skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Make an 'ask HN' to keep this thread closer to its original topic. I'm sure many of us would like to share our perspectives on the matter.
Labor/salaries should definitely be included in your CAC. The standard way to calculate it is to consider your 'fully loaded' marketing & sales spend in a given period, including salaries, which in smaller teams doing b2b sales will usually actually be the largest single item.

Re: wearing different hats, you should still be able to come up with a % of time spend on actually doing marketing+sales and allocate accordingly.
The main thing to consider is, as your customer acquistion scales, does your headcount/labor cost scale as well? If so, that should be a factor in your CAC calculation.

I don't think there's one canonical formula. But here are David Skok's thoughts:

"To compute the cost to acquire a customer, CAC, you would take your entire cost of sales and marketing over a given period, including salaries and other headcount related expenses, and divide it by the number of customers that you acquired in that period. (In pure web businesses where the headcount doesn’t need to grow as customer acquisition scales, it is also very useful to look customer acquisition costs without the headcount costs.)"

[0] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/
Full Adam short film created with Unity and rendered in real time
They can't verify counterfeit merchandise but they could take a picture of the contents of the box and turn a device on to verify it works, like a pawn shop. There is no perfect way to solve this but the above solution would help.
About gerrymandering
If you want a simpler alternative to Kubernetes have a look at Flynn (https://flynn.io).
A conversation with Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of the database Redis
How to make a printed circuit board using a diode laser with a 3D printer
At first I was worried that this is yet another Raft implementation, but it seems they're building on etcd's version [1] which should be a win for everyone trying to prove correctness for the various implementations.

1. https://github.com/docker/swarmkit/blob/a78a157ef66adf0978f0...
Also https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/ !
The complaints in the article look valid to me? Is the data wrong or made up?

Its been very blatant since the early days of print that advertisers either received additional editorial coverage or had plausible problems ignored by writers. The most explicit is the automative review articles which describe a technical object with near poetry. Of course, car companies are a huge advertiser for most newspapers and magazines.

So Vice produces some very edgy well researched content about topics which push in to the land of the dark things big corporations do and are involved in such as slave labor in the Middle East. Of course companies that are worried Vice is the next 60 Minutes sign up and fork over money in excess of what programatic buying would dictate the market rate is.

If advertisers are "buying" native content that has to be disclosed - period - yet because it is hardly enforced almost no one cares.
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
Great job! Reason being is I had those same tutorials that I used in language debates. Someone would eventually claim you couldn't do modern apps with (insert "ancient" language). So, I cited Fortran on FastCGI or COBOL on Cogs. Reactions are usually silence or serious revision to points being made.

Yours is a nice improvement. If you want to add to the prank, then maybe do a modern-style app or clone of popular one that would definitely delight people. Relatively small app to not take too much time. Offer them a link to the source in case they want to check it out. Let them find out it's Fortran on thdir own. Observe the reactions while recording the best ones. ;)
>Functional programming languages do not _require_ a GC. They just largely have it.

No they just require Infinite Memory [1] XOR GC.

Pure Functional programming has no concept of Alloc/Delloc. Let alone the concept of binding/assignment can fail. These are real. To quote James Michens [2]

>Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware
learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. Denying the existence of pointers is like living in ancient Greece and denying the existence of Krackens and then being confused about why none of your ships ever make it to Morocco, or Ur-Morocco, or whatever Morocco was called back then. Pointers are like Krackens—real, living things that must be dealt with so that polite society can exist.

[1] Infinite memory simply means more memory then the program can ever consume... But the halting problem exists so you can't actually know how much memory your program will consume :P

[2] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/thenightwatch...
Amazon could X-ray the items just before shipment, using a standard package inspection scanner.
> Where are you getting this "misdemeanor" thing from?

http://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/punishments-fo...

Breaking and entering is generally listed as a misdemeanor. Misdemeanors result in jail sentences of less than one year. However, breaking and entering is often associated with the felony crime of burglary. Burglary is usually defined as "breaking and entering with the intent to commit a felony while on the premises".

The difference between burglary and B&E of "intent to commit a felony" is the sort of thing that justifies the felony charges. I don't see that requirement in the CFAA.
I think the Hitler comparison is more as a very persuasive orator and the contents of his speeches (blaming the foreigner/other for all your society's ills) rather than his more notable sins like the holocaust.

Here is a holocaust survivor's take: http://www.thewrap.com/are-hitler-trump-comparisons-fair-a-h...
I hated SysV init, because writing init scripts is a chore - especially since you have little to no choice but to implement the detach/fork strategy to get a daemon to work properly without resorting to things like supervisord, etc. As much flak as systemd gets for trying to do too many tasks, I really find it a much better solution to `init`.

With that said, I agree about rpmspec's. They're simple to read and easy to maintain, it's part of the reason I chose CentOS and Fedora as our standard at work instead of Debian or Ubuntu.
> My values are to allow people to follow their own moral values independently of each other.

Does that apply to the neo-Nazis we have in parliament? Nazism has a fundamental difference with Communism: Communism (and neo-liberalism) used violence in order to achieve specific goals, for Nazism violence is an end in itself.
Ask HN: How do you keep your (always online) Windows pc safe?
I've installed a virus scanner and enabled the windows firewall. Still I'm afraid my Windows-machine is not safe. How do you monitor your system for intruders or what software do you install in your 'first 5 minutes on your windows Machine'?
10,000 hours, do you really need that much?
Any word on improvements since the latest Private Beta, aside from bumping Docker Engine to 1.12?
If it was it wasn't labeled correctly. That said, it appears that many of the examples even six or seven years old; before even the FTC suggested labeling guidelines came out (and the actual rules only came out in December).

Reading more of this site the author comes not as having a very personal vendetta against Vice (although there's not really a hint as to what has set it off). I'm very skeptical of the underlying agenda here.
An introduction to Merkle Trees
This is such a complex solution, I'm sure it would be an additional fee, time consuming to implement, and in general, outside the scope of most shipping carriers.
One of a thousand articles rewarding fraudsters with attention in order to discredit bitcoin.
I find it really interesting that Goal 4 is a game playing agent. Deepmind has been focussing on this since the beginning[0] and actually has great progress as far as Atari games go[1].

And DeepMind is able to use a single agent rather than a different specific one for each game. I wonder if OpenAI wants to go in a different direction although RL has considerable success. Whereas the other goals definitely need a lot of work before they are "real-world" functional, especially Goal 3. But of course that depends on their definition of 'useful'.

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbsqaJwpu6A

[1]:http://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.5602v1.pdf
Organic nanowire transistors emulate working principles of biological synapses
I've never seen someone put a scarier spin on "showing your work".

Fine-grained analysis? Again, you're not expected to be a master, but it's not asking a lot for you to break down a seemingly complex problem into something workable (e.g. The maze solver example above could be approached with choosing a right turn whenever you approach an intersection...does that seem very fine-grained to you?).

Incredibly unrealistic time pressure? Again, in most interviews I've had/conducted, you're not expected to just know the answer. If you do, that's great, but you make it seem like they're waiting to pounce on you the moment you struggle. I've never seen that in interviews for larger companies.
I believe some of the data aggregation is done by reverse engineering APIs of mobile banking apps. You can easily do that by setting up MITM proxy to intercept requests. In some cases, you may need to decompile app binaries to decipher password encryption algorithms.
No, elastic beanstalk is terrible.
The concept of autotools is fine for the most part, it's just M4 that has a really bad rap (and rightfully so, it's a huge pain in the butt!). I have a couple toy vala and C++ projects I've written and autotools "just works" without much effort, but when I've needed to do something outside of the standard functionality the need to write M4 macros makes me quickly switch it out for CMake instead.
Coding is an abstraction that tries to capture human intent over the physical realities of a machine, just as contracts are an abstraction capturing human intent over the realities of behavior, society and law.

That is to say they're imperfect and require human intervention to uphold intent when abstractions are incorrectly implemented over lower levels.
I hate to say this but you basically have to trust these types of authorities when it comes to this type of "trust." You wouldn't believe how many people are out to scam. It's endemic in anything that involves money. I'd say "few bad eggs" but it's mostly shit eggs amongst a few good eggs.
A brief history of web development
I've heard (but not tried) that Diet Coke is used because not having sugar, it's less sticky when it dries.
He's talking about the operations needing to be differentiable. So like multiplication, addition etc are differentiable. tanh, sigmoid functions are differentiable. You need this because back propagation is an application of the chain rule, so each constituent operation needs to be differentiable.

A lot of interesting advances have come from making operations that seems like they aren't differentiable, into differentiable operations that can be trained by backpropagation. See LSTMs and neural turing machines
>This works because Amazon heavily favors customers in their A-Z Guarantee claim process, and sellers don’t tend to record video evidence when shipping expensive merchandise (which they should)

FWIW my friend and I made an app called "Emberall" it makes it easy to record/label video and save it to the cloud. It's mostly used my new moms recording their kids, but would be equally useful to anyone that wanted to regularly record and archive video evidence like the article suggested.
This would allow sellers to carry out selective scamming: send buyers with longstanding accounts genuine iPhones, send new buyers boxes with clay and pocket the cash. Not so common on mainstream sites because it's hard to get away with currently, but apparently used to be rife on darknet marketplaces.
Sand Castle Holds Up a Car
This is a good idea. I'll try this approach.
A handful of Vice articles I've read over the years have touched on my personal sphere - people or causes I'm directly involved with. Their fact checking is actually quite poor. They get tons of easily verified stuff wrong. Moreover, I've seen at least two instances where such errors prevented a brand/product/person from being perceived in a negative light. Some of their articles have been wrong to the point of the entire article being incorrect (like their 'first clown escort' story).

I'm sure they do or have done some quality journalism, but the amount of bullshit they do shovel leaves them suspect as a whole to me.
Scientists engineer tunable DNA for electronics applications
> Mac must be a 2010 or newer model, with Intel’s hardware support for memory management unit (MMU) virtualization; i.e., Extended Page Tables (EPT)

Why 2010? The 2009 Mac Pro supported EPT.
Hi Alan, how do you think that object-oriented programming and distributed computing will intertwine in the not-so-far future?
Can you give a specific example of an area of math or a problem where "working in the right basis" offers dramatic improvement?
They could automate it by x-raying instead of taking a photo. It would clearly show the iphone vs a piece of clay and save them a bunch of time opening/resealing boxes.
Fun fact: the framework's author [1] is a member of the governing board of a major Polish political party (Razem).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Zandberg
Yes, tube gear is rad-hard and there's plenty of old 30s-50s vintage all-tube rigs around if that's your thing. Yes, you do still want to disconnect the antenna but either way tubes are much more durable to abuse and are going to have a better chance of surviving.

Tube gear is often quite cheap because nowadays everyone wants fancy electronic gear. About 12 years ago I picked up a 70s-vintage Kenwood TS-820S hybrid rig (tube finals, the rest as solid state) for about $150, when a comparable electronic rig would have been about $1k. I abused the crap out of that rig and it took it quite well. I finally need to have it serviced one of these days, the output power was starting to tail off (probably a tube finally giving up its magic blue smoke).

Tube gear has a bit more of a learning curve than solid-state gear (eg tuning up before operating) but it's very durable and easily serviceable. Generally the most you will do is blow a tube whereas with a transistor-based radio you definitely will smoke the semiconductors and the radio will be a write-off. Unfortunately tubes are getting rare/expensive, but it's still better to track down a couple of $25 tubes than to replace the whole rig.

Tube rigs are particularly common in high-power gear (again, especially if you are trying to keep costs down). Solid-state amps in the 1KW range only became feasible relatively recently and are still much more expensive than a tube-based boatanchor. They especially dominate AM/FM broadcast equipment, which can range from tens of KW up to megawatts of power. You just can't push that much power through transistors very easily.
"imagine" .. governments (and corporations) around the world do this on a consistent basis
The author of this article has a serious axe to grind with VICE which overshadows the few good points he makes. The photoshopped pictures of VICE executives with consumer brands are embarrassingly bad.

It does bother me that VICE sometimes over-editorializes some of its stories and does some truth stretching. Overall, I think the quality stories are worthwhile and I can just roll my eyes at the misinformative ones, e.g. many on motherboard.vice.com.

I clicked on another entry in this ranty blog and found a hilarious VICE parody done by the Onion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHvrirXi5Ds .
I recently decided not to sell several expensive bits of electronics on eBay because multiple people warned me about this sort of fraud.

Real pity because it's hard to know where to sell that sort of thing these days.
Platform9 introduces Kubernetes support
> Thus, for many people, they see the European identity as seeking to assert primacy over their national identity and they are wanting out.

What makes the discourse around this so contentious is the that it is easy to conflate this desire to preserve identity with the horrors of racism and nationalism in 20th century Europe.
Food Calorie Counter
There is no problem firing people in Norway as long as you have a real need to reduce the workforce, or even reduce the headcount in one profession and at the same point increase in another (like in restructuring). This is easier in Norway than many other European countries, especially in Southern Europe.

What you can't do is to fire someone because you don't like them or fire someone while you at the same time is hiring for positions the individuals you are firing are qualified for.

While what you say about contractors are only partially right. If the contractors are hired as individuals, they can legally claim a permanent position after working there for three years. If they on the other hand are engaged through a consulting company or similar, that will not be the case, since then the contract is between two companies. If the consulting agency does not have other contracts available, they can downsize.
Envisioning the hack that could take down NYC
There's "successful completion", and then there's what Google is looking for. They want optimal code, and they want you to explain your thought process as you're writing. They want you to hit all the subtle corner cases without being prompted (and for you to verbally note why you coded it that way).

You solved the problem if you give them the O(n^2) answer, but they're looking for the more complicated O(n) answer, because then they'll get to present you with the 2nd and 3rd variations on the question, rather than spending time refining the first.
Have you spent any time studying machine learning and how it might affect the fundamental ways we program computers? Any thoughts on how the tooling of machine learning (TensorFlow, ad hoc processes, etc) could be improved?
What language do you think we should teach first to computing major students these days? What about non-major students?
What is your one piece of advice to college students studying CS?
I agree. My favorite scene from "No Country for Old Men" is when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell figures out how the killer executes his victim, in the middle of a restaurant conversation with the wife of the hero ("My mind wanders" scene). It struck me as the exact way in which I have often thought. I read the book to realize it was not there. Must be an original contribution of the Coen brothers.
Agreed. Most of it are biased value judgments with little evidence. Still, the theses remain as interesting possibilities.
Yes their fact-checking is really poor in some articles. Their tech reporting is awful. I love their international stories, such as the North Korea special. Do you know of any inaccuracies in these stories?
I'm on Archlinux and I keep a list of the packages installed from pacman and from AUR and some config files in https://github.com/Keats/dotfiles (https://github.com/Keats/dotfiles/blob/master/zshrc#L39-L40 for the aliases).

I haven't reinstalled in a long time so the install script might be broken though
An idea to address privacy problems with this:

1) Only have the information for licence plate codes of people who have opted in be stored in a way associated with the specific licence plate code.

2) Have the system encourage opting in as part of setting up the system in one's own car.

3) Have an id which is used for all cars which have not opted in, so that cars which have not opted in have a collective rating. Possibly split this up by general location, and maybe time of day.

4) Because most of the cars in a given area are there often (or, at least something similar to this is true) , it may be worthwhile for, for the cars that do not opt in, to still record behavior of those cars, but to not send it to a central location, only keeping it within one's own car. Cars which have not been seen in a long time can be automatically removed from the local storage. This should not significantly harm privacy, because it is basically the same as remembering that you saw that car before and that it tended to be driven poorly.

5) Possibly (this might always be pointless/counterproductive. I'm not sure.) , in some cases only store a hash of the license plate codes, instead of the license plate code itself?

A) I think this variation should be sufficient to protect privacy, because it only does widespread collection about identifiable individuals if they they consent to it. The information it collects about individuals that did not specifically (and presumably intentionally) express consent is only collected in aggregate about individuals in a geographic region, which does not personally identify anyone, or only collected by individuals and not shared, which is not much more of a privacy violation than an individual with excellent memory looking around.

B) So, while this variation might be less effective, I think it should be sufficient to protect privacy.
Back when I looked at CloudFoundry (years ago now), it didn't work out because there was no middle ground deployment between a single PC and a full blown production deployment. You either ran it on one machine or you spun up what would have costed ~$1200 in servers at the time.

It doesn't appear this has changed: http://docs.pivotal.io/pivotalcf/1-7/customizing/openstack.h...

Even at a cheap provider like DigitalOcean, this is 16x10 + 6x160 = $1120/month in __overhead__, without even running any useful applications.
Lol, you're joking right?

With respect, the Rust community is extremely in-exposed to the majority of actual enterprise environments, and that's ok.

Honestly the best path forward is to just acknowledge it, say "we are working on it" and you'll get your point across better.

Again with respect, because you all do really amazing work, fighting it honestly makes you and the whole community come across ignorant.
Omg their navigation bar covers half my screen! Seriously, why do companies inside upon reducing my screen real estate for stupid shit?
Or they could x-ray the box on the conveyer belt and intercept any suspect packages in real time for closer inspection.
Are there any major differences in who the audience is between Google and Bing?
What are your pet peeves within your field of work?
Very interesting. The Harvard grad we hired back when we started my wife's' citizenship processes years ago was completely useless (late with paperwork, no-show to interviews, etc); we ended up losing the money and filing ourselves. This type of service is much needed. Applying for a permanent residence is mostly just form filling and document collection anyways, but the current processes is nearly unbearable. Does SimpleCitizen plan to stick around all the way through naturalization? She's got her interview coming up in July (woohoo!) and that process is a mess as well.
All I can say is -- if Amazon wants to plaster their slogans everywhere imaginable (above doorways at their facility; and literally on the backs of their workers - going by the photo midway down the article), they can at least have the decency to do so in the native language.
I think the premise was totally reasonable because of the probabilities involved. Instead of a single hack resulting in a smoking crater, I think it's far more likely that the enemy will quietly amass a large library of exploits over a period of years, and then unleash them all at once to impede emergency service response, leverage panic, comm failures. This also means that instead of a 100pct success on one essential target like a nuclear plant, the enemy can work with thousands of 10pct successes against softer targets like EMS, power, transport, economy, etc.