skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Flynn co-founder here.

Great question. We just consider ourselves to be a normal company that happens to build open source tools. We also try to make money in ways that don't interfere with the open nature of what we build.

There are lots of different kinds of companies whose engineers primarily work on open source projects. In most cases where their core "product" is an open source technology they also sell commercial support, usually to large companies who need an SLA. Others (like us) sell managed services as well.

We made the decision before we started the company to make anything we ever asked users to run on their own machines permissively licensed open source and just be careful with our trademark (like Mozilla is[1]). That leaves the door open for closed-source SaaS in the future but gives our users (and investors) a clear set of expectations about how and what we'll build.

I think it's important for companies to be as clear as possible about how and why they license their code, what choices they'll make in the future, and what happens when the company changes hands. It would be great to see something like an "open source pledge" where founders/the company could contractually commit to either a final open source release before closing (like Parse did[2]) or staying open after being acquired (like Sun didn't after being acquired by Oracle [3]).

[1] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/trademarks/policy/
[2] http://blog.parse.com/announcements/introducing-parse-server...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_(operating_system)#Pos...

edit: We tend to avoid calling ourselves an "open source company" which can get confused with the "open company" movement[4].

[4] http://www.opencompany.org/
There is a section dedicated to hashes, but ooof indeed.
> And really you should separate the mechanism for expressing voter preference from the mechanism for picking a winner.

Thank you for highlighting that. Too often the ballot and the aggregation method are conflated.

On https://modernballots.com/elections/zombies/vote/ I implemented 5-star ratings as the default. Everyone's familiar with this kind of rating and it allows indifference between two options.
Washington uses what they call Top Two. Only the top two in the primaries will be on the ballot in the general election for the congressional, state legislative and state executive offices. They can be from the same party, e.g. the two candidates for state treasurer in 2016 were both republicans.

(California does this as well and it has had interesting effects. California's 31st district voter registration favors the democratic party, but they ended up with only the choice between two republicans in the general election because there were four democratic candidates dividing up the vote in the primary.[1])

1. https://ballotpedia.org/California's_31st_Congressional_Dist...
No I assume that given the input rate and perhaps due to distributed, non-responsive servers or perhaps sheer incompetence they couldn't halt it.
If a strategy is any function from the preceding game state to keep/redraw, then I don't have the mathematical chops to specify a uniform prior over all such strategies and compute the optimal strategy that way. (In fact it may not necessarily be possible to do this in a sensible way, as Bertrand's paradox suggests, as another poster pointed out.)

However, there is a much simpler argument suggesting that maximizing EV would be the right approach in the absence of any knowledge about the opponent's strategy. Say the opponent chooses to redraw at random. Then in effect they are drawing once. If we redraw when the value is < a, then we just want to maximize the probability of winning, (1-a)(a + 0.5) + 0.5a, giving a = 0.5.

Modeling a process that we know nothing about as a random process seems reasonable. And the reasoning above does not actually involve computing EVs, though it happens that the right answer is the answer that maximizes the EV.

To justify this a bit further, we can reason as follows. If we know nothing about the opponent's strategy, then their initial draw tells us nothing about whether or not they will choose to redraw. So our estimate of their probability of redrawing, p, must be independent of their initial draw. Then the probability of winning is 0.5ap + (1-a)(1-p)(a + 0.5) + (1-a)p(a + 0.5) + 0.5a(1-p), which is invariant with respect to p, and which is at its maximum when a = 0.5.

>It's far more sensible to assume a strategic opponent.

Well, this is going round in circles, but I would say that this is sensible only if you know something about the opponent! I don't see how it's sensible to assume anything about your opponent if you know nothing about them. And if we're talking about the "real world", then of course you do know something, but you certainly don't know that they're perfectly rational.
They have gone too far this time. This is far beyond the usual expensive inconvenience dongle cost etc that we're used to seeing from them. They just want to game us. It's basically financial domination at this time.

How hard could it really be to make a basic Linux desktop environment work sorta close enough to OS X to make enough people switch to finance further development? My quick and dirty estimate is that 50 good people could pull off a great first release in 18 months.

(I do have relevant consumer UX software design management experience and feel that I can do reasonable quick estimates based on that.)
Show HN: Control foobar2000 audio player through a RPC API
I have worked in this space for a while and the typical users of CRMs won't accept a standard method. If you come up with a method that works for all companies you can go into sales training, write a book and become rich beyond your imagination :-). Skip the writing software part because that will be easy.
Most smartwatches are also paired with phones. So there's extra power usage for bluetooth, too.
These are people who in general not tech workers. Also at some points one could not open the email client nor scroll to the latest messages.
Bucklin seems worse than IRV on every property except monotonicity:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-member_district
Congress will abandon Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, White House concedes
“Radioactive Boyscout” dies at age 39
Code execution only.

Bear in mind the victim doesn't need to OPEN the .mp3 file... See the part of the article about the 'auto thumbnail' feature.

I would guess that a crafty attacker could package additional content inside the mp3 file, perhaps some local privilege escalation code...
As another Washingtonian who donated to and followed the Maine initiative closely, let me know if you find an organization to work with (or if you start one).

I'd be happy to volunteer, donate, etc.
Show HN: GitHub template files
No. The correct thing to do here is to send a mail reply all asking how you can get on the list.
I haven't tried that before but that could be a good idea. I just hope my accent doesn't make it too obvious!
What is exactly state of the art in sequence learning. ELM and ESN are so limited. I hope there's something much better available.
Another commenter linked to the Wikipedia article on Bicameralism. If you're interested, you might want to check out "The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"[0] by Julian Jaynes. The jury is (mostly?) still out on whether or not Jaynes is a quack, but he asserts that humans used to be unconscious, bicameral beings who "heard" voices in their heads that would direct them to do things. I put "heard" in quotes because Jaynes thinks the entirely process was fully unconscious (in terms of the subjective consciousness we experience), but that as consciousness developed, people literally heard voices in their heads for a long time.

Socrates' voice absolutely reminds me of this. Jaynes thinks that the first "conscious" humans literally heard the "voices of gods" and that we eventually evolved to lose that as subjective consciousness took over performing the same function.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009MBTRHA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
Why searching for Real Estate still sucks
Sorry, that was want I meant to imply.
there's the possibility of GPUs in the display, though
> a whole new era of finding security holes in emulators that allow PCs to be compromised

Indeed. People acquire ROMs for emulators illegally from wherever they can get them anyway. Given what you say about ZSNES, I'd be surprised if no one has yet built a botnet by spreading a ROM attacking ZSNES.
Similarly, Feedbin gives you an email address you can aim a newsletter at and see as another feed. It's kinda genius.
The cycles will continue. The workforce is as much to blame for the mythos as the VCs. Everyone likes to think as you pointed out that they're the next Larry Paige or Elon Musk when in reality those people are as much a product of their times as they are a product of hard work and intelligence. That's a harder story to sell though and given a long enough time people forget why the last bubble went pop and start believing in all the same things that lead up to it.
I'm really not sure people realize how chaotic and unpredictable ranked choice voting can be, and how easily it can be gamed.

For example, there are scenarios where it's better to put your favorite candidate in #3. You pick #1 to help an undervoted candidate and therefore, causing one candidate to drop off. Same for #2. By the time the choice comes to #3, your minority candidate has suddenly managed to eliminate stronger opposition just by playing numbers.

We've seen this scenario happen repeatedly in all countries and counties that have tried this approach.

There's a reason ranked choice voting is hardly ever used anywhere: it's really not such a good idea.
My Daily Learning Ritual: discover, consume, share, discuss, and write
The UX Fund: Investing $50k in 10 companies, 10 years later
Yep.

Personally. I'm a free-market type and so I struggle with any moral objection to these internships. But I find it amusing that internships are so popular within institutions (govt, media, big tech) full of people with politics that should find fault with them.

By contrast: when I was the work experience boy at an electrical goods maker, I would have accepted no pay (I needed it for Uni). But they made sure to pay me out of a sense of professionalism.
We were previously worried about filter bubbles -- that is, people only seeing true news that agreed with their worldviews. This election cycle we seem to have a rise in blatantly false news that agrees with people's worldviews spreading through social media. Everyone is talking about Facebook and Twitter fueling this problem, but it seems not even Google is immune. A healthy democracy relies on an informed citizenry, so this phenomenon is truly a threat to democracy itself.
Facebook and Twitter (and the mainstream news) have no problems posting violent protesters that want Trump dead.

I've seen at least 6 instances ofTrump supporters getting beaten up and attacked because of their beliefs.

So please stop making it seem like the people on the left are all about love and unity.
This is really exciting electoral reform. I don't think our current system captures the diversity of political opinion now, and we could really use a couple more parties. Like a democratic party that is anti establishment or a republican party which is not particularly religious but more libertarian.

And maybe if we had more parties, voters wouldn't be so tribal. There's a deep sense of "us vs them" now in America. It's good guys vs bad guys, and whatever their side says, our side cannot believe. It leads to complete nonsense like climate change denial. But if there were many parties, your 25% couldn't be against the other 75%. You'd have to recognize your perspective is just one of several and you have to look for common ground.
What can Google do to prevent this from happening?

If Google really wants to organize the worlds information and make it usable for everybody, they have to make sure Google news is a news source you can trust. Pagerank is not going to cut it.

A couple of suggestions:

- prevent less reputable websites from showing up for political queries at all

- ignore articles with headlines in ALL CAPS

- work with a dedicated team of editors, like politifact, to give websites an honestyrank

- be transparent, show honesty rank in the search results

Any other ideas?
What is a "stargazer" in this context? I've never heard this term used in the context of software development before.
Apparently it's not that common but I'm used to hearing it pronounced 'oh-day'. Zero is sort of an annoying sound to make if you are having a longer discussion where the word comes up frequently. 'oday' is really easy to say though.
TSB probes near miss between plane and drone near Toronto
I'd just like to note that in some interactions I had with Linus, he was very polite, when he had some reasons to be impolite. I think the blunt interactions are almost always to do with things done by people who should know better.

It's much more newsworthy that Linus was rude, than that he wasn't. News is biased. Who knew!
FYI as a word of caution with FB numbers in GA...FB gives 100% credit to view-through conversions with a 1-day lookback window by default in addition to click conversions on a 28 day window. GA only has last click attribution by default in most reports (attribution/multi-channel aside) and only tracks post-impression performance from channels Google owns (GDN, data piped in via DCM, etc.). So you'll likely have large discrepancies.

That is actually one of the biggest headaches with getting reporting automated at scale that I've had to solve for many times in my career. Bid management platforms don't hold all the data, your ad server can hold most of it but you need to pipe stuff in and still have real limitations on the levels of data you have in there, etc. Even extremely expensive enterprise solutions don't fully solve for all of this.
Clean price data is one of Quantopian's features. They've put effort into normalizing price data for backtesting. For example, they deal with stock splits for you, so that you don't accidentally treat an 10-way split as a 90% loss.
Be fair I didn't read the article. Just judging by the site, the headline, and current events, I assume the problem is that the content of the page is opinion instead of fact.

Ok, what's wrong with that? If that site/blog post has gained more traffic, social signals, backlinks, etc. etc than it's "competitors" shouldn't it naturally be top ranking?
Woah, we didn't realize launching on IndieGoGo would be such a red flag. Thank you for the lesson learned.

Please believe me when I say that we are a real company with real facilities, not a scam. Some other things that may help reassure people:

*Our 8-person team has 5 Ph.D.'s, including our founder who did his graduate work in thermoelectrics. Feel free to Google the rest of the team: http://matrixindustries.com/#team

*We have funding from Khosla Ventures and 3M, among others

*We have real prototypes in the lab right now that generate power when you put them on
Top 6 Gloriuos Animals That Are Close to Extinction (2017)
Osirix is the only FDA approved software of its kind (MRI, 3D reconstruction, database), as far as I know.

Mac is the only platform where you can run freesurfer and word natively.

I didn't notice the downvotes..
Even Israel aren't banning Muslims outright, as Trump says he wants to do.

For sure, some of his policies on immigration make sense. The problem is that he is at the extreme end of the scale, similar to UKIP, National Front, Wilders, etc.

People have legitimate concerns about immigration. Whether those fears are real or imagined, the government needs to do something to address them. When they don't bother, that's when the people get fed up and then elect someone who will shake things up. That seems to be what is happening in the UK and Europe at the moment.
Ask HN: Best things happened to you just because of HN?
I got my current job because of HN. One of my posts got featured on the front page(https://introvertmac.wordpress.com/2015/10/28/list-of-y-combinator-companies-i-have-hacked/) last year, and my current CEO contacted me after that. Do you have a similar story? Just curious!
Pornography has to be one of the most ideal contexts for developing our understanding of neural networks and deep learning. I think this was and is a great idea, not just in that context, but in the anthropological one as well. If one is going to program a thinking algorithm, it should think like a human, and pornography is ideal for that. The approach is original and innovative.
> “I think of Quantopian as the next-generation BlackRock,” said Alex Rampell, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz, who will be joining Quantopian’s board. “They can become a very large asset manager, but hopefully in a way that no one else can replicate by aggregating and harnessing the best talent.”

Hmmm.....

The thing is, until you actually manage money you can't really tell if you have alpha or if you are one of the million monkeys typing out a novel on a typewriter.

Are there people who aren't currently at funds who could be awesome quants?

Absolutely. Just working on the markets as a full time job is a large part of succeeding.

Can some of these strategies that quantopian users are coming up whit make money?

Of course, alpha is everywhere.

The biggest hurdle is again taking the theory and putting it into practice. And then redoing it year over year. I mean making money from 2008 until now isn't really proof of much as the market has been up and to the right almost the entire time.

I don't want to sound really dismissive, but until a quantopian fund successfully manages say 200 million with returns of S&P + 5% over a period of say 5 years its probably best to cool the hype:)

And I say this as someone who is a big fan of what they are doing. It's just in finance you see alot of hype and you learn very quickly, that the scoreboard is everything, nothing cuts through bullshit faster than actual returns data net of fees.

I've written alot about quantopian and them turning themselves into a fund of sorts if anyone is interested.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12335272#12336086

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12171843#12173142

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207569#11211122
That's not what the article is about. It's about misinformation; the fact that people are citing these sites and touting numbers that "prove" that Hilary lost on both electoral and popular vote.
If I were to quit my job, the things I would turn my attention to would be insufferably, oppressively boring to almost everyone.
Is it so bad that productivity grinds to a halt like this? I can understand if your employer has Henry Ford posters on the wall to keep workers productive, but sometimes the best work is done when a worker gets home, as if home is some precious thing that is forcibly denied, because it represents a reward, and that the reward of work is only represented as enjoying the spoils of your labor at home.

This is, for want of better phrasing, the rat race, and quickly being swapped out for better work-life balance, increasingly being lambasted, and seen as generally not ideal for more and more people.

Burnout is such a catch-all term these days and is usually a word associated with the more negative aspects of 9 to 5 culture. It's not a word in the vocabulary of high-performing people. High performance is not especial to 9 to 5 culture, or especial to those who have grit. High performance can be seen in unpaid work, or in work that feels more like work, simply because, there are different types of work, like body work, mind work, etc
Perhaps (just perhaps), Quantopian is gathering (or has gathered) the evidence that B > A. If so, this is a great investment.

Regarding institutional money, they have been around for a few years. I'm not sure about how long they've been running the competition, but they certainly have been running an asset management service for some time - and would have impeccable records regarding this.

In other words, there is a lot about Quantopian that we don't know and so it would be difficult to make a judgement call on the quality of AH's investment.
He may have meant in the 13-inch model.
Layer X – container scheduling across multiple orchestration layers
> And that's without considering that, career wise, you'll be learning more changing jobs every couple of years or so.

This isn't true. You should switch because you want a raise and don't like the people. The raise situation can be fixed most of the time staying where you are so really you should only switch because the people situation has changed and you no longer like it. Switching because you think you will learn anything new is the wrong reason to do it. Programming hasn't changed since the 70s. You are not gonna learn anything new building the next CRUD app powered by mysql instead of postgres.
One of the headline quotes in this article may be a forgery:

“For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand & rend him. Let him be struck with palsy & all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, & let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, & when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him for ever.”

I don't know anything about this topic, I just saw this after looking it up real quick:

"The book curse from the San Pedro monastery is no such thing. It is an amusing hoax dating from 1909. Edmund Pearson, joker, librarian and true-crime writer, claimed it was part of a rediscovered Old Librarian's Almanack originally published in 1773. The Old Librarian dated the translation to 1712, "English'd by Sir Matthew Mahan" in a guide to his Spanish travels."
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/marx-pandora-a...
Both sides have people who don't think critically. It's a huge problem. I consider myself a liberal but I dislike sites like Huff Post. It looks to me just like Breitbart. I don't know why it's popular. John Oliver is funny and can give some insight into many topics but no one should use it as sole source of information, I don't think many do but I'm not on the receiving end of their argument so it's hard to tell.
Perhaps look at your controller software, enable some of the Update settings. Because I guarantee you that the three APs I have here will reboot, one at a time, in sequence. And when they do, it's <2 minutes (with AP AC Pro v2s).

There's no CLI for configuration? You really haven't done much research - there absolutely is, based off Vyatta/VyOS/JunOS.

In fact, most of the "advanced" functionality is CLI-only.

I use: VLANs, traffic shaping, ACLs, LACP. RIP and OSPF is supported but I don't use. 802.1x and BGP are not.