skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's a good question. Perhaps the best question anyone can ask of themselves in relation to "why are you doing what you are doing?"

And the way to prove if it is true or not is by "reverse induction." Remove one-by-one all the supposed "fruits" (wealth, glory, honor, respect, celebrity, etc) of your labors. And determine if it is still really important to you. Or to Us.

Alan Watts ~ Egocentricity In Humanity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkhR9c17ibE
The risk Facebook runs is in having lost that cachet.

Facebook transitioned from "the cool kids" to "all the kids". They've been playing a highly defensive game, through pricey acquisitions, of seeing that they remain "all the kids", though with significant leakage forming.

No single other party has decided to enter into the frey with a decentralised social networking model (Google could have, didn't, and at this point I'm suspecting won't, more on that: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/3L3Z5GhJ...).

One thought that's been bubbling up my head is that we still don't fully understand networks, values, and costs. First it was Sarnoff (V = n), then Metcalfe (V = n^2), then Tilly-Odlyzko (V = n(log(n))).

I argue that V = n(log(n)) - kn

That is: there's a decreasing value for each additional user, but a constant cost function. Where log(n) < kn, adding additional users hurts you.

You also risk a smaller, higher-value network beating you out.

There are a few implications, one of which is that network size is highly dependent on 'k'. This strikes me as a very general characteristic, common for pretty much any network-type structure: social networks, phone systems (crank and sales calls), cities (crime, disease, congestion), computer chips (heat, noise, defects), and more.

There are also some psychological and perceptual limitations at play. I've been trying to find what I can on human limits of information consumption. Several sources (Stephen Wolfram, Walt Mossberg) suggest ~100 - 300 emails/day is a near upper limit, the NY Times comments moderation desk averages slightly fewer than 800 comments/day per person. That's about one every 36 seconds, straight.

I know my own bandwidth for articles, comments, posts, and books is limited, as well as my capacity for handling longer forms once I've started consuming shorter-form content.

I'm tumbling this around to see what I can get out of it. Not sure yet.
Everyone at RethinkDB was incredible to work with.

Thanks for showing everyone how to write amazing documentation

Thank you! (Really. I'm RethinkDB's documentation writer/editor.)
I also tried spacemacs multiple times. It helped me completely re-designing my vim config into layers but in the end I wasn't 100% happy with it. It is way too heavy, comes with too many batteries and does so much magic that troubleshooting a problem becomes increasingly difficult.

But I can highly recommend anyone to give it a try. It's a good example how you can split configs into smaller packages and do keybindings the right way.

I went back to neovim and re-wrote my vimrc from scratch. With mnemonic keybindings, layered config and all the likes
This is why the key product should be open-source. Else it's too scary to invest in it: what if the company behind it folds, and you end up in a dead end?

Only certain super-behemoths like Microsoft or Apple can afford to have their infrastructure products being closed-source.
Arguably, it may only have made sense for Samsung to buy Viv if Samsung is planning on ditching Google entirely.

- Google's MADA agreement forbids OEMs from making anything but Google Now/Voice Search the default digital assistant on Android devices with Google Play.

- Google is telling it's hardware partners for Google Home and Google Cast they're forbidden from supporting competing digital assistants.

So, having Viv as a second digital assistant which isn't default on their own devices and doesn't support any of the products Google's does, doesn't make a lot of sense. But if they need something compelling on Tizen to launch an exodus from Google's platform, where the Pixel has just been declared to get a ton of exclusive features they won't have access to... well, that'd be a reason for Samsung to buy Viv.
“We will return our undivided attention to our miniLab platform. Our ultimate goal is to commercialize miniaturized, automated laboratories capable of small-volume sample testing, with an emphasis on vulnerable patient populations, including oncology, pediatrics, and intensive care.”

People who are expected to die before they can sue. Also kids. Am I reading this correctly?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/theranos-retreats-from-blood-tes...
How does Boston compare to SV and what do MIT and Stanford have to do with it?
>They had a choice to fire Holmes

According to

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/elizabeth-holmes-ther...

>Holmes, meanwhile, isn’t going anywhere. As the C.E.O. and chairwoman of Theranos, only she can elect to replace herself.
Oh I stand corrected that the BLS doesn’t break that out!

Here’s a comparison of men (in black) vs. women (in blue). Very interesting.

https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/labor-force-partici...
From an ethical standpoint, I think they should've just wound down the company. If there are parts of the business that still have value, sell them. Otherwise, give employees decent severance and try to help them find new jobs. Return any remaining money to investors.
Ive been teaching my siblings programming. It took them literally a day to learn rethinkDB.

That should say a lot about how amazing RethinkDB is. It's unfortunate to see this get shut down as RethinkDB is pretty easy to work with
Just started a new project at my company using RethinkDB, very early stages, but I was amazed at how well this was documented and implemented. Coming from different ORMs to use with MongoDB, ReQL was a joy to work with and I didn't even want to use an ORM(for me at least, others may disagree).

Sad day to me, but as an open source tech, I hope and trust it will continue to live on.

It sounds like the company landed at Stripe. Good for them. Glad they weren't left out in the cold.

Thank you all very much for your hard work. In my short period of time I have had using RethinkDB, it's been a pleasure to work with.
The AI platform that wins won't necessarily be the one that provides the most utility. It'll be the one that people bond with emotionally. I'm not talking about you here- I'm talking about teenage girls with self esteem issues, recently landed immigrants working as night janitors, divorcees with drinking problems, and anyone else who needs a friend.

It's a technical challenge now, but in a few years making a good AI will be high art. By a few years I could mean 3 years or 23 years. There's the possibility that dressing an AI assistant up in a personality that asks 'how are you feeling?' could lead us into an uncanny valley that takes a long time to cross.
Because having the better product (often) doesn't matter: see Windows vs Apple in the early days.

Mongo has a strong community, which translates into a plethora of articles/blog-posts/tutorials/etc that secures its niche. From there it's possible to make money with things like consulting fees to help fix the problems it created in the first place.

It's all about execution. Case and point: I know what (purportedly) makes MongoDB special. I have no idea what RethinkDB is supposed to do, other than store data. Yes, I could check their site, but the point is I'm already familiar with Mongo's reputation. All of this contributes to a lesser product winning over a better one.
Bummer. Had Rethink in my list of things to eventually tinker-with. Is it stable where it should still be considered as a viable choice for your tech stack, or is this pretty much a deal-breaker?
Sell support contracts. Kind of similar to MongoDB's strategy, but they were too late to the party. Also the "support" open source business model doesn't always scale well and works better when the product quality and documentation isn't so first rate (like Rethinkdb's is).
I had a friend some time back who'd been in the Soviet army, assigned to somewhere in the east, and he told me about a smokeable plant with psychotropic effects that grew wild there. To this day I don't know if he was talking about some kind of Siberian "ditch weed" or if there's just some unknown-to-the-west plant out there on the steppe...
Finally, an affordable quality online CS MSc – Georgia Tech for $7k
 won't let another map be the default. It doesn't matter if you have google maps installed, if you click an address apples maps open.
Project Naptha: The Chrome Plug in that reads texts off Images
I believe it's batteries on their own - as long as they are in a device I believe it's fine (if not I've been breaking the law...).
I guess, but it didn't work. She was probably hoping all the political connections would help push back the regulators. But the regulators have come down hard.
Can I run the Erlang BEAM on one of these cores?
I await to hear postmortem on what went wrong
Optimizing images on your blog
Ha they fixed it. Someone at theranos reads hn.
That reminds me of an interview i saw a few months ago with one of their main guys:

https://charlierose.com/videos/28249
>MongoDB is like the Microsoft of operating systems.

I'm not a Windows fan, but that's harsh. http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2015/07/19/why-you-should-ne...
What was RethinkDB's business model and why didn't it work?
Are you seriously suggesting that the Apple and Google negotiators aren't aware that they're bending the laws to their limits? It's pretty far from the innocent 'good faith' that you're suggesting, and better described by the term 'back-room dealing'.
The Gentoo wiki basically says to stay away from testing if you don't know what you're doing:

"Users that do not know how Gentoo works and how to solve problems, we recommend to stick with the stable and tested branch."

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:X86/Portage/Branches#T...
The website is down. Maybe a good opportunity to demonstrate the scalability improvement with such 1024-core processor?
This is honestly quite depressing for me to hear. I've always liked the team and the fantastic product they created. A couple of years ago, when I was working on a DB product myself, I met a few of their team and I was just blown away by how nice and welcoming they were, even to someone developing a product that could potentially compete with theirs.

Later onwards, when I was working on an NLP startup earlier this year, I opted to use RethinkDB because I had seen how clean, smooth, and fast its internals were. When I had a hiccup with running a cluster in here cloud and tweeted about it, Mike and others from. The RethinkDB team instantly reached out to me and helped me resolve the issue.
Endless? No. We will have as many incompatible proprietary offerings. That's all.
Tim Cook does whatever the hell he wants to do.
I'd say that's beneath Apple. They usually don't attack competitors directly (used to WAY back, but now now).

At least I really hope it is. Twisting the knife at something like this would be a pretty horrible thing to do.
Does anyone else think the static design of Wikipedia is a good thing?
Apple apologists will pick whichever metric suits the current argument.

Suing Google for running a far more open platform while Apple continues to exert as least as much if not more control on the direction of the market is just another case of misguided European regulatory overreach.
Viv still uses Nuance according to their last demo, viv seems to be just a developers platform. Even Siri does not use Nuance anymore. Samsung probably needs developers for their IoT products in order to compete.

Pixel's new assistant will not be available on other android devices with nougat so make sense that Samsung will have to bundle their own into their devices.
> Thousand times better than the default Apple maps

"Better" is subjective. I used Google Maps since it was released on iOS. I recently switched to Apple for a perceived privacy benefit.
How many people in the world can work on a large DB, even with source?

I am all for open source, but it doesn't make things like this is easy as some make it out to be. For example with Linux source, how long would it take me to fix a video driver bug? Perhaps a year?
No I'm not saying that. Let's take an example. Let's say a local government wants to deploy iPhones to all their staff but as part of their local laws, all communication on government owned equipment can be monitored. So a developer writes up an app to record all typing on the iPhone (this is a hypothetical). They submit to Apple and Apple rejects this because it's against their policies (apps are sandboxed and wouldn't really be able to do this, but you get the point). Apple shouldn't be forced to comply with this local requirement, nor could they since every single government or private business would have different pieces of compliance. It would be impossible for them to develop an operating system that would allow for all these corner cases.
Thinking about this, yeah it'd be amazing to e.g. Have a community-driven forum with some DIY CPU designs (lisp machines!) with an affordable (let's say under $1k per chip) way to get them made. We'll probably get there eventually, but I'm not aware of where progress on this front is.
It is stable, performant, and has an amazing query language!
My greatest condolences to you guys. I have met with Slava a couple times, and with Mike several. They are incredibly down to earth and I felt they were very important to contributing to the democratization and humanization of databases (an otherwise unfortunately very vicious and elitist industry).

So what is next? I need to strongly remind people that both Mozilla Firefox and Blender were Open Source projects that survived their parent companies. This is not a death statement, and very easily could be a rebirth of Rethink.

Despite working on a competing database, I want to take a moment to explain why RethinkDB is the best in its chosen niche, by comparing it to other options out there:

- MongoDB. You won't get realtime updates and relational documents if you use MongoDB compared to RethinkDB.

- MySQL/Postgres. Rethink's awesome ReQL query language is a joy to work with compared to standard SQL. Without Rethink, you'll be missing document storage and live queries.

- gunDB. Our model is Master-Master, which while we think is great, it fundamentally restricts you from building Strongly Consistent systems, like banking apps, etc. RethinkDB is the only realtime updating Master-Slave system out there. They clearly win here.

- Redis. RethinkDB still has amazing speed and performance, but offers so much more than Redis by itself can.

- Hadoop. I know less here, but I've heard that RethinkDB has an amazing query optimization engine. Automatically taking your query and sharding it out across the distributed storage system.

RethinkDB is a winner in these technical aspects and fits for a very well defined problem. I encourage people to still use it and contribute to it if their business matches that. Don't let news like this deter you, or else we would have lost gems like FireFox and Blender.

Best regards to you guys, you are awesome.
RethinkDB is production stable as shown by a number of users running it in production, this won't change that. I'm optimistic that it'll do just fine as an open-source project.

Jeroen / VeXocide here, one of the RethinkDB engineers
Some consultants do the same thing; they might not be always removing code, but it does happen. I personally did some of this in regards to optimisation, it's always fun to see your clients' reactions when you dramatically cut down the resource usage of some massively bloated system they were using.
How long have the Mets fans been doing that hammer cheer?

Because it looks eerily similar to another arm swinging chant that another NL East team does.
I actually maintain an app that uses a RethinkDB cluster that's been up for over a year (despite occasional peak loads that exceed capacity), so yeah it's pretty stable. I've had multiple virtual servers fail (this is all in a cloud) and have to be replaced in that time frame, but the cluster itself never went down.
A more interesting application would be storing health "meta data" - for example, permissions around viewing health data, or focused data like advanced directives ("code status"). For advanced directives, this could be really valuable to guarantee that disparate health care systems that don't share data are aware of your wishes.
I just want to personally thank Slava for his exceptional work over the past few years - at every step him and his team have been classy and professional, and brought real creativity and intelligence to the world of databases and startups.

Its clear to me that Rethink is the model for future databases - its just that DBs have a long gestation as no-one wants to risk their data until the code is aged like a fine wine. Its an important longterm technology play - just the kind we need to improve things for all of us.

In two or three years I think they would be making money, I think this is a failure of capitalism or imagination our HN/SV community.

To those several of us who have the power to write a check, please consider doing so, Rethink have been relentlessly building the future [ and you will make money ]
Haven't played with it, but everyone about RethinkDB looks positive. Hopefully it will continue to develop in the open source community.

There are so many projects that really need attention to keep open source growing. I started looking at what I could do for IRCv3 projects recently because I'd really like to support an open source alternative to Slack.
Competition is for losers. 10 years ago the battle was microsoft vs yahoo and whoever...and it turned out the ones to pay attention to were fb and twtr...etc. The big innovation, the one to dominate headlines in 10 years, is likely unknown, run by a few guys on a shoestring and barely on the radar right now.
Funny you should say that, I just subscribed to the Times a little over a month ago, the digital version that is. Its the first newspaper I've subscribed to in over 4 years. I like their articles and generally find myself actually reading through them the whole way. Its the only paper I've found worth my time/money.
Torrenting the galaxy
The first burning man?
I believe this is because the Node.JS community still recommends MongoDB as the perfect database engine for their projects. There is even a name for their stack — MEAN, MondoDB + Express.JS + Angular.JS + Node.JS — which is kind of ironic because considering the rapid evolution of the JavaScript ecosystem having an acronym like that will make no sense in a couple of months since now people prefer React-like libraries / frameworks. Besides the JavaScript community I don't know of any other that enjoys to use MongoDB — which to be fair it's not that bad for what it offers, but you know — or ships it by default in bundle installers which are preferred by many young and/or newbie developers.
Someone once told me about a maths student in grad school who said they couldn't really visualise 3D shapes. Like they could tell you what the definition of a cube was but they couldn't picture one.

Their field of research was something like algebraic geometry.
You know who Dropbox has on their board right?
...while relying on more.

Using frameworks/libraries often can reduce the amount of code one has to write to perform a certain task, but it also can greatly increase the total complexity of the system. The OP is talking about reducing total complexity, which may mean increasing local complexity slightly.
He's saying that working men are so looked down upon that the unemployed consider themselves a step above them. A bit like a perverse parody of aristocrats refusing to work.

This is not theoretical, I've seen it, I believe it. It is typical for the middle classes, especially the younger ones and what I can only really call kept women to look down on working class men as being one step removed from the prison population. Possibly feral. Never enlightened.

I think the primary cause is an education system that strongly gave the impression to young people that it was 'Yale or Jail'.

Basically the universities have created a class system by creating a new social class. Unemployment is less egregious than picking up a hammer or spade.

Otherwise you might be one of those ditchdiggers, you know, in "the world needs ditchdiggers too" quote.
I hope not, I've always wanted to use it, it seems like a great product!
I hope it wouldn't take you a year to hire someone qualified to fix it for you.
Hands-On with the CHUWI Vi10 Plus Running Remix OS 2.0
Click on a comment's timestamp, and you get the option to 'flag' it (requires a certain amount of karma though)
They're under investigation for basically lying about the tech behind their core business model. There are fundamental problems not fixed by simply firing Holmes. Pivoting or closing shop seemed inevitable.
Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try Again.
Fail again. Fail better.
-- Samuel Beckett

I see this as "two steps forward, one step back" kind of progress. Something you'd expect from an evolutionary process -- which the evolution of social structures clearly is.

So the fact that there's perceived progress, which is then overdone to the point the structures in question collapse, then people pull back (too far in the opposite direction?) and are apprehensive for a while, but then try again, differently, having (hopefully) learned a lesson.

One interesting observation: the "pull back" phase is not uniformly distributed across societies.
For us in Eastern Europe, we observe West's cheerful march into deep Socialism with despair (our collapse being too recent). Apparently, in the West, it's a distant memory or never really happened, and the societies there are ready to give these utopias another shot (again, hopefully, having learned their lesson...).
Here, for instance, is a graph of manufacturing jobs per capita in the US:

https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-emplo...

It’s quite clear that manufacturing jobs have just been slowly and steadily disappearing over the past 70+ years.

Viewed at this scale, the debate over the bump in the last 6 years seems totally silly. Moreover it’s hard to imagine a policy that would turn that kind of trend around.
Hmm. Surely under the circumstances, assuming she's somewhat rational and aware of fiduciary duty, she'd entertain the idea with her board. Can always bring her back. Then again...
Replace "ML knowledge" with "CS / SW Eng. knowledge" and I would say this has always existed in the start-up world. My personal opinion is that lack of basic technical knowledge is a major no-no unless at least one of the other co-founders is technical.
Thanks for the info. I just looked into it. You are right about non-recursive Makefiles. My own experience with cmake generated makefiles are actually comparable with ninja build times. Why would you want to write Makefiles by hand anyway? With CMake you can generate VS 2015 or MinGW or ninja pretty much any project file.
QtCreator deals with CMake project really well. KDevelop too. I think CMake is the way to go. Then we won't be talking about ninja vs. make vs. tup
It works the opposite way too.

If a project is open source then who is committed to helping you support and maintain it? You essentially need to have a team to do it.

If there's a company behind it, it gives you assurances.

Especially for a small company that needs to focus on building a product rather than committing features and bug fixes to their database