skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I've built this promo to help people build their products
TemplateHaskell/Introspective – GHC
They are problems type systems are intended to solve: It just happens that Java's is too weak to deal with it well: They best you can do is use an option type, but even then, Java's Option type is far weaker than in other languages. Languages where null doesn't exist are far nicer.

Java's boilerplate comes from lacking type inference and from having a type system that is too weak, not one that is too strong: I'd argue that people's love for dynamic languages without type systems is cause by how people's idea of what types are, and what they do for you, come from Java and old C++, as opposed to something more powerful.
Safer than what's already there is a valid point, but it's also (somewhat unfortunately) not one a lot of legal systems tend to go by. For example, it's likely that if alcohol or tobacco was invented in this decade, it would have been banned as a 'dangerous' drug. But safer alternatives aren't exactly legalised because they're safer than what's already out there.
and at the Google campus they play "Watt is love. Baby don't Herz me no Morse"
She was five at the time ... she obviously didn't know what she was deleting. And there have been plenty of times I've "paid extra" (in money and/or time) to allow my kids to keep a fearless curiosity.
I used Field Trip for a while and really liked it when walking around in an unfamiliar city. As you say, as you went along, it would point out interesting facts, landmarks, etc. Then I noticed that its focus seem to change to "You're near Hardees! Here's a two for one coupon!" I deleted the app and never tried it again.
Pretty hard. Buy me a beer and I'll tell you about it sometime.
I think the way we use technology today will be looked back on the same way we look back at naive cigarette smoking in the 1950s.

Or perhaps cars and freeways, from about the same period.
Probably be cheaper to just build and launch a spare.
Oddly enough I find Apple's approach to AI more to my liking than Googles. When I do a voice query on Google and all of a sudden every ad on the device is related to what I just did, I feel abused.

I think the confusion here is the difference between data mining and AI. Google is great at data mining and less convincing when it comes to actual learning (Look at Alpha GO, it is an algorithmic exploit of a game, not a breakthrough).

I've been thinking recently that Google is the one with the losing approach. Personally, I have been using Bing a lot more because Google has been pushing the good results to page 2-3. Whatever their big AI is doing seems, at least for me, to not be working.
Cool idea, but the landing page needs some info about pricing. I assume you'll give people a quote based on the idea, but even just stating that up-front would be helpful.
Since you've taken us to nitpick land, I'd argue that you've expressed "Y is 30% less efficient than X", and that 10 can indeed do the work of 13 if instead "X is 30% more efficient than Y".

To me, the reference standard is assigned unity.

In the first case, X is 1.00 and Y is 0.70.

In the second case, Y is 1.00 and X is 1.30.
Maybe they don't want you to know how slow their service is.
Not clear from the landing page what this actually does. Enable people to follow me all at once? Provide aggregated analytics?
This reminds me of my multiple attempts in writing a declarative scrapper framework. In the end, I've chosen to just write the code.

What I see is a crappy ad-hoc scripting language. I feel bad saying so, but I can only view this project as a bad solution to whatever problem you have.

You could have chosen to send actual code, be it JavaScript, Python, Java or even Linux binaries, executed with limited privileges. How would that look like? AWS Lambda.
Only if you can foresee the problems and solutions to encode into the system. If you miss one, the system will fall down or make the wrong decision.
Thank you :) Funny you mention that, we're in the process of wrapping up a UI overhaul, and the modifiers panel is right next to the variables one. Meanwhile in the current version you can also double-click to have your variables added automatically to whichever chart you're on (based on a charts suggestion engine).
Sounds like a great parasite business idea... the "surge protector"
At least around here, if it was from cameras, the hotel would be the one committing an illegality.
http://i.imgur.com/i6ww9WK.gif
I'm many times more productive in python than I am in C++ for lots of reasons, but I feel like the clerical parts and compile times only add up to a small minority of the reason why. The respective standard libraries included with the language, the ease of finding existing code you can build on, the ecosystems surrounding the languages are all things that lead to meaningful differences in productivity.

Interpreted vs compiled is indeed a major difference, but I feel like focusing on the compile time difference doesn't account for it or adequately summarize, there are significant mentality and workflow changes.

Bob might be right that we're approaching negligible differences in programming languages, but I hope not, and I'm not at all convinced. It seems like the introduction of new useful concepts into mainstream languages is accelerating right now. And I expect to see huge advancements in programming soon that leverage today's huge advancements in AI & natural language processing. I think it's within our reach to be able to describe to a computer what our end goals are and have it figure out how to put together the pipeline to get there.
Yes talk did work over the network. The programmers that wrote it, though, made fundamental mistakes in it. They sent raw C structures over the network without marshaling, oops! So talk didn't work very well. The issues were addresses in "ntalk".
Do you mean that this is a classic case of supply and demand? I don't see a problem with this.

But I don't think this is what was mentioned in the article.
try {
enforceTopSpeed(getMaxSpeed(clear_road_ahead));
}
catch (CatastrophicBrakeFailureException ex) {
// ???
}
I can understand that different teams use Slack differently.

However, I assume you did manage to work before Slack existed, right? I'm not saying this sarcastically. We sometimes forget that there are many different ways to produce the same result. You can perfectly use it less.

It should provide value; if it doesn't, reduce its usage.

> That means dropping from slack means you completely lose track / have no input in perhaps many things that you could have helped out with. It's in theory not the end of the world, but we got used to providing input on basically every story, and so that's where I'm coming from on this

I always think of this quote when one of these dilemmas hits me: "You are not as important as you think you are". You think you need input or to contribute constantly, but that's not usually the case. Slow down on your communication, it's fine. Don't check Slack every 15 minutes when you're writing, check it less often. Easier said than done :)
That, plus it seems like in the last couple of years many people got more careful about estimating the values of privately-held companies. A $100 million investment for 10% of a company in its latest round doesn't indicate that it's worth $1 billion if there are liquidation preferences or other similar favorable terms.

I might be misreading things, but I think that has made people more conservative about what scales of exits are eventually attainable.
Crystal Palace 1-2 Man U (Trophy Live)
This was the message on my voice mail before I had switched to a carrier that made it easy to turn it off (that wasn't the reason I switched, that was a nice surprise):

---

Hi, this is Evan.

I will never ever ever ever listen to the voice mail you’re about to leave, because voice mail is a pain in the butt.

So if you actually want to reach me, you can either send me an SMS, send me e-mail, or try my home number.

Feel free to leave a voice message if you want, but remember, I will never ever listen to it. Have a nice day!

---

I don't actually give them the email or home number details on the assumption that if they don't have those already, they are probably someone who's call I'm that stressed about receiving.

Generally I got positive feedback once people did get in contact with me.

I did have a similar one on message bank on the home number, which also mentioned that I keep turning message bank off, and the phone company kept turning it back on again.
Japan has portable, artificial white noise makers for bathroom privacy. They're called otohime, or "sound princess."

- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0eqo6jU9gc

- example gadget: http://www.japantrendshop.com/keitai-otohime-toilet-sound-bl...

- background and wall mounted examples: http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/shop/sound-princess-loo-001106/
The purpose of surge pricing is to increase profits, the excuse is efficiency.
Supposing autonomous cars actually drive extremely safely and this results in them going 20 km/h under the speed limit. Are drivers going to be happy about the length of their commute increasing while regular car drivers (due to human recklessness) wiz by in the left lane at 130 km/h? I think you'd see a lot of human drivers get frustrated and turn off the AI.
On the AI front, Apple of course needs to compete. But AI/statistics relies on a combination of signal and compute. If Apple can convince customers that they will honor customer consent signals (on-device permissions), they can gain cultural permission to mine data on the device, then send only a computed result to their servers for combination with public data/signals. They can add another custom processor on the device for user data analytics (there is already a motion co-processor).

Apple has a good track record of using marketing to sidestep technical limitations, although it remains to be seen if that can be maintained without Jobs. They were relatively early in marketing Siri (long before Echo), even if the execution has been weak.

It's a fallacy that AI requires loss of privacy. It's easy to forget that the most powerful general purpose computing object on the planet is the human brain. Any AI strategy must leverage this in some manner. Harvesting historical data is one tactic. There is no reason why we cannot create AI business models around consent and 1:1 delegation from AI to human, e.g. explicit permissions.

Apple seems well aware of the technical challenges in protecting privacy while training algorithms, e.g. Apple Maps only retains query data for 15 minutes, https://thestack.com/cloud/2015/09/07/apples-privacy-policie... . Past technical breakthroughs have come from constraints, let's hope Apple can recruit smart people up to the challenge of balancing privacy & AI.
> No, I've been very clear how to deterministically determine it

Oh yes, you've been very clear indeed. "All" I have to do is prove that consciousness is supernatural in order to be right. And how do I do that? You've basically cornered me with an impossible task by shaping the semantics to be in your favor.

You want proof that consciousness is supernatural? Just wait until you die and then you can marvel all day long at the fact that you can still think without a physical body. I'll reserve my "told you so" until then (~50 years?)
The Busy Beaver Game
As someone who graduated with a Major in English before going into a 20-year career in programming, thank you for posting this link. This article sums up everything I eventually came to hate about my college education: the heavy focus on analyzing long-dead writers, the silly idea of having to take a position before you start writing, and his quip about the last paragraph being the first paragraph re-worded well enough so that no one notices is absolutely spot on. When I tried to get a job as a writer after graduating, one editor looked at my resume and said, "BA in English? I'm sorry, but you just spent the last four years learning how not to write."

I think he's right on target about what essay-writing really is: an exploration of complex and beautiful ideas. For the last 10 years I've been blogging purely as an exercise in researching and learning about complex topics. An essay doesn't need to argue anything, but can simply appreciate a subject and express its ideas from a new perspective and in novel ways in hopes of others appreciating the subject as well.
I'm sorry, if you're saying I shouldn't trust the information on a Wikipedia page about the exact topic we're discussing (historicity of Jesus), which I don't have any specialist knowledge of, then we don't really have anything to discuss. I've never seen a Wikipedia page I had to completely ignore. I don't see how we can come to terms if we're talking about something I don't know about and in which you're asking me to ignore all of the Wikipedia page on that issue. :) Of course, you could still be right.

You can add "citation needed" anywhere you think it needs it, go ahead. I think we've understood each other's perspectives well enough, and thanks for the discussion.
When my phone gets below 60 I've got 2 days left.

(Moto G 2015)
It depends, for several years now I order taxis in my city from the same company and never had any problems - price is similar to Uber, ordering takes literally several seconds over the phone (call, tell the street, hang up) and drivers always take the shortest route (they usually know the city in and out, hardly ever using GPS). The only downside is that the cars are quite old, but always clean and a fun fact - a 20 years old Mercedes is more comfortable than a brand new Toyota :)
just like Fukushima/Chernobyl/three mile island has slowed the enthusiasm for nuclear energy even though it's safer than coal overall.
Good. Facebook is doing her a favor. Why not self-ban herself from Facebook for life? Or to put it in a nicer way, ban Facebook from her life for ever.

I am not a lawyer, but I don't think it is illegal for Facebook to censor and deny service to anyone they want. (Somebody can correct me if I am wrong). And in similar fashion, everybody is perfectly free to use Facebook and comply with their rules, or choose not to use it.

Maybe it is me, but I am having really difficult time understanding why people take Facebook so seriously and add so much value to it. It is just another cheap entertainment website. There are so many more.
Perhaps, especially if you mean that surge pricing will be above regular taxi pricing.

That said, I'm fine with that. I live in a suburban area and getting a (traditional) taxi is complicated and getting a car service is both complicated and expensive. Uber is simple and convenient and I'm fine with paying (some) premium for that.
I like slack as a tool. How I used it mostly was for important things right then. We would have slack up and if something was posted you looked, because it was most likely urgent. No meme sending or idle chat allowed. I dont want my time wasted by looking at a stupid meme. Work and work only on slack is what works for us. (exception we use it when ordering lunch lol)
Productivity has to be measured with the implemented use-case held stable.

Visual FoxPro was probably the pinnacle of "easy to make CRUD apps", but the result is, at most, an program that runs on a few computers on a corporate Intranet, that each must use a specific version of Windows with a pre-installed runtime.

A modern LAMP app, despite being composed of layers upon layers of kludges, can be immediately interacted with from any computer in the world, with no sysadmin experience, by entering a URL, and—with no particular effort into architecture or scaling—allows for thousands of simultaneous users to submit changes to the same data in a perfectly consistent fashion with no "whole document is locked for modification"-type problems.

The LAMP app also has a number of modular boundaries that the FoxPro app doesn't: the backend server treats its database as a black box, so it could actually be a replicated cluster, or a different DBMS the next week; the frontend JS treats the backend as an opaque HTTP API, so either of the two could be rewritten or outsourced, and the API could be repurposed by new clients with no additional effort put in on the backend team's behalf; the frontend is built up from layers of specifications (e.g. CSS features) that are each optional, such that you can visit the site from a copy of IE7 on a Windows XP machine in a dusty Korean net-cafe and it'll still let you use the app, just in a less pretty fashion; and so forth.

(And this is ignoring the 10x advantage in accessibility for blind users markup gives over old pixel-blitting GUIs. Modern GUIs are "markup-based" in a similar sense—Cocoa NIBs, Microsoft XAML, etc.—because it's far easier to accessibility-enable a frontend when it exists in the form of an UA-inspectable DOM, rather than an opaque framebuffer.)

If all you need is the paired-Windows-98-machines-in-your-office use-case, sure, use Visual FoxPro (or whatever the modern equivalent is. FileMaker Pro?) You can go even simpler, if you like, and just use green-screen terminals pointed at an ncurses app running on your office machine. But if you need the Internet use-case—where everyone with any tech experience level can use your app from anywhere on any old device, all at the same time—nothing less than the stack of kludges we've got is actually up to solving that problem.
The Skills and Traits Employers Want to See in Your Resume
Apps are told when a phone's battery is low so that they can change into a battery conserving state.
In BlackBerry's defense, Nokia, Palm and Pocket PC also got sidelined by the iPhone and, to a lesser extent, Android.
From the article: "The ride-hailing service is alerted when a customer's phone battery is running low because the app switches into power-saving mode."
Which works fine until there's also a Lyft car that's not price gouging. You can only price discriminate if you have a monopoly.
How do those people get any work done in a room like the one in the headline photo?
Yes! I can't believe those people actually get anything done!
Because someone thought apps (web or otherwise) having access to battery status information would, in the usual language, "allow us to improve the user experience", and that feature was added. It's the same justification as for GPS location, except in this case those who opposed did not notice that someone could use battery status for exploiting and profiling users too.
I'm embarrassed that I didn't even think that something like this would exist.

Thank you for posting it!
>Look at Alpha GO, it is an algorithmic exploit of a game, not a breakthrough

Huh?
Yep, I think this is the lesson we learned last week. The world doesn't end if any one of us drops.
Laminar flow might actually be faster than turbulent flow where everyone perceives they are "getting ahead".

Particularly when this "getting ahead" behavior results in accidents that require road closures that back up highways for hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic.
i think it's a little early in the self driving cycle to be upset at their speed. There's no limitation keeping them going slow. In fact they could easily and safety drive much faster.
Yes, once they get past the initial adjustment, assuming we have actual autonomous cars, and not 95% autonomous that require a completely alert individual driving them, then the commute is not lost time, it can be time spent working, relaxing, or doing something besides simply staring at the bumper of the person ahead of them.
Theranos needs to prove that a blood sample oozing from an open wound (a finger prick) is in any way comparable to sterile blood extracted directly from a vein. They also need to show that analyzing a diluted and contaminated blood sample with the Siemens instrument produces an accurate result.

At this point, I think we should assume that because Theranos won't publish any studies about the scientific foundations of their work in peer-reviewed journals or preprint sites, they have nothing of value to show us.
Okay, I got a good laugh out of this one and appreciate it.
Can you identify a scenario where an injury is possible that death cannot be an outcome?
No, the purpose of surge pricing is to get more drivers out on the road. That, in turn, is to increase profits, but I'm fairly certain you could argue that pretty much anything any company does is to "increase profits"
See this doc for details of how iOS lets apps request to be notified upon entering low power mode: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Perfor...
> The watch hasn't really done well

Can we stop this? 6.5 Billion in it first year?
> ... Mark Zuckerberg’s message hasn’t got through to Facebook’s employees.

What is this referring too?
Stories, please!
Snippets for scientific computing and data visualization in Python
Or because we try to check email only twice a day (so that we are focusing on actual development).

That's the thing I'd like to have in our chat - a way to mark a message as "not urgent" (or vice-versa), so that it doesn't interrupt their work. Usually I just end up emailing them, but that just adds a bunch of friction to both sides, and even then some of my colleagues are expected to reply to emails with little delay, since they handle client support.

On IRC one can configure the client to alert the users only when the message matches certain terms, but we use Hangouts :|
Looks great, but $75? Really? Why are these books so expensive? And no (cheaper) kindle edition?
The new norm...
Ask HN: How do I become a Customer Success Manager?
Hi HN!

I wanted some career advice and I'm hoping that someone here will see it!

I have a strong Web (SaaS) Development background. I also have some Project Management, Marketing and Sales experience. I also know how to managing a fast-food franchise!

I recently found out that Customer Success Management is a thing and would love to become a Customer Success Manager.

I'm technical, can speak business, love making people happy... how do I do this?

Would love your advice.
d3 is way overkill for static chart (i skimmed your code and there's no callback for events)

Interactives are what missing from others. Sure you can see the largest circle, wonder what that is, look up csv, ... second largest circle? rinse repeat. wasting time? sure

with d3, you can hover a circle and get its horiz and vert rule to indicate its center's position on x and y axis -- also a small popup box for simple info, like name, id, etc.

you can summon external vis by clicking on said circle and say, a table appears under the chart, showing rows of data relevant to said circle, or ... other charts for the matter.

the code is not terribly long. i did it 3 years ago.

i don't know how to do interactive chart like i did in d3 in matplotlib, granted i haven't touched matplotlib for 13 years (i think i used numarray back then and feed the result to matplotlib because i refused to use matlab)
I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. While Facebook is legally allowed to censor what they please (at least in the US), they present themselves as a neutral platform. Their CEO was just speaking with political pundits concerned about just this kind of behavior.

Beyond that, Facebook is much closer to a utility than a single media entity these days and it's disturbing to see them wielding political power in this way. They hold a great deal of power over nearly every online media publisher around the world. Even in a case where I agree with their political slant, I don't want to see this happening.

It pains me to say it but due to their monopoly power over the social graph, it might be time for more regulation.
When we hype our science, discoveries are diminished
An Indian Daughter, Remembering
In the banking world you can get too big to fail.

I wonder if in the social media world you can get too big to allow censorship?
Well, you can see how it worked with Twitter, which had the same breakdown with right wing people.