skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm torn between "That's better than the $30k it was the last time we discussed this years ago, which was itself better than $0" and "If one produces something as staggeringly joy-bringing as Dwarf Fortress, one can fairly easily avoid being a starving artist by applying single-digit hours of worksmanlike execution on monetization."
If Peter Thiel could do it, why not Google? It does not cost much for Google to invalidate the patent.
> Other than a handful number of people doing some fundamental research towards understanding the theoretical concepts of these methods, almost all the community now seems to target the development of more complex pipelines (that most likely cannot be reproduced based on the elements presented in the paper) which in most of the cases have almost no theoretical reasoning behind that can add 0,1% of performance on a given benchmark. Is this the objective of academic research? Putting in place highly complex engineering models that simply explore computing power and massive annotated data?

I last dabbled in image processing research around 2011. Probably most of the papers i read during the previous 5 years were small little epsilon papers that added no real value. I did some work in other fields and noticed a similar trend there. I always attributed it to the trend of PhDs being pumped through the system in ever greater numbers and the need for researchers to publish a paper every few months.
Excuse me, no jokes please.
Your reasons were the same that i had for not wanting to get an echo or google's device. Let's hope this software platform takes off AND that hardware device makers latch onto and run with this!
Often times, the products we make should really be features of a larger offering. Did you guys explore building on top of your contract tech or getting acquired by a company that requires your tech? for example:
1. Marketplace of services that need contract signing between parties.
2. Project management app for SMBs or freelancers
3. Legal document authoring app that extends to contract signing.

There are prolly more ...
The article says "Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards."

It wouldn't be the first time a news article was wrong, though it'd be nice to know for sure.
I have to say, I don't agree with this part at all:

"But most of the time, customers don’t really want the the features they are asking for. At least not very badly."

Customer feedback drives an absurd amount of our roadmap at Cronitor. We have a good idea of the many shortcomings of our product and are constrained primarily by resources in developing it faster. When a customer -- especially somebody on a trial -- puts their thumb on the scale of a specific flaw or deficiency, we look at it as an opportunity to seriously delight that user and at the same time level-up the product for all users after. We don't build everything asked for, but I would say "most of the time, customers know exactly what they need, and we try to give it to them within our ability."

A specific example for us would be Etsy, who uses Cronitor on a part of their business and during evaluation asked for a couple API endpoints to expose more advanced functionality.
One swallow doesn't make a summer.
Bayesian Deep Learning – Neural Networks Estimated with Variational Inference
I was using Google Voice for a few years. When I got Project Fi, I had to release my old number and get a new one. It was disappointing, but less annoying than I thought it would be (since I don't use my phone much).
Yet another example of the consumer software industry being completely impotent when it comes to defending itself.

Patent trolls file these frivolous lawsuits because they make millions and suffer zero consequences for their actions. Why? Because there is no industry trade group representing the software industry with any sort of teeth. They know software developers have money, and they know software developers are absurdly weak when it comes to defending themselves. Software developers are easy prey.

Other than the EFF who is out there to represent us with any measure of real leverage over the legal process? Who is out there with the muscle to make patent trolls and software unfriendly lawmakers have second thoughts when targeting developers?

With no lobbies or trade associations with any sort of power out there representing consumer software, anyone with even minor influence over government can simply walk all over software developers, again and again and again. The consumer software industry has enormous amounts of cash at it's disposal, surely a few cash rich companies can pool enough resources together to kick off a trade association worthy of punching back, hard
> If the developer cannot make a living by creating an app (or any other piece of software for that matter), why would they bother creating it at all?

If you're trying to make a living doing X, and you can't, then don't do it anymore. There are tens of thousands of apps that did not need to be made, yet were (no doubt the first step of someone's get-rich-quick scheme). If there is a need, the need will be met, eventually, by someone, and if it is truly a "need", people will be willing to pay money for it.

As others have mentioned, requiring updates to run correctly is actually a fault of the underlying system, and the change therein.

> People should be paid for creating and maintaining software.

This "should" is really nebulous. By whose standard/ethics? What belief system led you to believe that you were guaranteed to be paid for your work (software or otherwise)? You get paid when you sell something. You can create the shit out of lots of things and maintain lots of things, and not see a dime for your efforts. Software is no different -- you need to create something that will SELL and be profitable.

These two things do not go hand in hand. Creating and a necessity of maintenance are not necessarily the case. Remember when software used to be sold on CDs? You bought and were able to use the software for your given operating system, and for the given time that it had no bugs. There were no other guarantees, and I don't think there should be today.

If something in your app breaks, release an update and either release it for free, or charge for it. There is no need for me to pay you forever -- your certainly won't be releasing updates forever.

It's obvious why companies want to move everyone to this model though -- much easier to setup recurring incomes, and once it's ingrained in the culture, people won't remember a time when you bought a piece of software and you actually owned it.

Maybe this will be a chance for F/OSS to make a resurgence? Once people get tired of paying for Office 365 and their Flappy Bird subscription, they'll start looking for software that they can truly own
Pentest Proving Grounds
Well well well, didn't expect you to show up on HN.

Got any new projects going on?
Counterparty Announces Ethereum VM for Smart Contracts Creation on the Bitcoin
For evolutionary features, you're right. But I think the point in the article is that if you're trying to get to product-market fit, your customers' feature suggestions are rarely the ways to get there; you generally have to watch, think, synthesize, hypothesize, and iterate again and again to get to the solution that actually does what you need done.
So now github "sorta sorta" [1] supports https:

- You CAN force HTTPS for your *.github.io site.

- You CAN use an https://yourname.github.io URL.

- You CANNOT use a custom domain name with a fully secured HTTPS connection.

[1] https://konklone.com/post/github-pages-now-sorta-supports-ht...
I remember that thing being super long. Is it really worth going through the whole thing?
Ex-Crypti Devs and Chainlab to Launch a Platform for Creation of DAO
I guess it comes down to that age old reputation thing. Get the brand out, get it known for quality and service, and stick with it.
Finland it is!

https://rsf.org/en/ranking
https://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-wo...
Ethnographers tend to be rather hands off (/against) directly changing who they're observing. Contextual Inquiry (http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/contextualinquiry.htm, http://www.amazon.com/Contextual-Design-Customer-Centered-In...) is a fairly light weight method and I think would benefit a lot of startups.
The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix (2011)
I've added a new acronym to my personal mail servers over the weekend: SRS (fixes SPF when doing basic forwarding to another email address, e.g.: to gmail).

And now I'm not even sure that was a correct move, since Gmail explicitly states[1] that you shouldn't change the envelope sender (which SRS does).

[1] - https://support.google.com/mail/answer/175365?hl=en
You seem to forget that warm skin can melt snow, and that sweat can dampen and even soak clothes. There are plenty of ways to get wet. The operational range of temperatures includes temperatures as high as 98.6F or more when humans are in the picture. Sweat and snow melt at far below 98.6F.

"Simultaneously" is your own bizarre projection, not something I said or would say.
Agreed. Why would you need another UI when you can either use Hangouts in gmail or through https://hangouts.google.com?
> You can double your salary by finding a second job. You'll make $310K/year, work 80+ hours a week.

That's not even as easy as you mention it though, is it? If it's a regular office job, that implies you won't be in the office at the same time everyone else is. Which means you won't be getting the job (or will be fired).
Or at least they could join with some other companies to pool money towards a software trade association with real teeth that we can rely on to represent our industry's interests when it's under attack like this.

It's appalling how limp this business is when it comes to demonstrating political muscle
Time to sell?
djrogers said "hospital emergency room in the US has to provide you any needed medical care - full stop."

That is what I was replying to in the immediate parent comment.

As to your comment- even if the hospitals definition of emergency is generally 'common sense', it may differ from ones expectations. Further, it seems (I may be wrong) that emergency rooms are given a great deal of leeway especially in edge cases that may not be general, but probably occur more often than one might expect.
First of all, he didn't call him racist.

When you start a comment with "well off white guy", you are indicating the person is a racist since they are ignoring problems of their fellow humans because of the person's race. If you substitute any other race in that statement, people would find it to be an accusation of racism. I suppose there is another interpretation of that line, but I am trying very hard to be charitable to posters (I do fail quite a bit).

pointing out that for some reason long-standing problems suddenly seem to get a lot more attention once they start negatively affecting white people is not promoting hate

from the article: ''It's called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.''

I would submit his current problem is not long standing since it started last month. Also, we do not know his history of speaking out about civil forfeiture. Why, the incident with his wife could have been a "shutup" warning from the police. I said I provided a piece of data, and I have not really had time to look at the context.

As to the second half, pointing out some issue is racial and the participant only started noticing because of their race is informing your reader that you believe that person to be racist.

it is calling attention to racism

Which implies that a belief that someone is being racist. Thus calling him a racist as he is the only protagonist mentioned.

You know, I grew up in the grey between two different groups, and I sometime wish I could have been raised in a suburb or had a little more blood to qualify as the other group. Being able to say "I am..." in a clear voice is an amazing powerful thing. I've gotten to see what absolute shits groups going too far can be on each other when one believes they can say and do things with minimum risk. Assumptions about people based on their race are just wrong. Judge a person by their word and deed with a kind eye and hopeful heart. I fail at this quite a lot, but I think I'm ok with what I wrote.

// as a side note, I love hnreplies and if I had cash I would suggest adding a blackout time feature
Bootstrapping a bossless organisation in 3 easy steps
Amazing freestyle dance with a twist
Tech Incubators on a Mission of Diversity
Tesla CEO, Pentagon Chief to Meet as DOD’s Tech Outreach Flops
Building Go Replay on Windows
I can't see how to define "accept" except as the opposite of rejection. You can understand what someone is trying to say, but then mock them for saying it "stupidly". You can also just refuse to repeat it. If you accept someone's usage, you probably do neither of these (you might make fun of someone for the heck of it, or not get a chance to use the new term, but you get the idea). Social dynamics, basically. And yes, this metric might produce different answers at different cultural strata.
This is the one thing that sold me on recently switching to one of their products. I absolutely refuse to pay Adobe's subscription because I don't get a perpetual license ever.
Video that autoplays with sound and no visible mute or stop button--not cool.
I've contacted them ~ 5 times for minor issues with multiple accounts (getting a discount when they dropped the nexus 5, minor number porting issues, a billing question etc) and it has been fantastic. I've never had to wait, always had someone who was knowledgeable and could quickly resolve my issue.
I'm late to the party but since the poster only showed us the tree we don't know what else is going on in that build.boot.
boot-http, boot-cljs, boot-cljs-repl, and boot-reload

Provide all the features of lein-ring, lein-figwheel, and lein-cljsbuild with a simpler setup and no clojure neccessary in a clojurescript project.

Serving compiled clojurescript, reloading cljs and css, with a browser repl, is really simple in boot. The boot tools work together better than the leiningen tools do.

If you look at the Tenzing template's build.boot, which doesn't have a lot going on, you'll see how straightforward the meat of it is, without ending up with other JVMs.

https://github.com/martinklepsch/tenzing/blob/master/resourc...

lein new tenzing some-project
emacs some-project/build.boot
M-x cider-jack-in
// switch to repl:
(boot (dev))
M-x cider-replicate-connection
// switch to new repl
(start-repl)

That's it. The first repl gives you feedback on the dev server and reloading. The second repl gives you a browser repl. Cider has also levelled up, such that when the browser repl connects it gets picked up by nrepl and just works. All of this with one JVM... and no Clojure sources in your ClojureScript only application.

I stress again that the template really doesn't do a heck of a lot and the build.boot, the filesystem layout, and the way boot works is really the whole of the story. I wish Boot were better documented/marketted, so I could've switched to it long ago.
A California club bans DJs who use laptops … but why?
And don't forget Mondo 2000. Earlier, more counter-culture and techo-utopian (or maybe dystopian...)
As far as commercial vendors go I really preferred SQL Server from about version 2000 onwards. I got into Oracle again recently for a consulting project with a finance client (who basically have unlimited Oracle licenses) and really quite enjoyed it since the Oracle 7/8 days.

You can do some phenomenally sophisticated things... I extensively leveraged things like partitioning, parallel execution (dbms_parallel_execute!), lots of PL/SQL using the pipelined table cursor stuff, data mining stuff (dbms_frequent_itemset!), index-organized tables, and my god, bitmap indexes were a godsend, direct insert tricks for bulk data loading, external tables were fantastic (you can wrap a .csv in an external table and interact with it in parallel just like any other table -- great for ingesting large amounts of janky .csv data from other parts of the business).

The parallel execution and robust partitioning options were probably the most critical pieces that have no particularly good counterpart in open source land.
That's a little too hand-wavy for me. I think you solve a problem, produce an acceptably bad solution, and as you get traction you improve it. You do it evolutionary because you're not Steve Jobs and improving something continuously is a repeatable, adaptable technique in a way that spontaneous invention isn't. If you never get traction, and can't crack it, then you invested a minimal amount and you can move on. A portfolio approach.

I think this is true for both big ideas and little ones. I guess there may be some nuggets of truth deep down in the cw that "users don't know what they want until you give it to them" but I think it's mostly an over-used canard.
The app boom is over
Is there anything in particular you're having trouble with?
I think i originally ran into a British variant, called Goodheart's Law, while reading about reforms to their National Health Service.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law

The particular example being of how hospitals where given a negative rating based on how many patients were left waiting on stretchers (the rating system being introduced in an attempt at producing market like forces within the NHS). To get around this, the staff started removing the wheels on the stretchers while the patient was waiting. That way it was a bed, not a stretcher...
Moving down market is tough. The reason why enterprise ecosystems can flourish is that consultants have a symbolic relationship with software, act as a silent sales force, drive legitimacy and solve the soft issues that make software projects fail. Creating a simple CRM system isn't that hard, but getting mass adoption AND offering a customizable product takes hand holding. Content alone doesn't hold hands, nor does (most) UX. Software that changes how people's jobs work (accounting, CRM, EHR, etc) naturally invites pushback because PEOPLE HATE CHANGE.

Maybe the next generation of UX will have change management built into the system, not just tours and tooltips. For now, the burden of software adoption is best served with donuts and somebody how cares enough to make it work for the business that is investing in it.
Oh god mocks/fakes/doubles. The best answer to that probably comes from The Art of Unit Testing as explained on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/a/33333064/2136440.

In short yea, you're right.
Analysis of Twitter.com Leak
Am I right to believe that there is no way that proprietary scientific software can keep up with open source?
> the generous severance would let her regroup, retrain, and find a new career path.

Now I'm no executive, but is there a reason the blindingly obvious strategy of investing the money they're clearly willing to expend in training so that this individual's skills did fill a need they had?
Thanks; some of these are so bad they reminded me of [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_under_the_World
Reading the title and description of that Planet Money episode, I have never heard of a coach even at the professional sports level who said hard work was irrelevant.
I'm surprised it took so long. Integrated experiences almost always trump separate apps as far as user experiences go. I'm looking forward to more consolidation.
Nice explanation on this!
I love it when commercial software developers complain about having to pay for software.

How dare Qt demand that others pay them before developing a commercial product using their code?
> But most of the time, customers don’t really want the the features they are asking for. At least not very badly."

It is easy to agree or disagree with that because it is rather ambiguous and everyone has seen it go either way.

At least, I've seen it go both ways. It really depends on the context and most of all who the customer is. Are they paying for the product, will they be more likely to upgrade or pay if the feature is there, do they know that feature contradicts with other feature they already requested and so on?

Even silly things like customer is trying to be nice to you can interfere with the process. Because they don't want upset you and they want to be polite, they might ask for something trivial and hide something more annoying or bothersome.

I have seen this happen with me and design. I know a crappy design when I see it. It is annoying and bothers me. But, at the same time I wouldn't know how to tell the designer to fix it. If they press me I might make up something like "yeah, change color to beige" or something silly like that. I can imagine that happens with any domain where customer might not have as much expert knowledge.
Another nice explanation on this!
Julia is great too for this kind of work
I think the key thing here is that they didn't just nuke her, the employee received a "generous" severance package. I think it's ok practice if it's a expected part of the job and is built into the compensation.

But don't be fooled -- this sort of thing is a subtle change in status for finance and engineering jobs. You're no longer a professional, you're labor. That's a concept that tradesmen accept, but I don't think the average IT guy does.

The company need to acknowledge what that means too. If I'm just some keyboard puncher, I could give a fuck about what is best for the company.
How large do they expect this search space to be compared to 'websites'?
Good question... I'd imagine your standard QUERTY makes up a sizeable majority of programmers, but then I have no data to back that up... :)
If you do "show original" you can see the reason in the headers.
What sort of price would you consider good for static site hosting? GitHub provide theirs for free as it's a loss-leader, where as this is ther main business.
Reading this discussion, I've seen several comment on the "hassle of managing all those subscriptions". But wouldn't it be the case that the app store is going to do that for you, and give you both a single notification channel and a single point of management? Isn't that the whole purpose of managing the subscriptions through the app store instead of having customers visit your web site directly? Isn't that what Apple is getting %15 to perform?
Getting a CPA would have been a very long road for a person with an associates, and they likely needed to replace her with one or more CPAs right now, not in 2+X years.

That said, it's hard to imagine there wasn't something she could have done, somewhere in the company.
IOCP is the top item on my (short) list of things Windows simply does better. The performance boost you see from designing a server for IOCP from the ground up is jaw-dropping. However, it's hard to grok because it's a very different model, most servers are proprietary code, and the MSDN documentation is barely sufficient (at least, back when I was writing IOCP-based servers in '09).
They got audio setups right. The reason the network degradation happened is that video and audio playback were given realtime priority so background processes couldn't cause pops, stutters, etc. At the time Vista was released, most home users didn't have a gigabit network, so the performance degradation would only happen on a small number of users, and most would rather prefer good audio and video performance to a slowdown in network performance in a small percentage of users. With today's massively multicore systems, it's even less of an issue, while linux still has a problem with latency on applications like pro audio.
I imagine they have sales guys. If you have a meaningful amount of money to spend they will talk to you. If not, don't use their LGPL code in a proprietary product.

Qt is not an end-user, boxed product. This may shock you, but B2B software doesn't always have a public, standard price list.
can you tell me how you did this, i would really like to try this out.