skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Launch HN: Scaphold.io (YC W17) – GraphQL Backend as a Service
Hi, we're the founders of Scaphold.io (https://scaphold.io) in the YC W17 batch. Scaphold is a GraphQL backend-as-a-service platform that helps you build apps fast. We built Scaphold because we were app developers and we were frustrated by how long it took. We started building apps together back in college, and every time we started a new project we found that we spent a lot of time doing the same things. Whether it was setting up the infrastructure, integrating APIs, managing REST endpoints, or even implementing something as simple as pagination it took a lot of time. BaaS platforms have existed before but we were disillusioned by the lack of flexibility they provided. This all changed the day we first found GraphQL in an article posted here about a year and half ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217887).

At the time, we were working at Microsoft and started hacking on what eventually became Scaphold at night and on weekends. We were driven by this vision to be the foundation for people's apps, the scaffolding of their masterpieces. We were lucky to get accepted into the YC Fellowship program last April and launched our first version of Scaphold last May. We learned a lot. The Fellowship program helped us gain initial traction and after several months of focusing on product and strong growth, we reapplied to the YC Core program and were fortunate enough to be given an opportunity to join the winter batch and to continue the dream.

Since then we have been hard at work improving the platform and have reconstructed it from the ground up. Today, Scaphold powers thousands of apps and we think it solves a lot of the problems of BaaS platforms that came before it. We're really excited about what we have built and would love for you to try it out. It's free to sign up and development tier stays free forever so you can get straight to building apps.

We'd love to hear your feedback and are happy to answer any questions. Thanks!
Uh, maybe they are so good and come from an environment with good process hence no death match. As a manager, no death march here, I rather ship a few weeks late and have a superior product and developers not burnt out. A lot of hard deadlines are made up. No one on my team will ever experience, that's what agile is all about. We ship the best we can within the constraints we have.
GLE can produce some decent plots and is BSD-licensed, but the DSL used to create the plots can be cumbersome. http://glx.sourceforge.net/examples/3dplots/index.html
You continue even though you're doomed to fail.
+1. I just now found out about it. Tried it, saw the tab reduced to a favicon, and will probably never use it till that's fixed. Especially with how a Gmail Tab blinks when I get a hangout message.
I wonder if you were brought up with 3D TV as the norm if you'd still think the same.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

A very, very good book. Also, mention should be made of Leo Szilard who was the first person that we know of to be aware of the nuclear chain reaction.
>"It's a total non-story."

If he were Hawaiian, that would be true. But he's an outsider and he's world famous.

It's a story.
I think 360 degree video and other POV style video is going to be the killer app for VR. Even more so than gaming because passively watching video doesn't require complicated/gimmicky controls and half a dozen sensors. Coverage of sports in 360 video is going to be huge.
> That's why we so often see automated systems backed by people, as we don't have automation that can respond as dynamically as a person.

I imagine there's specialized training involved to make sure that the person monitoring the machine understands the nature of how the machine operates in order to service it and know when it's making mistakes.

I wonder if the people monitoring the machines are the same ones that are being automated out of jobs or if it's an entirely different skill set?
But the biggest cities in the world have problems with foot traffic and subway traffic.

I'm not sure that they still employ "pushers" in Tokyo but they very well might.

And that's with the benefit of Japanese culture where people are generally clean and polite. Japanese density plus American social problems sounds hellish.
Great points.

> Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" is probably the most artistic use of 3D I've seen to date.

I'm going to have to watch it, do you know of a way to see it in 3D using a normal laptop or TV?
Hello, World Wide IndieWeb
It's simply a habit from LaTeX :-)
To be fair, of those in the outer boroughs of NY that do have a car, (anecdotally) they don't commute with it. From what I've seen, the car is for trips out of the city or occasionally getting something big home, or used as part of their job (Taxi, Contractor truck/van, etc).
Agreed, not all sequels or reboots are bad.

Derivative work is a little different than building a sequel though. A sequel may stand alone on it's own, but it also can take away from the original intention of it's prequel because it usually further builds out the universe or plot that took place in the original.

Movie producers often reach for sequels because they are guaranteed cash grabs and prop them up with nothing more than a shallow plot and a few A-list celebrities. To many, this takes away from the intent and meaning of the original.
aswin8728@gmail.com
Building a Dynamic Instrumentation Agent for Python
> I realized that I like looking at sets because I was frustrated every time I tried.

I had a similar experience.
Multan Metro Bus Service Inaugurates Rs 29 Bln Bus Project
Going “off-chain”, how to make your Ethereum dapp scale and successful
Land owned in the commons, by community, or with a large group of people is hardly a new concept. It seems a broken legal concept because it has become uncommon now, but it was a very common way to hold land just a few centuries ago:

Please see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_land
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

This whole situation also reminds me a bit of the Vogons destroying earth:

"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. ... What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."
I only buy 3D blu-rays. If its not 3D, I don't buy it. No point: I just rent it on Amazon Instant Video or iTunes. I have a Sony 4K/3D(passive) and its amazing, and a Visio 3D TV which is still good. We have maybe 15 (free) glasses so any number can watch. I will miss 3D, and 3D will be the #1 deciding factor when I buy my next TV.
Fair point. That said, even if a cynic interpreted a personal foundation as such, it doesn't preclude the philanthropist from harboring altruistic motives.

The issue here is that many of the comments have devolved into "gratuitous negativity."
The Ultimate PATH Management Guide
And here's an alternative solution: re-integration

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/...
The previous owner acquired it through adverse possession over a period of 10+ years. Due to a quirk in the local laws, compensation is still owed to all of those who descended from the original owners. In this case there are over 300 potential owners, some owning as little as one hundredth of a percent of the land. As long as there are unsettled claims no one will invest any time or money to improve the land. The quiet title action settles these claims allowing the land to either be sold or developed, and for all of the current owners to be compensated.
Informative article, but a picture is worth a thousand words. While I appreciate the picture of a drill ship in the ocean, it would have been more informative to see a single picture of one of these robots.

I guess since the focus of the article was the effect on related labor and not on the technology itself, a picture was deemed irrelevant. But when the title leads with 'Robots...' I want to see a picture of a robot.

You may ask why I can't just google them, but alas, I am too lazy to google for the robot in question.
The CVE-HOWTO by RedHat is a good resource to find out about the process:

https://github.com/RedHatProductSecurity/CVE-HOWTO
Dictatorial concepts in PL usually fail pretty badly. Rust may become the textbook example of a good idea too far. I'd certainly never use it or use anything written in it given a choice and/or time to rewrite in anything more accessible.
Community ownership only works if humans are identical robots. We disagree very often so how would you decide usage of land based on communities?

Look at housing societies in India; they enforce rules like no single women or no Muslims.

It's convenient when you're in the majority but inconvenient when you're in the minority.

How would you decide between so many different wants? I can not decide between say whether this land should be used for a mall or a factory.

In fact, in the real world if I knew, I could earn good money by building whichever is better. Information is money.

This system is also poor as people who value land less end up with excess land and people who do value land more end up with a lack of land. How do you measure this "value"? Money.

> There's one just north of San Francisco, a lovely hostel and beer garden in Muir Woods. If you want to be a member there, you have to consistently contribute labor to maintaining it.

This ignores specialization, i.e. I could be doing something that I'm good at (like programming) and the labor can be done by someone else (who doesn't have any better option) with the money I earn.

EDIT: replaced LTV criticism with specialization argument
I don't have many good things to say about Scala but "concessions" to backwards compatibility and enterprise support are almost always the right choice. These things are much more important to more people than "doing the right thing".
So you're saying that he should sell the drugs at a low cost, forgoing profits, for what exactly? Service to the US people? If you want companies to give up most of their profit just to be nice, then create laws to do so. Either have a socialised R&D system, or make it easier for other companies to create generics.

Nothing besides the FDA is stopping a competitor from selling generic Daraprim. And if it's not economically viable, then maybe the government should contract at fixed prices to ensure the availability of otherwise unfeasible drugs.
How could you detect possible plagiarism between documents in a large DB of documents?

Given such a system, how could you process a document to subvert it?

How would you fix the system?

How could you subvert the fix?

...
FCC chairman nominee Ajit Pai wants to take a 'weed whacker' to net neutrality
I'm also exactly there. I feel I cannot really excel at dev while I enjoy it, but I believe I can make a difference in PM
I am not one of those people. I said nothing to suggest that I might be either.
I suspect once the tech is good enough, it could become quite useful for non-entertainment uses. E.g. viewing houses before buying them, or house designs before building one. Maybe integrate it with something like Google Maps street view, so you can get a feel for where something is, and where to park, before you arrive.

I'm sure there are plenty of other uses, but it will probably be a while before the tech is good enough to be convenient for these uses.
"Sell shovels during a gold rush" has always been a true statement.
I work on databases and I ran into similar problems implementing index data structures. While I understand petgraph solves some/all of these problems completely - it would be great if the barrier to writing trees / graphs from scratch in Rust would be lower than it is currently.
Ask HN: Consciousness thought experiment-Is memory capacity of brain bounded?
There are people who can remember pretty much every day of their lives in great detail; this phenomenon suggests our brains are capable of much more than we usually use in a lifetime.

But, as a thought experiment, suppose such a person lives forever. At what point (if ever) would he or she experience a marked decrease in memory function? If it happens, would it be sudden or gradual?

To me this suggests an approach to a meaningful exploration of where consciousness resides. If it resides solely in our brains, then there should be hard physical limits to memory. But if consciousness is space-time distributed, and the universe is possibly infinite, then memory may well be infinite.
By screwing up, owning it, and fixing it. It's impossible to get real operational knowledge without actually working on it. If you're in school, design competitions are awesome. If you're working in IT already, take responsibility for some processes.
We do this, but in an interactive way, to see the approach taken, additional context given, adjustments made along the way. This really shows how a candidate thinks and if they can on-their-feet. Often we will run out of alternatives before coming to a solution, with many avenues explored. Rarely we will discover a path that may have worked, possibly even better.
3D was dead for a while for home viewing. There was no content that was easily available to watch on the 3D TV. Cannot rent or stream 3D movies from anywhere. The only way to watch 3D at home is to buy and that is twice as expensive as HD DVDs. So the content industry marked it as dead a long time ago, the TV companies are just now catching up.
No tab should get the audio exception unless it started playing audio while I was looking at it. (reopen yesterdays tabs counts as looking at it...) If you play audio to get around throttling - you should get zero CPU, not just throttled. If you have work to do in the background that is fine - there is legitimate work to do. However once you are playing audio it must mean the other work is done.

What do I know though? I don't normally listen to audio on the web...
If you like open water swimming, invest in a wetsuit. I lived in Seattle for 7 years - a 2mm or 3mm thick wetsuit should make the water quite comfortable.
Studies like this make me cry inside. Everyone tells me that I shouldn't let my kids use phones/iPads/TVs/Nintendo for too long, but I just don't know what else they would do all day. I can't send the kids outside to play out of fear they'll wander off and get hit by a car, I don't have the money for day care, and I can't guide them through structured play activities all the time because I'd end up exhausted, irritable, and I would never get anything done.

I don't want my kids to go blind, but... what am I supposed to do? Being a parent is hard. I wish that instead of doing all these studies to prove that how we raise our children is dangerous and bad for them, scientists would focus on coming up with practical ways to make modern society more kid-friendly.
China's Largest Bitcoin and Litecoin Exchanges Charging Trading Fees
I like the idea of pinned tab, but since they cannot be moved freely it is only halfway useful for me.
Thanks for checking.

> However contrary to my original statement it turned out secret in use was actually only 30 characters long.

I'm guessing it's 32 characters long? (256 bits) That matches to the spec and is a good key - as referenced in other threads anything longer is mostly a waste as the key input gets hashed down to a fixed size.
I've got an aunt who insists on sending me $100 every Christmas, and I usually spend it on those buy-a-goat-for-a-villager things. I guess this year I'm sponsoring elephants...
Well, we can disagree on those points...

On the subject of writing code - the question is really trying to find where on a spectrum someone is from:

"Code, I don't write code, I draw UML and throw it to our offshore development partners"

through to

"I always keep all the most complex and demanding parts of the development process to myself as everyone else is an idiot and only I can realize the amazing architectural vision I have <maniacal laugh>"

[And yes, the space probably isn't one dimensional and those probably aren't the endpoints] :-)

I've known extremely successful "architects" (in terms of £££$$$) who fit both of those descriptions...
You're right. I mixed up my stats. Most of the new households come in these cities without owning a car.

Sources:
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2014/08/15/car-free-households-are...
https://ggwash.org/view/35905/88-of-new-dc-households-are-ca...
http://www.betterinstitutions.com/blog/2013/07/almost-all-of...
Nice to see the nod to Loopback
Peel: Dynamic parsing within trees
Free to download, then $1 to remove ads or unlock the full game. I get the frustration, but I'm someone who pretty much never pays up front for an app, but the bar for getting me to pay $1 to remove ads or unlock features is extraordinarily low. I basically need about an hour or so of use before I'm willing to invest (which is unfortunately necessary thanks to the hundreds of essentially useless apps I've downloaded in the past).
I've heard Death March more meant as a crazy period before a deadline.
Both opportunities and challenges, but people are working on it: https://www.flexport.com/blog/port-automation-oakland-rotter...
Our Mistakes – Clover Food Lab
Math people can read TeX without compilation.
I hoped it has to do something with math, not just "it's atoms". We already know hard key points in our scientific history — next generations could use these initially obscure fragments to prevent spending time on already invalidated methods and theories.
My answer is yes. I've worked in companies which have many engineers who work with deep learning. No PhD needed.

There is a difference between doing deep learning research and building a product powered by deep learning. (with some amount of correlation of the respective success in both categories depending on the possession of a PhD). In my experience, the engineers are far, far better at building a product which can create value in the market place. Deep learning algorithms / architectures cannot do this alone.
A product encapsulates a user experience which is often completely separated from the particular learner powering the experience. However, engineers without the understanding of basic ML practices (which apply more generally) cannot build great products. (they tend to violate ML theory, i.e. they make dirty data or draw causation where there is correlation). You can see why Google is putting all of their engineers through a 6 month ML course.
> There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a contract and think this means they grasp the law; but without understanding jurisprudence or equity, common/case law, the myriad forms of legislation, actual legal proceedings &c &c.

There's a large cohort of smart people who've read a program and think this means they grasp its semantics; but without understanding the language specification, compiler bugs, undefined behavior implementation, posix specification, operating system bugs and configuration of deployment environment.
There isn't a lack of RPi-like SBCs, so Asus needs to do serious amount of PR and have persistence for long-term presence to stand out.

Here is a random recent list of 90 different competitors: http://linuxgizmos.com/table-compares-90-hacker-friendly-sin...
> It is the tragedy of the commons that no educator wants to pay the price of seeing their curriculum reduced or replaced with something better. For them better doesn’t exist.

I don't think this is correct. The issue is much more complicated. First, education is not really a tragedy of the commons, more like a tragedy of the anticommons [1].

I agree there's a time constraint to a curriculum. But that little hiccup is trumped by education's private-public problem: the US compulsory education space involves the private interests of parents/students overlapping with the public interests of their state, overlapping the big interests of the federal government. Education doesn't operate like an under-regulated scarce resource being depleted, much worse than that, it's an over-regulated scarce resource where nothing useful can get accomplished or make real changes - a dark hole of the anticommons.

I also agree schools seriously need to add more practical subjects as well as life skills classes. With that said, every educator I see is not happy with the current curriculum and they usually have opinions on what to change first. Plus small shifts in curriculum have happened and are slowly spreading. There are states and public schools with software classes, health ed, workplace training etc... But fuck some states and school districts don't even want to teach science and want to keep teaching the Bible, to everyone, by law. The federal government had to step in a few times, but there are limits to what the fed can and should do.

I'm not exactly sure how the workers comp values you brought up tie in with your very good education question, but I do see how workers comp in each state deals with similar problem: Why is an index finger valued at different amounts in different states? And then why is an index finger valued the same for different people? Surely some people are going to lose much more in life earnings due to such an injury vs others people, so how can it be standardized or fair?

This is America. We have a Constitution. And have a social contract. And we have a population of all shapes, colors and sizes. A good education curriculum and system, determined by the government seems very difficult to implement and be compatible with the other structures here.

If I had to answer I would say students should be given much more freedom, at a much earlier age to focus on a subject they want plus more freedom to learn on their own and get credit. Besides that, add philosophy and computer science. Cut pure math after algebra, offer math in the context of the other sciences like physics and computers. Cut some of the pure literature, no more old English and Beowulf taught for weeks, maybe a single class, teach more literary non-fiction in English classes. Pray for the best ;)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons
33 Best Practices for Boosting Event Registrations [Infographic]
MoveOn.org hiring Senior Fellows
The article is about drilling roles being reduced though, so those future wells will come with less jobs than new wells required just a few years ago (article claims 1/3 to 1/2 of jobs will not be there on new wells).
+1 for active SSE connection as an another signal
Yeah - that's a really great trick! You can also get this somewhat "for free" by batching updates on `requestAnimationFrame`, which never fires when unfocused.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/visibility is a nice little package that encapsulates some of the browser compat issues, if you have out-of-date clients.
Sharing this because I found it interesting that a company is public about mistakes it has made/is making.
It's pretty great for kids, it introduces them to the idea of conservation.
3DTV has always been too much work for the consumer. You have to pay the big ticket price of getting a 3DTV. Then you've got to get a pair of glasses for each viewer. What if you're one pair short? Plans ruined? Then you've got to get the 3D version of the movie. What movies do you even consider watching in 3D? Personally, I can only think of Avatar, Gravity, and maybe Dr. Strange.
It's becoming less and less obvious that anyone in a position of power advocating for fossil fuel energy actually cares about the jobs.