skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here is an unsolicited email I sent last night. I sent it to spinn3r, but any company doing "competitive intelligience", market research, big data, ect can be subbed in here for their name, because the browser and search engine wars are starting. The email:

Just read the blog post on optimizing the elasticsearch cluster. It sounds like you have a pretty awesome deployment setup. Now, I know competitive intelligience is "hot" and "trendy", I mean, for sure it isn't mobile-first omni-channel blockchain bitcoin disruptive "trendy", but it's prety close. Now, I jest, but what I am about to say next I am dead serious about: your product is a search engine, just let people use it as a goddamn search engine.

Now, let me explain. For like probably over a year now I have been making the case that between google, elastic and apache there is just a goddamn open source version of google sitting out there. Would a consumer facing pay for search engine be profitable? idk, is your product profitable? I suspect there is a lot of people who would pay a $9.99 a month to upload and control page rank and not have google own them. Lets assume you were able to capture even 0.01% of googles customers e.g. 1 billion people and got them to pay you like $9.99, then you'd have just shy of $1M MRR, and $11.98M annually. Obviously, you could do some nice caching of resources like stack overflow, reddit, hacker news, and wikipedia and simply store peoples preferences (sort of a heirarchical git like system) and then you would have some pretty swiggity sweet optimizations.

You know what might really add value? Having NLP on your own custom tailored information database. I bet people (who search and use the internet daily) would probably see much higher leverage from this than the sentiment analytics you can give them on a competitor. Also, as an aside, you should be mining the competitors customer support channels not only for sentiment but for their inabiliy to service feature requests/complaints. Proabably one of the biggest predictors of why wealthfront lost MS to betterment. Regardless though, if you guys are looking for an expansion strategy or a pivot, this is it.

tl;dr. Peter Theil was wrong (no, not just about Clinkle) but it is true that:

The next larry page & sergei brin will build a search engine.
You don't need an internet connection to use it. It has 4GB of storage and can do offline syncing over WiFi

> You can also use Core’s 4GB of built-in storage to access your favorite playlists, podcasts, and audiobooks.

> Core also works without a SIM card or cellular plan, using WiFi to sync offline music and workouts.
Only in a very few select contexts.

1. When you have a fiduciary duty.
2. When you are on a witness stand.
3. When you are speaking to a federal agent.
4. When you are committing fraud. (See #1)
5. ???

None of these are relevant to mass media.
> Yes, the big ones are conservative, because every other one is liberal.

How would one measure this? How would one know if what they're detecting is not an opposing bias, but a lack of reinforcement of one's personal bias?

> Conservatives flock to places like Fox and WSJ because they're a refuge from the liberal bias that pervades the rest of the media

That's the story, anyway.
Google's New Custom Chip May Not Live Up to the Hype
Obnam: easy, secure backup program
I am about to start a new project with a company where COBOL is still very much a force. COBOL is far from dead and there are very serious applications using COBOL in mainstream use.
And you just provided a textbook example of how the term FUD is usually applied.
Doesn't mean it's not legacy
>this can happen in France given the way in which laws are prosecuted,

I am a French lawyer.

So I have to disagree. This is not the case here. The prosecutors are plainly saying that Google did something outright illegal by misinterpreting on purpose a clause in the French Irish tax convention.

According to the prosecutors in this case Google used a clause sheltering pure advertisement and research subsidiaries of Irish companies from having to pay French tax. But this clause is clearly intended to protect subsidiaries doing market research and advertising a product in advance of actually selling it in France (And also for subsidiaries doing purely informative business (tech support, warranty management etc.) and pure research).

So Google is saying that they do advertisement, so that this clause apply to them, but a reading of the part of the convention that was made public by the prosecutors, clearly show that this is apparently wrong. But the fact that I still haven't found the full convention is a huge caveat :).

So most of developed countries would have enough to prosecute.
Splinter Cell Blacklist Free Download Full Version Here
Privacy issues aside, I'm not sure that the folks who trade their privacy for a discount coffee count as "desperate" in any sense of the word.

I do think that they perhaps haven't thought through the implications of what giving up their purchasing history could mean in a decade or two. Or maybe they have, and they're making the very rational choice to focus on the concrete effects of the here & now rather than some abstract consequences in the future. Data has an expiration date, after all.
I might as well spend less money on this then, yes?
> Is this pressure enough to force out "legitimate methods of EU tax avoidance" via legislation?

The problem is still that nobody can answer this question: If an international company designs its products in America, manufactures them in Asia, sells them in France and has its headquarters in Ireland, what portion of its total income is it supposed to report in each country?

Any kind of non-circular definition effectively converts the "income tax" into a tax on the thing that happens in the country where the income has to be reported, which nobody wants to admit (because people don't like sales taxes or job taxes), and which nobody even actually wants because it will then discourage that thing from happening in that country.

What people want is for the money to come from the corporation without that fact altering anyone's behavior in any way. But that's not how taxes work. If you want to collect taxes from companies that sell things in your country, you have a de facto sales tax and everything that comes with it. Either accept that and call it what it is or admit that you would rather get the money from somewhere else (or not have it).
Scientists are just as confused about the ethics of big data research as you
The 'single programmer' bit is the most damning IMO. It assumes that a programming language is objectively good or bad, when they are instead a medium for creation where the personal affinities of the creator is the most important factor.
This might be a bit much for a single person, but your question reminded me of a piece[0] from last November which covered the creation of a local ISP, the Doe Bay Internet Users Association[1], on the Orcas Island after the residents had poor experiences with CenturyLink.

The ISP also has some technical details on their website[2].

Previous discussion on that piece[3].

[0]: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/how-a-...

[1]: https://dbiua.org

[2]: https://dbiua.org/technical-details/

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10487419
While many people may not be able to swing exercising all their shares or a generally-meaningful number of shares, you can exercise one.

As I type this I find myself wondering if it's not a bad idea to do in general, so that you move from "options holder" to "stockholder". Comments from those with experience?
Man! That is just awesome, and badass!
My respects!

[Orson Welles clapping GIF]
You are literally incorrect as I literally quoted someone suggesting otherwise.
NMSLIB: an efficient k-NN search library for generic spaces
Ok, I can be more explicit:

If the funded research is bad -- and it is an area of interest (political, social, industrial, etc) -- then it won't survive for long. So you are correct, if Philip Morris funded bad research relating to the mating habits of fruit flies in a zero gravity environment - it is unlikely to be challenged in a timely manner... but as nobody cares, it doesn't matter.
We have recently released a new version of our Non-Metric Space Library (NMSLIB). NMSLIB is an efficient and extendible toolkit for searching in generic non-metric spaces. Our killer feature is generality. Despite being general, some of the methods may outperform the celebrated LSH in the spaces where LSH methods seem to work best.

For more details, please, check our repo and/or my reflections on the state of the library and future work https://github.com/searchivarius/nmslib/tree/v1.5: http://searchivarius.org/blog/what-non-metric-space-library
Does this have provisioning for easy automatic backups and restoration? I can never find one that does both good automation with secure remote backups, and also tackle a good restoration experience.
Silk: markdown based document-driven RESTful API testing
Defender of the Crown turns 30
Why should we deny people the right to sell themselves into slavery? It's their life, after all. Perhaps in a generation or two our society will degrade to the point that, to the poor, slavery looks like a pretty attractive option. For some, perhaps it already does.

In any capitalist system, if anything is permitted, someone (i.e. the poor) will be coerced into doing it.
Seems like a hilarious parody. The only problem is that it isn't typeset in Comic Sans, the official font of the OpenBSD web presence.
At least Google acts somewhat optimistic (trying to fund as many interesting things as possible). Apple and Microsoft are the kings of surgically ensuring positive contribution margin to the exclusion of voyaging into the unknown. I have never run a $x00B company to know what runs through your head, but I find it strange that this cash is not plowed into new ideas.
>most of us self-censor our news (liberal vs conservative media) to the point where we're largely reading only views we agree on (HN is no different in that regard).

I wouldn't call what happens on HN self censorship. HN is heavily censored. One says things the authorities here agree with or one's posts are down voted off the board. New users don't have the ability to down vote. Sometimes user?id=dang steps in and deletes posts personally.
> "BCHS (pronounced /biːtʃəz/, beaches) is for real development. It's a hipster-free, open source software stack for web applications."

Everything about how this is written is so hipster. Cool idea though.
> They would say that intrinsic value is the only "real" value.

Thing is, this is a testable hypothesis (at least in theory): measure whether those "intrinsically valued" languages make a true impact on software cost. Often, it is the very same people who tout this intrinsic value who deliberately shy away from testing this hypothesis empirically.

It's interesting that when Java's original designers analyzed customer needs vs. features offered by academic languages, they discovered that most value in those languages wasn't in the linguistic features but in the extra-linguistic features, so they deliberately put all the good stuff in the VM, and packaged it in a language designed to be as unthreatening and as familiar as possible. It was designed to be a wolf in sheep's clothing:

It was clear from talking to customers that they all needed GC, JIT, dynamic linkage, threading, etc, but these things always came wrapped in languages that scared them. -- James Gosling[1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2WQuWVrgQ
Not everything needs to be fried....
Also, wow. And many grats. That was in another sense quite a feat.
Good point. I'm glad I stick to algae oil.
Google to Increase Size, Frequency of Ads
AMD’s Zen Summit Ridge 8-core CPUs on Par with Intel I7 5960X Extreme
I hate these stupid "my db is better than whatever db" articles.
1) What db to be used depends on the situation
AND MORE IMPORTANTLY
2) what experience your staff has

I can say that 10 years go, I would have chosen M$SQL over MySQL and it would have been the correct choice. At the time I had almost 10 years experience with M$SQL and almost none with MySQL. Now I have more than 10 years of MySQL under my belt. AND the MySQL experience is more current. Right now I could choose between the two based on specific features and performance characteristics. For me to pick Posgresql because of a specific feature would be insane because I don't experience with it. No knock on Posgresql ... maybe I'll spend time with it and pick it for some down-the-road project.

I have implemented couchdb as a caching solution. I know how to manage, backup, and restore the database server. I have managed a 5 node cluster. If you ask me to implement NoSQL, it would be my choice for 2 reasons:
1. It can do the job.
2. I have experience making it do the job.

I'm sure there are 10 million people out there would would choose mongo in the same situation. The would not be wrong and they may come up with a superior solution. For me to implement Mongo today would be wrong - I would almost certainly come up with an inferior solution. for them, it would be stupid not to.

I'm not saying "don't learn anything new". I'm saying "don't gamble your business on technology with which you're not familiar".

Its a bit like backups ... the most important thing about a backup is not the technology you use, but whether you are capable of restoring and maintaining the backups.
Note that there's no need for a conspiracy or even a bias. Or even an official stated policy.

FB is ground zero for hyper holiness signalling spiral, extroverted, somewhat narcissistic, workforce automation software for the middle school girl social experience of shunning and friending and whatnot. Its has little relation to the real world, yet strangely reflects it, much like an augmented reality game like Ingress. It would be highly surprising if the tiny fraction of the population that are "whales" in terms of unusually heavy participation in such a weird activity are of a political outlook remotely similar to that of the general population.

Its like a shocking expose of the really large amount of praying going on in churches. It doesn't require a conspiracy or a mysterious pro-prayer bias. All you need for non-typical beliefs and behavior is a weird filter that keeps out most of the general population plus self selection bias and you're off to the races.

Theres probably a more general theory that the more wall clock time is spent by participants in a subculture, the less likely the subculture's values will align with, or even make sense when compared to, the main culture. Groupthink conquerors all.
Being left behind is a very real problem if you're a contractor. You just have to learn the tools that everyone is using, including Angular, React, React Native, and Node.js. There's still Rails jobs out there, but they seem to be disappearing.
What other use cases are suitable with this setup than obnoxious ad-tech?
Pebble CEO, Migicovsky, says about the Core, "Look, when you go for a run you can take this instead of taking your phone."

I think the Core is really interesting but his hopeful "instead of" vision might be naive, based on the Core's capabilities.

Leaving a smartphone at home when it only weighs as much as a gulp of water (e.g. a 4 oz iPhone) seems like a step 20 years backwards in convenience and peace of mind when you can't call or message from a Core.
A "pro establishment bias" is a conservative bias.
Using Kubernetes health checks
I do not think that this:

>>> print("my home is $HOME")
my home is $HOME
>>> echo "my home is $HOME"
my home is /home/snail

constitutes progress in user experience. And that's from the tutorial (I appreciate the honesty though)
Nobody cares about your privacy anymore
This article isn't exactly wrong. Certainly, running on your target platform and having library support for the things you're trying to do are critical features for getting anything done, and a great language that lacks these things in the wrong tool for the job. That doesn't mean criticism of bad design choices in, say, Javascript is mistaken, or as the author describes it, "troubling". It just means you probably have to use Javascript anyway[0].

It also leaves out another reason for learning languages and using them for pet projects: it makes you a better programmer. The more good languages you know, and idioms from those languages, the more likely you are to recognize when an ad-hoc implementation of one of those idioms is the right solution to a problem in the language you're actually using.

[0] Though possibly only as a compilation target.
FWIW, although I am not a lawyer, I do not read that the same way you do, to say that the waiver is unenforceable. Rather, it says that the corporation cannot unilaterally take away the right of inspection. That does not mean you cannot give up the right in exchange for something. In fact it strongly implies that you can as long as the waiver is "clearly and affirmatively expressed."
I have a similar success story. Thanks to Dropbox spamming me with "OMG UPGRADE!" every time I clicked anything, I found out about SyncThing (specifically SyncTrayzor for Windows).

Thanks, Dropbox!
Maybe because they started with a tiny LAMP system in 2004 and got stuck there to the point they invested considerable resources to write their own PHP interpreter and optimize MySQL.

From https://www.percona.com/blog/2014/03/27/a-conversation-with-...

"we had the MySQL engineering talent we needed to work with the Oracle team to get 5.6 ready for production at our scale."

"We all worked hard to adapt 5.6 to our scale and ensure that it would be production-ready. We found some issues after production deployment, but in many cases we could fix the problem and deployed new MySQL binary within one or two days"

"Performance regression of the CPU intensive replication was a main blocker for some of our applications" followed by a description of how they addressed that.

So it's not vanilla MySQL vs vanilla PostgreSQL. They tailored MySQL to their needs and keep honing it. What they do has little resemblance with what the other 99.9999% of companies do, and I'm probably missing a few 9s. Another excerpt from that post highlights the differences:

"For example, typical MySQL DBA at small companies may not encounter master instance failure during employment, because recent mysqld and H/W are stable enough. At Facebook, master failure is a norm and something the system can accommodate."

My take: if they started with and stuck to PostgreSQL they'd have to work on it as they did on MySQL.
"hipster-free" really? :-) I think it's the definition of hipster: Low value framework(compared to established web frameworks), will be used a bunch of devs for corner cases OR (mostly I guess) to brag about it (on hackernews, reddit, mailing-lists, forums, chats, etc.)

That said, I'm glad it exist, the more choice we have the better :D
Kasey, it is "origin/master" or "origin master"? Ha ha
The GNOME 3 desktop works pretty well with ICC profiles for me.
Scrap this. SSH worked just fine. The stupid tmux config is a little messed up.
French Tax Authorities Raid Google Offices in Paris
Having "been there, done that, got the t-shirt" I can tell you that no, there currently is no market for an unbiased search engine. We (Blekko) couldn't even get enough people to give up an email address in exchange for more control over their search experience.
related: friendfeed used a similar approach https://backchannel.org/blog/friendfeed-schemaless-mysql
Lua + C == welcome to C in the 21st century. :)

Seriously enough, Lua adds all those scripting high-level aspects that are missing from C. I know it's another language but its interplay with C gives strength to both of them. A good alternative of the C + Lua paradigm is of course Python.
Yes.

The manual [1] gives a restoration examples. The backup examples could be plugged into cron so as to make those automatic.

[1] http://code.liw.fi/obnam/manual/manual.html
The Tor control port protocol let's applications setup a hidden service automatically; Bitcoin Core recently released support for this, automatically using hidden services for incoming connection to your Bitcoin Core nodes.
At some point you forget a zero and it all goes to hell. Using 1 << n is far more concise.
"Attendance drops at your meetings...No regular project meetings are held..."

The number one sign being, of course, that your company has been taken over by people who think that having lots of meetings is a good idea.

Seriously.
FWIW, having worked in Google Search before and now working with the open-source/IaaS big data equivalents, there's no comparison. Elasticsearch is light years behind where Google ranking is, and the way the APIs are setup and the service is architected, it's doubtful you could ever use it to build a system that rivals Google. Some of the key signals that Google uses just require a different data organization than all the open-source tools support out of the box.
I guess everybody forgot the "what is Facebook's responsibility to stop a Donald Trump presidency?" internal messageboard question.
So..the cost of an extra kernel/userspace switch was too much for a file request that is going to be serviced by a server on the other side of the internet?..really?
According to another comment thread, those clauses are not enforceable.
It's obviously up to them if they want to omit even 2 million potential customers.

Personally I don't get the 'not enough value in supporting it' considering the other phone systems obviously had to gain support at some point - now, more than ever considering the universal platform, Windows development makes a lot of sense.

Still, it's their choice - I'll just spend my money elsewhere.
If you knew what newer versions of MySQL offered, you would be aware that it also supports JSON.
Man, that's funny. Thanks. That guy is an evil genius.
What about when the problematic becomes boilerplate?
it seems unlikely that Google, Facebook, etc. are offering us a good deal in exchange for our data; why would they when we don't even know what the fair price is
Except nobody is migrating to Windows, not on servers where it counts. It's an attempt to prevent developers from migrating to OS X, because OS X is and soon won't be (if Microsoft doesn't fumble this) more interoperable with Linux ecosystem.
Has MySQL added support for Common Table Expressions (CTE) yet? CTE was added to the SQL standard in 1999.

I ask because I always miss this feature when querying MySQL.
The old DirectX redists are dead and has been since Vista. I think they relied on the old XP display driver model. Only time they did it since was Platform Update for Windows Vista.
Good call. I guess I'll need to exercise a share, serve an affidavit, and have it tested in court.
> just steal these UIs

Look and feel may not be copyrightable but this would make a lot of people very uncomfortable in terms of possible liability (UI's can be covered under design patents, etc).