skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
what's the dream business model of every VC? a marketplace.

the ideal outcome, though perhaps improbable, is likely to become the ebay of real estate. what they lack is critical mass.

today, they're focused on seeding the marketplace with sellers, that is filling the supply side, which is the natural place to start.

this is a long way of saying that it seems not at all unreasonable to hope they will emulate amazon's AWS strategy of reducing fees as costs fall, not only to deepen their competitive advantage but also to drive them closer to critical mass. but given the high costs and uncontrollable risks, they need to, in the early stages, compromise growth for unit economics and cash flow.

fundamentally, they're using machine learning and automation to remove guesswork and fat from real estate transactions, so this company will be interesting to watch.

what many commentators miss is that OD is selling a service to home owners. it would be helpful if knowledgeable real-estate people focused on (a) estimating how many sellers want this service; (b) if 2% seems reasonable for OD's service; and (c) if this initial market is large enough to jumpstart their marketplace ambitions (assuming this is the end goal).
WW3 MAY BE AVERTED BY USER UNFREINDLY BLOGS BECAUSE ITS TRUTH
My major gripe with them too, they aren't competing on technology but rather marketing and exclusivity arrangements. So glad they aren't the only ones driving the space forward, otherwise it's IE6 all over again.
But is it going to support ECC memory?

Also with Intel you can upgrade to more performant Xeons. What can you upgrade AMD to?
When you get a string from the client you prepend a single zero width space. When you send a string back you strip the single leading space you added. The client will always have the exact same data back that they sent originally.
Maybe theoretically Spanish has no diphthongs. But rapid speech definitely sees diphthongs develop as sounds merge together -- a very much Spanish thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphthong#Spanish

Your example would be /kau̯.da/, with the a and u merging into a single syllable diphthong.
Galileo's Sunspot Drawings (2004)
Ask HN: Why we assume software developers don't know math?
Pew Research had a January 2014 number of 71% of 'online adults' being on facebook, Statista had 79% of US internet users for April of 2016.

http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/246230/share-of-us-inter...
Does that mean that two empty strings won't compare equal to each other?
Haven't looked into how accurate these are but it's mentioned fairly often.

"Market leader Facebook was used by 79 percent of internet users"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/246230/share-of-us-inter...

"71% of online adults use Facebook"
http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fac...

"72% of all online US adults visit Facebook at least once a month"
https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/96-amazing-social-media-stat...
Carrying case - Plantronics and others would like to discuss "new/innovative":

http://www.plantronics.com/us/product/voyager-legend-case

(I know that this product is not specifically music-oriented, but the operation principle is there still).
Your comment suggested (probably unintentionally) that this characteristic is somewhat unique to U.S. culture. jerf's comment was therefore relevant.
Do you actually have them in hand? How is the sound quality? What headphone did you use before the AirPods and are they better or worse in terms of sound quality?

I'm probably not switching soon because I love my Atomic Floyd's sound quality (don't get me started on their customer service) but I'm just curious how they did with the sound quality aspect, which feels like the most important thing to me.
Which is better, unlimited "battery" or a 40 hour battery? It may not be a big issue for you, but for me that's a very significant tradeoff. And I haven't looked into studies but I have personally done multiple side by side comparisons of the same headphones/speakers connected via bluetooth vs wired and have yet to find a set where I was not able to notice a difference in the sound quality. For me, that's enough, but I'd encourage you to try it out yourself or seek out some studies (I haven't even bothered looking).

In the end it seems more of a question of which bothers you more:

1. degraded sound quality and drastically shorter (since one is unlimited) battery life or

2. having a wire from your headphones to your audio source.

For me, there's no question that 1. is more of an issue, for others, 2. is a bigger problem. I consider bluetooth an alternative to wired headphones but absolutely not a replacement since both have tradeoffs
I would quote them back their own marketing: "Using the AWS SDK you can write applications that store JSON documents directly into Amazon DynamoDB tables"
It was a lot of little things. One big takeaway is that they're big on going vertical not horizontal. Find a niche.

There was some useful stuff on landing page optimization.

patio11 gave a talk that year that was great.

I also found it helpful to talk to other people doing the same thing I was. A solo startup can be kind of isolating.

So it isn't anything you need to do. As I mentioned below this, the book "Start Small, Stay Small" has a lot of the practical stuff, if $25 is more in your budget.
Because it's a single update for all platforms that does other things as well, and because Apple makes weird decisions sometimes.

You seem to think that Apple hopes that people will forget that their battery drains quicker if they don't tell them how much time is left in it. I don't think they're that stupid.
Define "better".

If you just want to compress some stuff, zip is perfectly fine and widely supported. (or gzip or tar)

If you want fancy things with better compression, user rights/ACL (either linux or windows style), file dates, encryption, password protection. Well, I don't know what can do that.
Random question: is the earbud size and shape the same as old wired Apple earbuds?

I've never been able to use the traditional wired Apple earbuds because my ear is too small and they start hurting after 5-10 mins of use.
> If a product or a company or a technology—one of many competing in a market—gets ahead by chance or clever strategy, increasing returns can magnify this advantage, and the product or company or technology can go on to lock in the market.

Isn't this just describing the nature of monopoly power? The worship of this ideal seems to go hand in hand with the weakening of antitrust enforcement over recent decades.
Whilst Notes had it's frustrations (mainly as a user revolving around its insistence on using its own terminology and layout for everything), I thought it had strong points that made it an excellent tool for knowledge management.

Notes databases were easily replicated for offline use and encrpyted for data security (when I was using it was back in the mid 2000's before Full disk encryption became common).

In the days of poor Internet connectivity this made it immensely valuable for travelling consultants who could easily take large quantities of information on the move with them and synch it when in the office.

These days for end users I guess OneNote comes closest to that, but even there I don't think it has all the features that Notes did...
Google Publishes Eight Secret FBI Requests
Perfection is of course, impossible, the best we can hope for is progress asymptotically close to ideal. The minimum bar should be performance surpassing human performance, but the details do matter. For example, a 99.99% safety rated car which almost never crashes but randomly explodes once every 10,000,000 uses would probably not be accepted.
There's enough skepticism in this thread and comments (and I concur a lot with what's been written), so I'll try to take a positive "here's what could be possible" spin with it:

I recently purchased a Bose QuietComfort 35 and I've noticed that the lack of chords + noise cancellation have made it so that I wear the headphones for the entirety of the day. The lack of fatigue while wearing the head phones is a big deal. Additionally, the lack of wires has changed my behavior in ways I did not expect pre-purchase. For example, I no longer need to take off my headphones to go to the bathroom. Or when I leave the desk to grab something, etc.

These AirPods seem like they could make this behavior even more extreme. I can imagine just keeping them on all day without taking them off. That would be enough of a behavioral change personally to warrant the superfluous marketing copy of "Magical" and "Not Possible Before".

Beyond that, if people really start walking around with AirPods in their ear all day, it could more of a fashion symbol success (new age earrings basically) than what Apple envisioned with the Watch.

But, at the price they're going for, I doubt this will happen, but you can see where the marketing enthusiasm is coming from.
The decision makers in big auto are around 10y from their retirement. Reluctance makes sense for them. It's similar to the consulting project I had at uni with an O&G company: everyone knows they should pivot for the sake of the next generation. On the other hand, upper echelons just want to simplify their life.

Now it's the labor unions that are pushing german auto makers over the EV cliff. Ironically, they have the greatest incentives to innovate/follow.

It's bothering though, that redundancies will be massive no matter what exactly they do about EVs. Can anyone offer a growth perspective for that sector (=not some kind of UBI vision)? My initial thoughts were space. But this is not really were to retool design prowess and factories either.
>Also consider having someone you trust have access to documentation, passwords, accounts, etc...in case of some kind of emergency, etc. If it's making money, it would be a shame not to be able to pass it on to a beneficiary if you were to die unexpectedly.

This is important. Redundancy and automation are your allies, but it is prudent to implement some sort of keyman insurance.
It also doesn't store empty lists, sets, maps, etc, not just top level, but nested inside dynamo maps. The particular SDK i was using silently removes keys with empty (whatever) values from the map. Dynamo maps in general were full of gotchas and we ended up just serializing as json since the only gotcha there is integer keys becoming strings.

Also dynamo's capacity provisioning can be scaled up any time (although scaling up is slow-ish), but only down once per day, which means that unlike the promise of ec2 you end up having to essentially pay for your peak load at all times.

If I had it to do over again I'd have stuck with postgres, the only reason we used dynamo in the first place was to throw our boss a bone to soften our flat refusal to use Amazon Simple Workflow, which is an even bigger quagmire.
Don't waste your time with these cryptic editors. Get a more reasonable editor such as Sublime Text or VSCode that allow you to install plugins for emacs/vim bindings etc.

IMHO the best bang for buck that you get with these editors comes from learning just a handful of commands for the most common stuff, i.e. open/close/save, move caret, cut/copy/paste/, switch between buffers. So with a more modern editor with emacs/vim like plugin you can have the best of both worlds, i.e. enable fast operations for the common stuff while also having sensible menus etc. for the non-common stuff. If you go "raw" emacs/vim, then everything is cryptic.
I use Facebook and owned a DK1 and DK2, but did not get the CV1 or continue to the use my DK2 because of the Facebook integration.

I trust Facebook with the information I explicitly share with it, i.e., posting photos or comments on Facebook. I do not trust Facebook to have unfettered access to a microphone, camera, and activity just to be able to play a game. The Facebook integration was, well, integral, and not just an opt-in for enhancing social aspects. You can't use the headset to play local content without phoning home (short of using old drivers/OpenVR or something).

Of course maybe this still places me in a minority of users because I have the same reaction when a mobile app requests every permission possible, which seems to be the case with all apps now.
It's like calling a Tesla "an electric version of the same cars that were on the road for decades". Each headphone has a new chip that could probably run a whole smartphone few years ago - but I mean, if the fact that they are wireless is not impressive, then I don't think we can convince you.
$13M for boat timesharing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlA9bNk3b5Q
I believe the parent is saying

string_to_store = userstring + extra space
dynamo.store(key, string_to_store)

...

stored_string = dynamo.retrieve(key)
user_string = stored_string - extra space

That way the user puts a string in and gets the same string out. No problem.
Using a printable character (or sequence of characters) seems like it would be a lot better. It'll ugly up your database, but at least it'll be obvious that there's a difference. Having all your string possess two forms which are visually identical but are not actually the same sounds unpleasant.
One of the best replies I've ever read on HN. :)

I think you nailed it.
The same economy of scale that keeps people using Facebook despite constant privacy issues and bad press: the network effect.

That said, Facebook has a much larger network effect than Uber. The friction to create a profile and attend an driver orientation on a competing ride broker network is much smaller than telling your everyone on your Facebook friends list you're moving to Diaspora.
A feature I'd love to see: sync to AirPods.

I imagine it won't happen because in some ways it's kind of backwards, but I hate running with my phone, especially because I have a huge 6+.

It seems like a simple thing to just want to be able to take some of my music/podcasts with me running, but it's not realistic unless I own a separate iPod shuffle that I then have to deal with. Adding a small amount of memory to AirPods would make this possible and relatively seamless.
> Maybe your target audience was just not quite right?

Nah. It's insanely difficult to find this kind of stuff when you have no clue what to look for.
How do empty strings provide no value? It's a valid value for strings, one which many programs encounter regularly, and it's reasonable to want to store them. Refusing to store empty strings makes as much sense as refusing to store zeroes in a numeric field, because zero is "nothing."
Clarification: My comment was not primarily about browser developers, it was about web developers that do not care about interoperability – and either do not test in non-Webkit/Blink browsers or declare that for some reason (e.g. marketshare, “it is just an experiment”), other browsers are irrelevant in their specific case.
See also the History section of the GNU Troff (groff) manual:

https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/html_node/History....
>old fashioned hand coded features are necessary

I don't believe your hand coded features will outperform ML trained over a billion miles, even in the long tail rare events.

Sure ML is bad at rare events, but hand coded features also map poorly to such rare events, because it's unlikely you'll be able to imagine them all, or even manage to handle categories of rare events well.

Furthermore, I believe it would be possible to train an ML based rare-event detector, which simply detects the difference between "regular driving I'm familiar with" and "something funny is going on, I haven't seen this much in the training dataset", and then refer to a remote human to resolve the issue.
> Sometimes I feel that contemporary markup languages like Markdown, Textile, etc. fall short compared to the syntax that was just as readable and quite a bit more powerful in troff...

I've never used troff myself, but your comment prompted me to look at the spec for it. I also searched for a "markdown vs troff" comparison, but didn't have much luck. Do you know of a head-to-head comparison? I've been using markdown for the past year or so when I don't need the full power of LaTeX. But your comment has me wondering if I'd be better off just using troff?
I personally already use vim, actually prefer it when I remote to servers.

I guess my point is just that it seems to me a lot of people (not necessarily you guys) use vim as some kind of cargo cult.
> * Remember that people with non-software skills are probably just as smart and hardworking as you are

And maybe/probably smarter.

One of the smartest people I ever worked with was a sales guy (gasp). The dude could spend 3 minutes listening to you explain something, instantly grasp the problem, have an idea of what the solution would look like, then communicate that to the customer in a way that made it look like we were doing them a huge favor. He had a non-technical degree and his background before joining our company was at a car dealership.

He once declared himself Master Lord Architect of All Things Technical after he figured out an issue to a problem in the span of a conversation that took three engineers the better part of a week.

I did not object.
> Still, it's hard to imagine people being willing to use Oracle nowadays.

I use Oracle every day, because that is one of the options for our customers rely on to run their critical Fortune 500 infrastructure. The other being SQL Server.
Popular CentOS Linux server gets a major refresh
If you're interested in the economics of tech, this is one of my favorite books:

Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy - http://amzn.to/2hKFpwW

One of the authors, Varian, is now Google's Chief Economist, so they must think highly of him too.

The book is a bit older, but like the book says, “Technology changes, economic laws do not.”
Why? Because you think sql is not good or because you think there are better relational databases?

I'd say that Oracle delivers quite much value for your money for many applications.

I have worked with all other relevant relational databases and also with a few nosql databases, in distributed systems and monoliths.

It's hard to make a recommendation that can be applied generically. The best answer is "It depends, and it's complicated"

One thing is sure. Nosql is not the future (quite the opposite) although sometimes -in rather special circumstances- the right solution. Graph databases are perhaps more interesting, and perhaps event sourcing, but the promises are way larger than the deliveries.

Edit. I forgot the obvious reason. You try to stay clear of the Dark Side.
I think your parent commenter meant "3y experience using Mongo before having to use it [- DDB, subject of thread -] ..."
The company is in the process of moving to git now. Subversion met their requirement fine and so for the longest time they stuck with that.
Online payment hijacking/spoofing proof of concept – Hackmyfortress – Blog
I think it would be better to use something both printable and commonly used for placeholders, eg. an underscore, so it's obvious if you forget to remove it and unlikely to seriously confuse anybody.
> we have confused the two

I don't see confusion so much as a desire for the two to be the same and a goal worth pursuing.
> I use Facebook and owned a DK1 and DK2, but did not get the CV1 or continue to the use my DK2 because of the Facebook integration.

Fair enough, I care about privacy as well but I'm just pointing out you need to acknowledge most people aren't bothered by this.

> I do not trust Facebook to have unfettered access to a microphone, camera, and activity just to be able to play a game.

I'm curious: do you have Whatsapp or the Facebook app installed on your phone? Facebook could spy on you via this or Oculus but if they were found out it would be seriously damaging to the company.
Perhaps I have. I started this business after learning I was going to be a dad. My broader goals were financial, location, and time independence for my family and I. I suppose I take it for granted that I enjoy the building part. As long as I can use tools that I like, I can get excited about building almost anything. So far the time independence has been elusive but I'm still just getting started. Moved to paid plans just a month ago. I think it will get more manageable as the product and I mature. Also bringing on some dev help is in order.
https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/743193847178608640/dVj_...

Great way to end a conversation.
Judging by the outcry for the delay, and the available units immediately selling out, that seem to be a non issue.
I'm not sure exactly what the difference (if any) is between Chrome's dev tools and Chromium's dev tools, but Opera AFAIK uses Chromium's tools and the battery life on my 12" Macbook under normal web browsing in Opera (with adblocker and battery saver turned on) routinely exceeds 10 hours.

I do a bit of light web development work every now and then but I'm not really qualified to comment on how good the developer tools in question actually are. To me, they seem to have some nice features and they do what I need.
I'm from St. Louis, so I happen to be familiar with those numbers.

Here are the homicide rates in St. Louis in the early 90s (per 100k people):

1991	65.0
1992	57.4
1993	69.0
1994	63.5
1995	54.9

And here's 2002-2014:

2002	31.4
2003	21.8
2004	33.7
2005	37.9
2006	37.2
2007	39.6
2008	46.9
2009	40.3
2010	45.1
2011	35.3
2012	35.5
2014	49.9

Homicides here started falling in the late 1990s and remained (relatively) low throughout the 2000s. The rate did jump in 2014 and has remained higher since, but it's still lower than it was in the early 90s.

Which, I think, is to say that your narrative isn't correct, at least regarding St. Louis. It's much messier than that (and mostly good news (relatively)).
At a previous gig with an open data warehouse, we had problems with teams pulling data incorrectly (e.g. counting visits without using the correct combination of filters to get the "official" count) and using them in company documents and press releases.

The solution there was to cut off access and force such requests to go through the data team. What's the solution if you still want them to have access to the raw data? No matter how much documentation we produced, it never stopped someone from screwing up a join and getting the wrong information as a result.
Aston Martin Vanquish S – The Super Grand Tourer
Absolutely false.
A bit more than 5 years ago I thought quite seriously to invest on self driving cars because I thought it would be viable in the not so far future and it seemed that no one else was pushing for it.
10 years ago there were only research projects with abysmal performance compared to what today seems not too far from the market.
Any verifiable source for your claims?
Agree- our startup (www.Librede.com) does biosynthesis of cannabinoids in yeast from sugar. Much more environmentally sustainable and economical. Further, the modularity of the cannabinoid synthesis pathways in cannabis allows production of specific cannabinoids by substitution of single enzymes.