skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Kind of unrelated, but I'm super happy to be working at GitLab.

Nearly everything we do is out in the open, and most features are available in CE, which is fully open source (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce). I've wanted great, open source tools that don't look like dung for a long long time, and GitLab is definitely reaching that goal. Can't help but gush about the product we're building. :D

Here are some of my favorite upcoming features: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/17575, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14661, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/15337
I've been running https://briefmetrics.com/ for almost 3 years now (email reports of your Google Analytics).

It has been going back and forth between 100% running itself and investing a couple months of effort into it. I discovered I really don't enjoy marketing/promotion, so it has languished for sure. It's up to a bit over $1,000/mo right now which I'm fairly happy about but I feel it could easily be x2-x5 of that with some sales effort commitment.

I'll write down some lessons I learned in hopes that I'll take my own advice in the future:

1) Avoid big-effort partnerships.

Briefmetrics was a partner in an app store launch for one of the biggest domain registrars. This required integrating with their single-signon and payment system and coordinating with their team in India and altogether what looked like a week of work turned into ~3 months of hell. A year later, all this effort yielded approximately 0 customers. The target audience fit was not very good (new domains is the worst time to get analytics reports) and the sunk cost of effort kept me going far longer than it should have.

I finally pulled the plug last month and I sleep much better. (Even pulling the plug took weeks longer than it should have, ugh. Never again.)

2) Commit effort to marketing/sales.

This is definitely advice I need to take for myself. I launched a bunch of new features to upsell existing customers (mobile reports, ecommerce, etc) but none of this is advertised anywhere for new customers. In fact, I've had a professionally-done redesign mockup sitting in my Dropbox for over a year now that I'm yet to implement. I have a half-dozen related blog post ideas I need to write about, audiences to target.

I'm seeing a lot of similar issues with other people here, "I built this but they didn't come." I feel you.

3) Seriously, do marketing/sales.

I built Briefmetrics because it's something I needed and my friends needed. I instantly had a set of initial paying customers, but organic growth from a small seed of users is slooooooow.

Meanwhile I see great salespeople grow to tons of customers on what amounts to a product cobbled together in a few hours. This totally makes sense to me, and we all need to respect it more.

I'm allocating a couple of weeks on the calendar to just focus on this. If you built something you're proud of, you owe it to the world to do a better job promoting it.
Google plans to bring password-free logins to Android apps by year-end
As I commented elsewhere, Clojure very deliberately adopts the stance that type systems like Haskell's are valuable but heavyweight, and chose development speed and concision over types.

In my own work, I chose Clojure because it mirrored my experiences: that type systems weren't worth the trade-offs for me and my field.

Would I prefer stronger typing in different domains (longer project times available, greater consequences of failure like medical devices, etc.)? Sure, and I have in the past. But it's not the case that dynamic languages are always the incorrect choice, like smoking cigarettes.
Yeah, that's how terms like "real time" get overloaded and confusing for people.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, on my computer it's 85% faster using the direct links than loading drive.google.com. See the head to head matchup on the about page: fastdocs.co/about.html
The act of starting the document takes roughly the same time (a few miliseconds of difference on my average work PC).

However, this doesn't apply to the "waiting" time required for the Google Drive UI to load, which does take an awful lot of time (compared to the minimalistic FastDocs UI).
This one is nice and clean:

https://github.com/soegaard/minipascal
Two pieces of gratis software (DeepSkyStacker Live) and RegiStax already do something like this, as well as PixInsight and the venerable Maxim DL, among others.
But those seem mostly like chief investment officers, CEOs, doctors, dentists and surgeons...

I mean, public service can pay well if you are a commissioner or head of a for-profit part of public service. I'm not sure there is much of a comparison to be made for software developers, though.
Nicely done! Can actually start using this service immediately ;)

How easy would it be for Illustrio to take requests for specific illustrations from the community?
How about stop being jquery dependant once and for all: document.querySelector(".r3z-hide").classList.remove("r3z-hide")

No need to use a third party library
The author forgets the fact that the conditions listed imply zero economic profit. That still covers the operators' opportunity costs (i.e. what they could have made switching to their next best alternative). Profits converge to zero in any industry where incumbents are not protected via government violence. Industries are born, firms are formed to capture the supra-normal profits during the initial period of adjustment.

So, yes, in the long run, Uber is a zero profit proposition ... Unless localities set and enforce new quotas on how many people can drive for a living. We have seen this movie before.
Highly recommend against stock photography. Especially with sites like Pixabay, it's a race to the bottom. And when I sold stock photos ten years ago, it wasn't that profitable anyway.
For users, I think it's better to ask to install rustup from rustup.sh, and then just `cargo install wscat`.
The DOJ argued that they should be able to prosecute for revealing classified documents without revealing what the documents were. When the judge prevented that, the case collapsed and they were forced to settle.
Sounds a bit like a chip on the shoulder when, in this context, you talk about radio towers, which aren't windmills or solar plants (although yes, accidents happen also there).
I usually fast for 16 hours a day, and I don't wake up hungry at all. Usually I only start to get hungry around the ~14-15 hour mark.

Hunger is something that can be trained, not simply a static phenomenon. There's a reason you get hungry when you smell something delicious. If you eat every day shortly after waking up, I'd certainly expect to be hungry at that time.
IIRC Microsoft killed Visual Basic with the introduction of VB.Net back around 2000.

Why are they celebrating its birthday?
This java project gives you a glimpse at how it all works. It was extracted out of a now defunkt db vendor (I think?). https://calcite.apache.org/
It doesn't sound like you've read any of the articles. There are details and tradeoffs and limitations found by the people talking about them. And there is a massive knowledge vacuum because if there is a good solution, it's not something that is obvious and well discussed by Apple. Ignoring and dismissing them doesn't make them actually go away.

Here's two on just the Responder chain:
http://inessential.com/2016/05/17/responder_chain_followup
http://shapeof.com/archives/2016/5/dynamic_swift.html

The bigger point (which is in that first Brent Simmons link) is that people have built all sorts of frameworks and tools over the past 20 years depending using of the dynamic features of Obj-C. Some are Apple's like all the above plus others like Interface Builder and XCTest, but other people have built their own things too that rely on the same concepts. How do these people move forward in a Swift world?

None of these people are arguing that Swift is terrible and going back to Obj-C. They are trying to use Swift. They are only interested in solving the problems they have (and well). When Swift fails to solve a problem or is far worse than its predecessor, there is a problem.

Not everybody can nonchalantly throw their stuff overboard like you are willing to do with Core Data.
Yes, this is what I meant. One prominent example is GitHub. As far as I know they still take pjax/turbolinks to an extreme, in favor of a true client-side template/view framework.
After GitHub moved to unlimited repositories, I started to question if our small team should stay on GitLab - and this just triple-confirmed that we will.

Awesome feature for an already awesome product. Great job!
Analysis of the Visual Tech of Overwatch
A single anecdote disproves "rare"?
tl;dr: To get to the number 2 trending spot, we had 6,200 organic downloads within a period of 24hrs, with 3,000 of those packed within the first 3 hours. We gained over 12,000 downloads total in 4 days.
I'm not even going to try to reply on the sexist nature of the second half of this comment, but focus on the startup-related one.

Your guy switched to another company because you were on track to become rich off his work, and he was not. If you incentivized him right, he'd stay. Did you ask him why he left? Because if not, you really did not learn a lesson.
Do you guys put your stuff out there? Recruiters can't really harass you if they don't know you exist.
Jesus Christ. At that point surviving is the curse.
I don't know that it's laziness, as much as just fighting human evolution. With nothing to actually touch, touch-based interfacing with things isn't very easy. Our fingers are literally designed to feel input, not to act as a simple stylus for our optic nerve.

And anyway, this type of invisible interface makes you look dumb (http://dilbert.com/strip/1994-10-12).
This is quite common.

Good code dreams range from symbolic "module" level code flows, down to individual line by line execution, observing the flow is like watching people dancing, or music playing.

Bad code dreams involve getting stuck on a single bug. Getting caught in non-terminating loops, and more abstractly, not being able to see a solution and getting caught oscillating between two poor options.

It's interesting because I was discussing this with other developers and data scientists and they said it was common too -- even the "bad" code dreams I mentioned above were also their bad code dreams - getting stuck in non-terminating loops was the most common 'nightmare'
From a grammar perspective, it seems odd to declare property types as prefixes instead of matching the return type syntax. Were suffixed types considered?

class Person
{
public $name : string;
public $age : int;
public $isEmployee : bool;
}
Is S/MIME really that widely used? It seems to be sort of widely deployed, but not necessarily understood or required by users in secure environments.
I really liked 'Database in Depth' by C.J. Date.
Yes. What is funny is that some of my countrymen, who lived in Japan as expats, left the area because of radiation, and came back home, where the natural background radiation is higher than in the evacuated Fukushima area.
Or more simplistic:

"Me also."
Yep you are totally correct. I only point this out because the tool presented here does not do the same thing as other contract systems, but could (as you say) be used as a building block to get there.
HW Launches Human Loyalty Brand to Improve Omni-Channel Consumer Engagement
Mortgage backed securities were not risky because they were diversified. They were risky because nobody fully understood how undiversified they were, especially at the lower grade tranches.

Meanwhile, LC was alive in '08, and you can look at how their notes performed. Investors lost single digit percentages. In other words, they beat S&P by a lot.
Thanks for the kind words! (I work at Nylas.)

We actually have PGP support coming soon as well. ;)
I have a lot of fond memories of VB6, as I started using it for an internship in college, when then I got hired full-time after graduation to keep up the app, as the sole developer/IT professional at the company. VB6 had its flaws, certainly, but as a 21 year old kid figuring out how to architect a software system, get projects done, and get the system working on the existing Novell Netware infrastructure, I didn't need to fight with C++ or deal with the vagaries of Delphi. VB6 was a great tool, VB.NET became a different tool, and I wish for the sake of not-really-programmers everywhere, VB7 had existed.
Timpani. She played a flute also, but not over the summer.

Every time I mention this people kind of look at me funny when I offer my co-trigger explanation as "some kind of bug", but I was reading Dawkins at the time and had come to stop thinking about unitary causes for phenotypic expressions.

Of course, that's not the easiest course of conversation to travel down with most people, so I just sort of accept the silence that follows. It does give me the fun little anecdote of how my daughter was deathly allergic to peanuts for a year, but then she got better.
According to propublicas own analysis, the claim of bias cannot be shown to be statistically significant. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-analyzed-the-compa...

This article is terrible data journalism and probably deliberately misleading.

Step 1: write down conclusion.

Step 2: do analysis.

Step 3: if analysis doesn't support conclusion, write down a bunch of anecdotes.

Really, here's her R script: https://github.com/propublica/compas-analysis/blob/master/Co...

Just read that. It's vastly better than this nonsensical article.
I want this, but only if I can control exactly what I can see.
In a few more days I'll be 26. I started programming with Visual Basic 6, since then I have moved on. From time to time though, I can't help but try it out again now and then. I've seen many programmers start out with it and move on through the field into other languages. Many interesting projects have been made in Visual Basic 6 alone. Everything from private server software, to game cheating tools (packet injections), online rpg game engines, and so on and so forth (and throw in malware in there somewhere too). I am grateful for Visual Basic despite having moved from it, I know many despised it, and some of that group once coded in it, but I have to appreciate my roots despite the good or the bad I still learned programming through VB6. Thank you to whoever has ever worked on Visual Basic 6. Happy belated birthday as well.
> That's true. My point was just that your type definition does not tell the compiler/typechecker that the light, if it is currently yellow, must become red before it can become green.

Ah, yes, I understand what you mean now, but you can actually encode that if you really want to. (If we assume Haskell, there's very limited DT programming which will probably let you state which transitions are legal. I must admit I'm not very up-to-speed on it, but see the next paragraph.)

The thing is that people usually don't want to go that far. Whether you're working in a typed scenario or not. In the unityped scenario, you can't go that far without reinventing a (run-time?) type-checker.

> That's a rule of the state machine and, if the compiler doesn't stop you from writing a function that breaks that rule then your state machine has not been modeled fully within the type system.

> I'm pretty sure this is what Hickey et al mean when they say that Haskell's type system is not powerful enough to describe a state machine.

Certainly this is true, but if you're in an entirely unityped setting... do you have any guarantees?

(To which the answer is, of course, "no".)

Foregoing all guarantees just because you can't guarantee everything seems... rash. (I believe this is the position that Hickey takes, for better or worse.)

Obviously, that's why I, personally, prefer languages with multiple types.

Note: I do think there are geniune scenarios where unityped may win out, e.g. "generic data transformation without knowing anything about the structure", but there's even "typed" answers for that, e.g. lenses. For my money -- and I'm obviously semi-joking -- ekmett >> hickey :)
Ask HN: Hobbies sans screen?
Without the constant buzz of friends around a college campus, I'm pretty much an internet addict. In school, it was easy to keep busy with schoolwork and work-work. I know the importance of recharging between workdays, but without school I find it harder to maintain variety.

Most of the hobbies I'm interested in unfortunately involve a computer screen to some degree, or at the very least a lot of reading, which to be honest after reading all day isn't appealing either. I currently spend most evenings anxious about what I should be doing and end up futzing around on the internet, and then I go to work the next day frustrated that the entire previous day was identical to the incoming one.

Most of my friends play lots of computer games but I find myself nauseated thinking about home-desk-life, and couches feel only marginally better.

Outdoor activities seem great but seem pretty strictly for the weekend, generally I leave work as the sun is coming down.

Doing things in groups sounds good but I'm really looking for something that I can almost always escape to on any given weeknight, alone if necessary.

What do you do with your time?
https://metroui.org.ua/
Do men or women have more brothers?
The original source was posted and discussed extensively at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11729438
Because it brings out the nostalgia for people. Also a way to signal how long you've been programming, or that you stared programming early on in life.
Sure, that's great. Or I can meditate or do a ceremony and get a first-hand journey like that. Why watch a film?*

In Hyper-Reality, it's showing an experience where mainstream access to VR and AR gives mainstream access to some of the psychedelic experiences, and what that says about our civilization, and what's coming in the future. When I read the Wikipedia entry for "Enter the Void" does not seem as interesting to me.

* I do watch films like this. My point though isn't that Hyper Reality resembles a psychedelic experience, but that it gives us a glimpse of the future where pseudo-psychedelic consciousness shift is available in the mainstream, and part of the fabric of every day experience.
thanks for this excellent explanation; this provides just about all the justification I need. looking forward to toying around with this.
Respectfully, I've "created" on every iPad I've owned since the first. I write docs in Pages, create music in GarageBand, design web site graphics in Pixelmator, and edit code in Coda (and Prompt/Emacs).

Tablets make it easy to consume, but do not fool yourself into thinking that's all they can do. My iPad Pro is more capable than the laptop I owned two years ago, and costs less as well.
I didn't. This (or something very similar) was on HN a few weeks ago so I remembered it.
Despite much of the hate VB has gotten over the years, it served an insanely important purpose in the rise of internal business software. When I was at MSFT, me and the PM who owned the compilers for VB.NET and C# did a usergroup tour through Florida and I was amazed at how much of their world still runs on VB6 applications. Something like 1/3 of insurance software still does. It was one of the biggest reasons that Microsoft had to keep extending support for XP.

The transition from VB6 to VB.NET was a really sad one as it lost a lot of people - .net is a lot more difficult than 6 was. The result is that an entire group of people simply stopped making software and now we have businesses running on applications that are more than 20 years old that some random person in the company threw together over a week. There's a huge gulf between building a VB6 app and throwing together a web app today and despite much of the progress that has been made, we've taken some big steps back in terms of accessibility.

The difference between VB.NET and C# is pretty superficial, but I sincerely hope that someday people can experience the magic that something like VB6 offered. A lot of people got their start in programming thanks to it (myself included) and it's sad that it fell by the wayside to make way for "real programming."
Search engines will just need to take context into account, I remember a lot of confusion between searches for Cisco IOS versus Apple IOS back when IOS first took on the name, but with a few keywords to provide context, now it's pretty easy to get relevant results.
I like that angle, it's a new way to think about cathedrals for me.

With respect to free software though, the pertinent aspect of these architectures is the forkability. Once the cathedral is designed, there is no room for anything off script. You can't have your own services in the cathedral on Tuesday nights.

But if you don't like the way your meat lady treats her chickens, you can just open up your own poultry stand across the path from her. There isn't a central plan. The plan emerges from the voluntary action of the participants.
'What made breakfast into a distinct meal dominated by cold cereal? Ad campaigns like the one that coined the phrase "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" in 1944.'

http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/
Indiegogo improves crowdfunding with a stamp of approval for hardware projects
In the last 30 days the site received 27,000 page views and 7,000 sessions. Organic search made up 80% of traffic. The concept of a curated list for XYZ can be translated for other ideas, sure. Getting traffic was part luck for me. At the time it was a low competition keyword but now there are a lot of similar sites up.
I honestly wished they would of somehow open sourced Visual Basic 6, it was quite interesting being able to create software rapidly and easily that couldn't be "decompiled" the way .NET / Java applications can be reversed back from bytecode. Unlike Delphi / Pascal which are a bit harder to just pick up and learn by comparison (try just giving a child Delphi, and then give them VB6 and see which one they could work quicker in). I think VB.NET had not much of a point with a language like C# around. Maybe they should of redone some parts of Visual Basic .NET to make it more adaptable by all programmers. Multi-line comments is one thing I wished it had.