skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Really interested in learning if Snap is more Facebook or Twitter.

This could be a big litmus test for the tech IPO.

2 things I'm very interested in:

1) If the rumors are correct that they are looking to raise 4 Billion at a roughly $40 Billion valuation.

If you assume that their absolute pie in the sky max valuation ever is similar to what facebook is now, roughly 340 Billion, then that's not alot of upside for investors for a company that probably isn't yet profitable.

2) I've heard that the founders have locked up voting control. I'm always half watching companies like this to find out just how far they can push wall street before wall street says no more. Mark Zuckerberg and the Google founders have done a great job of managing their companies while maintaining voter control.

I want to see a tech company where the founders own voting control but manage the company like Twitter, this is not a positive reference.

If Snap get's their rumored IPO price but can't grow revenue then they could be the poster child for SEC minority shareholder reform, but then again President Trump has said he wants to remove regulation in the markets so.....

Twitter had a very dedicated and professional audience, journalists, investors, etc who used their product and they couldn't live up to expectations.

Snap now has to better than twitter and they'll have to do it by taking advertising dollars from Google and Facebook. That's a tough fight to get into.
Where's your opt-out form?
Maybe someone can enlighten me. I read awhile back (when the rumors just started) that a company can not engage in advertising/marketing in the pre-IPO period. If that's the case I assume the timing of Spectacles release is a way around that?
Pidgin + OTR.
The Minuteman entered service in 1962, and the long-lived Minuteman III entered service in 1968 - same exact year Operation Chrome Dome ended. It became pretty clear that ICBMs were a lot more effective than trying to get a B-52 through Soviet air defense.
On my current desktop machine (32GB ECC DRAM) I see a single bit error (corrected) probably every 18 to 20 days. There isn't an easy way to tell where that error hit in memory (you could presumably walk it back from the physical chip to the physical address space to the current page table and then back into virtual space and a process but that is waaaaaaaay too much work :-) Without ECC those errors would happen and I'd keep working and they may or not cause a visible symptom. A schematic data base slightly corrupted when it was saved to disk, a Flash image that isn't quite right, a system daemon that crashes and restarts unexpectedly, etc. Not really something I want to take my chances on.

Of course if you don't have ECC memory you don't know that your memory is being silently corrupted. For some people they don't care, for me, I do.
How thermometer and satellite data is adjusted and why it must be done
https://getprelude.net

A simple, server less, offline-capable web app for practicing reading music. I've always been slow at sight reading, and this lets me plug in a MIDI piano and do drills.

It was also a good catalyst project for getting to play with: React, Webpack, Service Workers, Web MIDI, Web Audio, and the Progressive Web Application paradigm.
Wouldn't it be cool if there were written multiple endings for the story? One is randomly selected when you start reading, and you won't know which one! Would that bring back the excitement?

Oddly I think it wouldn't, and wonder why. Is it because we want to know the one single ending the author intended?
I've gotten a lot of my best ideas from my friends. Right now my polo league wants some software for scoring tournaments. A few years ago, the local drift racing organization wanted some similar software to replace their excel spreadsheets for scoring laps. Someone wanted an app for calculating variables related to suspension springs. There are plenty of of software solutions for scheduling volunteers, hairdressers, acupuncturists, or receptionists, but even so, a lot of the ones in current use are shite. A boring problem becomes more interesting when you're doing it for someone you love.
Ah, at last via web.icq.com I was able to recover my account, update my email address, and reset my password.

Looks like my contact list was wiped at some point over the years, though.
It's not that kids playing are engrossing or amazing or anything. Go watch someone else's kid play for six hours. You're obviously not going to get the same high, it's pretty boring, pretty quickly. A small amount of people will enjoy it.

Some chemical's going off in your brain, saying "WOW, my kids are AMAZING". It's a delusion that helps the human race carry on. How can you compete with a nature built in drug?

What you going to do for kicks in 10 years time when your kids are teenagers? The allure will have rubbed off by then.
I don't find that to be true for me at all. Like the other poster said, there's endless possibilities for automation. I just don't have enough time to do all the weird projects I'd like to do, but I've got ideas for a bunch of things. At a minimum, there's plenty of places where there's some open-source software that does part of what I want, but I'd like to make changes to it. On top of that, there's a bunch of things I'd like to do that need a more serious project, and existing software that does something similar really sucks, or only works in Windows.

I see this with basically everything I use and look at in life: there's always something that can be done better (or better for me at least). Things I'd like to change on my car, things I'd like to change on my house, etc. The problem is lack of time, and too-high barriers to entry. For instance, my car's pretty new and there's some things I wish I could change on it which are really just software, but it's all closed-source and proprietary and completely inaccessible so it'd be a giant project to reverse-engineer it to make even a simple modification. But with open-source software running on a PC, this is a golden opportunity to be able to jump in and learn how others did something, and be able to make your own changes with a relative minimum amount of time getting set up (i.e., not needing to do reverse-engineering). Even writing your own applications is pretty easy these days with Free/open-source compilers, toolkits, libraries, etc. You can do all kinds of things with Python, for instance, and all the tools you need (including the OS) are freely downloadable.
This is the problem that we need to solve;

"How develop/maintain a complex software and at same time keep it simple to set up without a huge bottleneck with Ops team"

If state(ful) is a problem, How about KILL Stateful?
Maybe we need to (re)think about how we are handle with microservices? If true, that's is an good hypothesis to validate in a dev perspective.
I loved ICQ. Thanks for the memories
(“After me, the flood.”) Indeed, that is incredibly cool.

Super tangential, but there is a very enjoyable Regina Spektor song titled “Après Moi” with the full phrase as a refrain.
Better watch out for that Despair Squid and check if you have an unexpected ponytail [1]

[1] http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/RD:_Back_to_Reality
Wow, I thought mine in the 400k's was low. I lost it, though.
Quick, Draw
Is this how we ended up shifting from "global warming" to "climate change"? Improved models showing that things won't just get warmer, they'll go all kinds of sideways?
Obvious throwaway account but 4 years ago went to odesk.com as I had a super simple idea to make an app. I believe spent less than 2 hours paying a developer $50 an hour making the app. Had it up in less than a day.

Couple years later the app has made close to a million dollars with me pocketing about 60% of that and the other 40% to the ad company.

It's one of my favorite projects because it was so simple and literally took less than 2 hours but I was able to pretty much make a 1000x on it which to this day is better than anything I have ever done.
Putting 3d models of people in VR is easy. Getting them to do anything interesting and not just be a few scripted things is much harder and very far from a solved problem.

Maybe that doesn't matter. Maybe all you need is the character to look you in the eyes. But I suspect most people would need more. Someone you can actually talk to. Not just pick multiple choice responses
Or more read-write heads?
a) To build an ad business capable of handling $100m of ads. You need massive investments in sales, infrastructure, tools, etc. to build a business like that

b) They have one of the fastest growing user bases in the social space, their users spends an astounding amount of time on the app (estimated at 30 minutes per day), and their user base is the most targeted demographic for demographics. Also they have literally barely turned on the advertising machine and their initial forays have already hit a revenue run rate of $300M+.

So essentially they have a shitload of eyeballs, the eyeballs are growing massively, their eyeballs spend a lot of time on their app, and advertisers love those eyeballs. Their business valuation is based on massive potential, not current revenues, but their advertising efforts already show huge promise. There is almost no startup with anything close to their engagement, growth, and monetization potential and the last company that looked like them was Facebook. Hence, the HYPE.
The craziest thing about all of this, is that my number 7672xxx still works! Every few years I download the client, and my username and password from the late 90s is still valid. This is no small feat in the age of shutdowns and spin-offs.

In other news, WebRings still exists as well.
> ... when Apple switched to max 16 Gb of ram on their PRO line...

What PRO line do _you_ think he was talking about that is limited to 16GB?
THC: compact home automation framework in Tcl
We have about 20TB in an AWS S3 bucket we'd like to backup somewhere separate from Amazon. Is there any chance of Backblaze offering ingestion from an Amazon Snowball export (https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/)?
"Obvious throwaway account"

Why use a throwaway account in this instance?
Indeed, reciprocation/interactivity is not a requirement for obsessive love. See Dorothy Tennov's theory of "limerence". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence
The movie "Her" is a great movie that touches on this.
What is the relationship between Serverless Computing and microservices?
This is a tragedy for our lower class, who do not have the skillset to produce wealth increasing businesses and have to compete for a non-growing share of work.

It's not fair to them.
Always nice to see TCL work.
I think it is fine. I will actually be going in person to buy the book tomorrow. I'd prefer people voicing their opinions over an echo chamber.
If you're not spam, how do you prohibit bulk unsolicited SMS?
On a - I have no idea.

On b-

Not sure if it's worth $25 billion, but I have noticed that it is the "Facebook" for younger generations, and that when they use it, they use it all the time, not just a few times a day like other social media. It's a way to share their lives - in real time - with their friends and followers, and have their friends do the same.

(Look at me sounding like an old man!)
I think it's simpler than that. We don't want to miss out on a great ending by picking a suboptimal one. Endings are definitely not equal.
Loupe: Logging and Monitoring for .NET
The best way to end up on my Giant List of Most-Hated Entities is to send me a text message. Texts are for friends and family only. I'll tolerate the occasional appointment confirmation text, but other than that, my text inbox is the last place that has yet to be invaded by spammers.

And don't play dumb, randomly texting someone "Go Vote!" is absolutely spam. Texting someone because some sign-up form had automatic opt-in is equally spammy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrik...
As always, email[1] us to ask about the HN readers' discount, which is significant.

[1] info@rsync.net
Snapchat has filed confidentially for its IPO
Modern Iranians are to be blamed as well. Study of history is mostly overlooked. Archeological investigations are not funded. Part of it general mismanagement that applies to everything else. But the ideological regime in Iran is not keen about uncovering new historical facts that may alter its version of history.
Good question. Hustle tries its best to only work with organizations that are reaching out to people who actually want to hear from them.

If you receive a message you don't want you can ask to be removed. You'll instantly be opted out of receiving messages from that organization in the future. Also, like all SMS based tools, if you reply with the word "STOP" you'll never hear from them again.
Technically it's "Los Angeles Plays Itself".

This may seem pedantic, but it's a point made in the movie itself: "The acronym functions here as a slightly derisive diminutive. Now it’s become second nature, even to people who live here. Maybe we adopted it as a way of immunizing ourselves against the implicit scorn, but it still makes me cringe. Only a city with an inferiority complex would allow it."

(Also it turns out there was already a film called "LA Plays Itself") http://www.standardhotels.com/culture/whatever-you-do-dont-c...
It can mess up graphics work and zfs pools.
LeadGenius Hiring – Big Data Platform Engineer
Having spent many hours in VR (Vive Room Scale) at a stretch, the article rings true to me. The biggest surprise being that it might not feel perfectly real at the time, but the memory is much closer.

The next generation of pixel density will make a huge difference IMO. I can comfortably work in VR with multiple desktops, but the resolution is tad too low.
https://vk.com/
The premise is to build a json file to represent "parts" of the face.

For example say I wanted to landmark a feature like the image's left eye. Here is a GIF walking through the labeling process. http://i.imgur.com/63UXkUg.gifv

I would select "+New Shape" and enter in the name of the shape, in my example "left-eye". This will add the shape to model and enable cross hairs as you drag across the screen. As you click, a landmark point will get added at the XY coordinate you click. I can add as many points to a shape and can add any number of shapes to the model.

Once done, you can select the </> menu item and select "Export Points" to produce something like this:
{
"url": "http://landmark-tool.herokuapp.com/img/nic_cage.jpg",
"lefteye": {
"0": {
"x": 119,
"y": 274
},
"1": {
"x": 163,
"y": 251
},
"2": {
"x": 202,
"y": 274
},
"3": {
"x": 161,
"y": 289
}
}
}
I assumed beak evolution was a flight adaptation to reduce weight. Teeth+jaws enable chewing which is much more effective at extracting energy and nutrients from food.

Birds have a lot of weight adaptations. Digestion is quick-and-dirty in order to minimize the time food must be carried around during digestion. Legs are generally very thin and break easily (one leg broken is very common) in order to save weight. Even feathers participate -- most of the surface area of the wing is constructed from feathers rather than flesh in order to save weight.

A Moa, for example, is similar-sized but has no teeth because it evolved from lighter birds. Why would a large dinosaur evolve a beak and lose the efficiency of teeth?
A lot of comments here mention this isn't unique to the VR medium. I would suggest that VR is fundamentally different than reading a good book or watching a great movie.

I would expect this is closer to when movies were first invented. There's a story (which may be untrue) of a movie which had a train heading towards the camera, and people running out of the theater thinking it was real.

I expect the feelings the author is exploring is in part experiencing a brand new medium. What I really like about this article is how the author isn't drawing conclusions, but rather saying this is an interesting phenom to investigate further. VR does provide extensions to fundamental human ability (I can only thing of the depression a disabled person would feel if they could move around virtually), and I would be interested to see if there's a fundamentally addictive quality to extending your interactions with reality.
Re: WhatsApp.

WhatsApp was a possible existential threat to FB (usage moving from streams of posts from many many "friends" to more direct conversation in smaller chat groups), so $19B when spread across the many years of "non-death" of the company can be recuperated even if they don't earn a dime from WhatsApp thereafter.
Ah ! This is really cool :) Do you mind if I ask what this is built on ?
How Safe Is Your Career from Data Theft?
In 2015 I launched Bitcoin Fax. https://www.bitcoinfax.net/

Send a fax, pay for it with Bitcoin. That is all.

I like it (and Bitcoin) because you can transact online without signing up.
I just wasn't sure if the image being removed is by design.

I found another article where it leaves the author photo but removes the main article photo (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-camerons-wizar...) so I believe it is a bug.

BTW, I think this bug covers the issue (it's where I got the WP link from):

https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/219

Edit: Actually, this is a better bug report:

https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/299
ha it was SMAUG for me too coincidentally enough. I still hack on it occasionally and eventually went on to make my own shitty codebase (RanvierMUD)
I have to imagine Apple can only milk the goodwill of their customers for so long before they become alienated by needless antics like this.
Nukes stopped being carried in 1969. Missiles were common well before then, as you point out. International incidents, especially Spain, were the driving factor.

Chrome Dome was one name of a series of such routines designed to intimidate the Soviets. "Head Start, Hard Head, Round Robin, and Operation Giant Lance" from Wikipedia. It turned out the risks exceeded the benefit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome

Here is a quote from http://www.nukestrat.com/dk/alert.htm.

"Airborne Alert Aircraft carried a variety of nuclear bombs. The bomber involved in the 1968-crash carried four B28 thermonuclear bombs."

"Following the accident in 1968 and the nuclear scandal, the carrying of nuclear weapons on Airborne Alert Indoctrination flights was discontinued. The day after the accident, Strategic Air Command ordered the nuclear weapons removed from airborne alert aircraft. In December 1969, when SAC briefed the Danish military liaison at Thule Air Base about the 1969 Thule Monitor mission, the flight route avoided Greenland airspace even though the aircraft no longer carried nuclear weapons. This was also the case in 1971 for the Giant Lance routes (see right-hand bar): Greenland airspace was avoided."
I built the Chrome extension [0] for Pesticide[1]. It toggles the Pesticide CSS in the current tab making it easier to visualize the placement of elements in the DOM. Useful for front end debugging.

The extensions first implementation was basically just a ternary operator! Now it's got a little more to it, but it's still super simple.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pesticide-for-chro...

[1] https://github.com/mrmrs/pesticide
California kids have big balls. What do you think?
A suite of internal autocad automation tools for an electronics manufacturer.
R-ladies London meetup tomorrow
http://bugfender.com/ - A remote debugger for iOS and Android apps.

This is one of the internal tools that we built at Mobile Jazz as we always had the problem of being a remote team and therefore physically detached from our clients. Many times they had problems that we couldn't reproduce on our devices. With Bugfender we now can get access to their device's app logs and figure out what's wrong.

From being initially just a clunky internal tool, Bugfender is now a whole platform with a nice admin interface and many filtering and search options. The result is great and we're having quite some success with as not only we, but also the whole mobile developer community really loves it. And that is what makes us proud! :-)
I'm also looking at this project for a similar use case. Have you looked at InfluxDB or Prometheus?
Or just disable mp4, webm, flash altogether in about:config. I typically view media in specially sanctioned browsers, just for viewing rich media.

E.G Chrome on windows 10 hooked up to a 4K Acer monitor via HDMI

You can harden FF also and remove a few other annoyances like the default PDF reader, etc:

https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js/
Wait ... a millinewton is 1000 micronewtons, not the other way around. Not taking a position on this issue, just posting a clarification.
Tony Hawk of Yesteryear
Atlas Recall: Photographic searchable memory
Really tired of iTunes too. It's tagline should be: "Making simple complex". I'm using OPlayer Lite right now, but may try your app too.
I had a problem a bit like this a while back: I had (and still have) a small side business, and needed a shopping cart for it. I looked around at open-source solutions like osCommerce and Magento and decided they all sucked, especially for my use-case (I have a small number of products for sale, each with a lot of documentation, instructions, illustrations, etc., not a giant retail site with hundreds or thousands of products with a minimal description for each). I tried, but these programs were all such huge monoliths that it was too impractical to strip them down to the minimalistic code I wanted to run, nor did I want to use a database (I run on a small, cheap, slow webserver and want to keep my page-load times decent). I ended up finding a somewhat broken but minimalistic shopping cart program in PHP, and learned enough PHP to fix it up and customize it for my site. That program is now abandonware, but my heavily modified version is working great on my site, and does just what I need: gives me a simple but functional shopping cart and is very fast, and if I need to make more changes is easy to modify because it's not a giant mess of tens of thousands of lines of code in hundreds of source files with zero comments (I'm looking at you, Magento...).
I have used this website a lot in the past, it has greatly helped me debugging complex expressions, I would love to see an electron port in the future.
I get like this with my favorite things. I do it less frequently than I did as a child, but I still do. It's silly I guess.

The last book I did this with was "Permutation City" by Greg Egan. There's probably less than an hour's worth of reading left, but I just don't want it to end. This was maybe a year ago and I still haven't touched it since. Eventually I'll probably re-read it from the beginning and actually finish it.

I also do it for bands I really like that are slow to put out albums. I haven't heard the latest GSY!BE (from early 2015) yet, not because I don't want to, but because who knows if they're going to go through another 13 year gap between albums! Maybe in 2020 I'll be having a really bad night and 40 minutes of "new" music from one of my favorite bands is exactly what I'll need.
I suspect because of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773282
I remember meeting a 14xxxx or 13xxxx once! Maybe both.
> the Google founders have done a great job of managing their companies while maintaining voter control.

They moved aside and let Schmidt be CEO for a while though, because Page was not ready.
Touch Bar MacBook Pro have non-upgradeable SSDs, seemingly under-sized batteries
I highly recommend Loupe. It was a great one-stop logging shop for my severely understaffed line-of-business system team in Indiana. If Kendall's reading this, he should know how truly top-of-the-line customer service was, to the point of debugging a runtime error with me over the phone!
Do you mean any and all advertising or advertising for the IPO specifically?
Maybe not sending an email in the first place?

If their product is so great, they don't need to spam anybody, specially developers, to go look at it.
Open-Sourcing the Pact Smart Contract Language