being Turned Against Them
If he launches, deterrence failed and civilation is gone. What is the point of killing even more people?
This comment inspired me to recount a story from my time at Amazon: https://storify.com/jrauser/on-the-big-rewrite-and-bezos-as-...
Play with 100% client-side Photo compression on your browser