skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm afraid to have to say that your argument is tangential and somewhat misleading. No one is arguing that any creative work is valueless. However, it is a fundamental economic principle that the cost of a good will approach the marginal cost of production, which for digital works is zero and for physical media is still very low -- I'll take your figure of $8.30 at face value. I think you need to revise your argument, and I believe that your understanding of the economics of information would be improved by the arguments of Mr. Boyle[0]. He considers the subject in depth, and his is more or less the canonical argument against excessive copyright durations. I would be quite interested to read a detailed refutation. And not to belabor the point, but I would like to be quite clear, we all agree that cultural works have value, the argument is whether (e.g.) a one-time commission payment for the production of a cultural work adequately captures the true value to society of that work, or whether we need to create a market for the right to market those goods in order to provide further incentives for their production.

> Digital goods should not be "free" and appropriating them without economic exchange is theft

This feels like a petitio principii. Legally it is incorrect, and as an argument it is unsophisticated nearly to the point of being a slight on the intellectual abilities of our fellow commentators here. I'd like to think that we all here are fairly intelligent and well-informed, and I feel that it is incumbent upon ourselves to present cogent, well-reasoned arguments, which do not trivialize the opposing side, but which are well-supported with appropriate citations. I believe that you have a valid position and that the discussion is one worth having. I read your comments here fairly often and have never yet found anything in them which would subtract the least measure of my respect, but I do think you do yourself and your position a great deal of harm by arguing in this manner.

[0] "The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind" http://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf
$30M may not be big budget by Hollywood standards but it's hardly "low budget" and, from what I've seen, La La Land looks like a fully professional Hollywood production.
Please comment civilly and substantively on Hacker News—no personal attacks like this.
While native support is always better, this seems to be implemented similar to AWS Lambda sothe same approach should work there as well. You can have a husk of a nodejs app exec the precompiled binary of your go program. You'd just have to make sure the CPU arch matches up with the k8s infrastructure (i.e. it's going to be Linux x86-64).
>A lot of people, me included, will never buy another Fitbit after having been burned

In my case, getting burned was quite literal. I had a Fitbit Force and was one of the thousands who wound up getting a chemical burn on my wrist from wearing the device. It took about six weeks for it to subside.

Fitbit's response was sub-par. They finally did recall all the devices, but it took them way too long to admit a problem existed and to act on it. They initially dismissed the whole thing as potential sensitivity to metal, when clearly something different was going on.

A TV station spent a year filing FOIA requests with the CPSC, etc trying to chase down what happened. The best they could come up with was that perhaps trapped sweat in the charge port could get converted to sodium hydroxide when you plug in the charger, and that would imply that you got a lye burn on your arm.

http://abc13.com/technology/possible-cause-of-fitbit-rashes-...

The burn that I had was definitely localized right to where the charge port would contact my wrist.
The Algorithms Behind Probabilistic Programming
Is this some sort of Etherpad revival? :)
Would be awesome
Most of the metrics with my Charge and now Charge 2 are inaccurate for any purpose other than trending info. Same with the Aria scale for Body fat %. They are not horribly inaccurate, just not terribly accurate. They are at least consistent however, and the graphs are useful to make sure my exercise, weight, etc are trending right. For me, that's enough - I want to be fit and healthy, I'm not trying to be highly tuned and in peak fitness. Those who are would probably want to look at other products.
Some interesting mentions here. I tend to follow mostly people who talk about statically-typed functional programming. Some people who I believe stand out because they changed the game in some way:

* Dan Grossman for his amazing, succinct explanations of static typing and functional programming concepts in Standard ML

* Philip Wadler for his work on Haskell

* Miles Sabin for freeing Scala developers from fixed arities with shapeless

* Jordan Walke for React (put immutable and reactive programming in every JS dev's hands) and Reason (bringing OCaml to JS devs)

* Erik Meijer for putting monads (LINQ) in C#

* Evan Czaplicki for bringing functional reactive programming to JavaScript devs.
Pied Piper. I mean..Paper.
If you can brace yourself for much of the same, read through Jason Perlow's material going back decades. He just keeps singing the same tune over and over again...
It's amazing how strong it's still working years after his death.
You're using some really dubious tricks to massage the numbers so they can be discounted.

Temporality is a nonsense argument.

Your sandwich shop worker served you and 80 other customers last Tuesday. I'm the boss, and it's time for me to cut the checks. Wait—what am I paying for here? Today's Friday, and all those sandwiches are already out the door.
I'm using Dropbox Paper since quite a while and I love it. For PCs it is completely browser based and therefore works nicely on every platform - no native apps needed. It has mobile apps. I cancelled my Evernote subscription and account on the spot.

The only real downside at the moment from my point of view is that it does not yet have an offline mode.
What qualifies one to count as a philosopher in your opinion? I don't know about Camus, but I'm pretty sure Sartre has produced at least as much purely philosophical works as works of literature and is universally considered one of the most important philosophers of 20th century.

The nonexistence of absolute free will does not make it a useless concept just like the nonexistence of "absolute" solid bodies doesn't make "solid body" a useless concept.
I'll let you in on a secret, the best minds don't know whats going on most of the time. Just go with the flow and be open minded and accommodating and you'll be well on your way to achieving your goals.
Except that's not what I'm referring to. As with any cost based optimiser, it's only as good as the statistics it has to work with, and if you've finally carefully tuned your database with an appropriate histogram on a critical table, and found that after an upgrade they "tweaked" the CBO to fix a statistics calculation then you are right back to looking at explain plans to fix your performance issue.

Sometimes you just aren't going to pick up this sort of thing in testing as you'll only know about it under full production load. Their CBO is pretty powerful, but by and large it's often difficult to know why it makes certain decisions. And that's even when you use their full suite of profiling tools!
Are they simply taking this out of beta? I've been using paper for over a year now, it's a lot like Quip but integrated with Dropbox
H-1B, the input stream for these skilled immigrants, do not have any such per-country limits. But the green card process does. This brings into existence a large number of skilled immigrants who have their stay in the country tied to their job. This weakens their negotiation power, and contributes significantly to the wage depression you talk about.

Even NumbersUSA do not oppose removing this [1] restriction. Yet, you are _for_ keeping the per-country quotas. Why?

[1]:https://www.numbersusa.org/content/news/november-30-2011/sen...
Since this has been submitted several times and flagkilled on each occasion, we've turned the flags off on this one to host the discussion.
The fact that Saudi money, very substantial sums of it, find its way to terrorists, terrorist sympathisers and extremist preachers and their mosques and cultural centres is simple.

The reason for this, and the mechanism by which it happens, is indeed very complicated.
> canners use varieties that have not been ruined for shipping

This explains why I love canned/boxed tomatoes, but hate the slimy, bland sliced ones they put on sandwiches.
Ask HN: Which marketers do you closely follow?
I saw the "Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?" recently and thought to ask you similar question if I may.
Another closed file format. I think we're are in need of a lightweight document format, which is more complex than markdown, but needn't be as complex as docx.

A quick google shows some results which look like pet projects of small business which have obviously failed (since I've never heard of them before)

All of these new document formats that are pushed by big companies (some are really great I actually love using Google Docs) try to tie the user as close to their eco-system as possible.

When ever I try to maintain documents for long term storage, markdown seems like the only good format. I've seen people talk about stuff like org-mode, etc, but they all lack the fluidity and the WYSIWYG nature of Google docs, docx etc. I'm talking about how markdown never actually stores pictures inside the document, but just links to them, and you'll have to use a specific application to view the rendered markdown, and a different one to edit or make new ones.

I'm interested to see that does everyone else use for documents? And please don't suggest docx+open/libre office. I'm still waiting for some of those applications to properly handle a big file and I don't want to wait so long for those applications to even open.

EDIT: Thanks for the replies. I think I should clarify something. I'm looking for a WYSISWYG tool, like google docs/docx. I don't really have time to spend doing the edit->render->see where you went wrong->edit cycle. This really hurts productivity when you're editing large documents and increases the barrier for new comers. I do use LaTeX but only when I need ultra sharp looking documents with specific needs. I really like it, but only pull it out when I need to write a paper and want the output in PDF. Other times, it's really not worth the effort.

So formats which require me to render to HTML etc, are a no go. I'm looking into ASCIIDOC but even that looks like it's very similar to markdown. And by WYSISWYG, I mean I want to type, and press Ctrl+B to write in bold, and Ctrl+I for italic and right click to insert hyperlink and so on. Not use asterisks everytime whenever I want to make something bold. Sure it transparently to that in the background, but I shouldn't have to worry about it.
No it doesn't.

India has a massive backlog of green card applicants. Obama's order makes it so taht people who are already here working under H-1B laws can cut ahead of that line and start getting green cards. That's a change in priority.

Otherwise these people are stuck here tied to a company for a decade+. That's shitty for everyone but hte company.

If you really want H-1B visas to not be abused then you should be in favor of more reasonable paths to PR and citizenship.
Do you honestly believe he did not know the meaning of racism? That he was not being deliberately ignorant (the definition of willful ignorance) about racism to make a rhetorical point? Come on now.

I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings by calling out the obvious. I apologize.
As long as the code has adjacent entries vary by only one bit it is unnecessary to use them all. The author gives the example [110, 010, 011, 111] of a code that is valid but doesn't use all 2^n possibilities.
I liked this blog post on the subject.

http://glassmaker.tumblr.com/post/137759512208/how-to-listen...
My understanding is that Windows supports user-mode drivers and Microsoft strongly encourages not writing kernel-mode drivers unless absolutely necessary. If Fitbit did that anyway though then it's definitely their fault.
Many terms commonly used in computer programming originated with Mark I
Huh? Hopefully they didn't waste a ton of resources on this. I doubt there even exists a market large enough to justify this.
I think its worth pointing out that when most people say "hardware" when talking about the fitbit, we're talking about the band, charge port etc and not the electronics (which is usually what I'm talking about when I use the word "hardware").

I think we've all had the same experience with the band/casing (personally mine haven't lasted long enough to have issues with the charge-port. Currently mine is wrapped up with tinfoil tape which is doing a good job of keeping my 2nd warrenty charge-HR alive). As far as the electronics hardware I don't actually have much of an issue. Some recent update required location for syncing but after I read into it it sounded like it was actually a google/android issue, not fitbit.

I won't go as far as you to decry fitbit but they waited far too long and lost far to much goodwill on an issue as simple (seemingly) as the freaking band.
I'm (selfishly) for keeping them because I don't want to get stuck in line with the huge backlog of people from India and China. That's a lousy reason though.

I'm not going to spend a decade living a shitty life waiting though. So if the per country caps go I might just give up.
One potential path is to gain FI, then you can do whatever you want. It can happen pretty fast on a dev's income.

My current favorite early retirement blog:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
Haha, beautifully put, but I often wonder the opposite. What if our capacity to perceive and think is so limited and narrow that most of the underlying workings of reality are completely missed by us? The what if being, we are not so special as we think. The way an ant colony will bustle full of self-import and purpose, blissfully unaware of the giant people passing by. And the people pay it no mind, because they can't interact meaningfully with the ant colony, so while one is aware of the other and far more about the world, the reverse isn't true.
> So there were really no paying customers

Well, there were no customers who would pay the original author. Chromium still required developers to incorporate and maintain the library. Money was spent on the library, it's just that none of that money was given back to the original developer.

> or you do it as a passion project

Doing a "passion project" doesn't mean that you need to give everything away. If there's the chance my passion project could make money, why deprive myself of that chance before I even begin?

Lots of passion projects licensed GPL which make money; and lots of passion projects licensed BSD which don't have a single user.
Hi guys

Since Parse announce that the will be offline, we found a very good alternative SashiDo, they provide a very good and proactive service, absolutely recommended.

Hernan Mejia
CEO SECUOIAIT
Sad news. It was a great BAAS. My company has migrated our app over to sashido. Their services are pretty solid with a good support team.

Larry Mickie. MusicLinx founder
My immediate thought was "another Dropbox project that'll be sunset in a year's time, huh?"
Google Wave is exactly what I thought of. Like Wave, this is a polished, high-quality, sexy solution for a problem that simply doesn't exist. People are going to ooh and aah over it, and then keep using Slack and Google Docs.

s/Wave/Paper in this Wave obituary from 2010:

> Wave brought together elements of instant messaging, e-mail, microblogging, and collaborative editing in a single service that strongly emphasized concurrency and rich media. ... Despite its prodigious sophistication under the hood, the service never resonated with its target audience. Regular end users saw it as a mismatched amalgamation of disparate messaging paradigms blended together in a cumbersome Web-based interface.

https://arstechnica.com/business/2010/08/wave-cancellation-g...
In my experience, loving the new version is not an understatement. Great work, and thank you. It's been a pleasure to see React and the ecosystem around it mature.
are you talking about HTML? w3c got it figured out, or do you mean LaTeX?
Yep. Specifically, the reason digital rentals cost $5 is because of convenience. The parent poster gave Blockbuster as a counter-example. But you had to physically visit the Blockbuster store to rent and return stuff. Digital content is way more accessible.
Nice! Thank you!
AFAIK it's all markdown and you can export your files as markdown. There's also an API available to export your paper docs as markdown.
If you plugged in the Mini Memory cartridge, it added a POKE command to TI BASIC.

There was a common cartridge, "Disk Manager 2", which gave you common DOS-like disk management utilities.

The lowercase font really was absurd. A few programs redefined them with much more pleasant fonts. The "Adventure" module for running the Scott Adams text adventures comes to mind.
that makes no difference to the workers. It's worse if anything because those companies won't even sponsor them for a green card.

I'm a foreign worker, and while I am very happy to live in the US being here on a visa sucks.
Possibly reposted in response to the recent release of Box Notes[1]?

My team uses Box, so all last week I saw multiple emails and posts about Box Notes, so I could be drawing a connection that isn't there. Either way neither Paper nor Notes seem useful to me.

[1]: https://www.box.com/notes
There are sleeping pills, everything from benadryl to xanax to ambien. It's just that there are a lot of side effects to any of these approaches.
The cost of a good should approach the marginal cost of producing that good. For digital goods, that cost is indistinguishable from zero.
They Google'd it.
Having just written a bunch of scripts to populate a Google Sheet with some KPI data for the business folks, I _completely_ agree.

At first I wanted to put my scripts in Lambda, put an API Gateway in front, and have them be callable by the Google Sheet on a schedule. This seemed "pure" because I didn't really _need_ independent resources to do the task. The sheet could just update itself using an on-demand server!

Then I realized there was a 30-second max execution time. My scripts, in serial, couldn't hit that. I'd need to rewrite them all to be parallel. Also, they were a bunch of bash/jq/curl I'd just thrown together. I'd have to write a Python wrapper to shell out and handle streams (ugh).

At this point, I gave up and fell back to the advice of an (ex-Heroku) coworker: why not just run them in a cron job and put the data in a Heroku DB and use Heroku Dataclips to update the Google Sheet.

Sure I have to "have" an EC2 instance and a Heroku PG box, but they're both so small they're either free or essentially so. After cloning my script repos, everything worked right away.

Sometimes it's better just to do the "inelegant" thing and move on.
Oh, not this again. Moderation improves only wrong ideas. Yes, experiments with social order are costly, but it absolutely doesn't mean that "even the most venerable and worthy ideas need to be balanced against one another".
Why do you think this variety will be less nutritious than "organic" tomatoes?
0.13 -> 1.0 was breaking
1.0 -> 2.0 was fully BC

That was 2 years with only one breaking change.

2.0 -> 3.0 removed deprecated 1.0 API, fully BC with 2.0

The only churn is for people who don't stick to stable releases, and that's their own problem.
Uh-oh Looks like Uber hit Trump's wall. #uberboycott #mobileapps
To be fair, my hash table implementations always keep a nth-key iterator cache, to make the default case of 0..n fast. If the standard library doesn't do this, I'd call that a miss in implementation.
Protection from someone monitizing your work before you can monetize on it. If they get a copy of the code released under the BSD license, no amount of re-licensing will help get a penny.

In fact, many people will simply re-host re-licensed work, in an effort to keep the "free" version available.
In case you're looking for a more wiki-like experience that supports internal links, markdown, and real-time editing check out https://www.nuclino.com (I'm a Co-Founder)
While the Parse team did an excellent job open-sourcing the platform and providing ample notice, it was still a costly learning experience.

Seamlessly transitioning a large user base on iPhone and Android to our self-hosted Parse with minimal service interruption or missed push notifications required significant engineering and coordination. The transition involved more hours than the initial build.

While we did our best (email campaigns, push notifications, etc.) we still have a sizable number of users who use the app daily, yet haven't updated it and are still pointing to (the old) Parse. We didn't plan on Parse going away back then, so those are not graceful failures.

Users who did update the app were signed out (couldn't maintain the session in the switch), resulting in a lot of "I didn't get my forgot password email" questions to support and an unknown number who won't bother troubleshooting it.

With the information at hand over a year ago, I still would have went with Parse. It really did help us get off the ground quickly. Maybe we would have missed our window of opportunity without it.