skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Have your written a technical book?
I am currently in talks with a few publishers who are interested in a book related to a Free and Open Source project I started.

The idea of writing a book is interesting to me, but I am uncertain about the terms - it doesn't look very lucrative, but perhaps there is a long-tail from the authority and fame it could bring.

People of HN - have you written a book? What was your experience like? What lessons can you share? If you had to do it again, what would you do differently?

My biggest question is - why go with a publisher at all? Other than the distribution channels and the vanity of having a printed book with your name on it, it seems like self-publishing could be a much more profitable route.

Anyway, I'd love to know anything you have to share!

Thanks!,
R
I've said it before and I'll say it again: A big part of Fitbit's problem is the poor hardware quality of their products, especially considering the high price. A lot of people, me included, will never buy another Fitbit after having been burned.

Their warranty only lasts one year, yet I've had to replace both Fitbit devices I've had twice within that one year. I'm now Fitbit-less because the latest, a Charge HR, failed for the third time, and it's out of that one year warranty.

To give you an idea of how bad the Charge HR is, its charging plug attaches with metal prongs, but it plugs into a slim plastic housing that is only glued to the rest of the device. The obvious result is that the plastic housing eventually gets pulled off with the plug. That's how two of my three Charge HRs have died. It'd be like if your laptop were ruined within four months because the power cable pulled off an essential piece of the laptop housing rather than detaching cleanly, and now it won't attach in order to charge. The third Charge HR bricked itself during an unprompted firmware update, which started randomly and then I guess got interrupted midway through when I moved my phone too far from the device. It never recovered.

I don't know what the hell they're optimizing for over at Fitbit HQ, but they're trying to sell $10 throw-away quality devices for >$100. It's outrageous. I actively discourage everyone I know from ever buying anything from them, and many other people I know have also completely sworn them off for the same reason. Their product just sucks.
Exactly, I agree, which is why I'm puzzled that anyone think Trump and his administration of people who became obscenely wealthy from controlling those very corporations would do anything otherwise, while accusing Obama of being the one trying to drive down wages.
The marginal cost of producing another unit of a digital good is close to zero. On the flip side, the cost of marketing that good is close to infinite.
> authentication to some extent

The "to some extent" part is precisely a big part of my point when I mention fragmented standards and absence of critical mass. An incomplete killer application is not really "killer".

Other devices (e.g: Android wear with smart-lock and Google Pay) also suffer from the "to some extent" illness.

But you made a very good point about FitBit not being able to replicate. Their devices are too focused on health and notification. They don't even have the hardware to go beyond that.
No basic income serves to drive overall wages down.
Absolutely correct... but continue down the path of wild, unjustified speculation... perhaps then "Dark Energy" is nothing more than "Hawking Radiation" as it appears from a perspective within the black hole. :-P
We don't really get it with the content still being controlled by its original creator / the chain of people the original creator sold the rights to, but to be honest I kind of like the idea of remaking Batman, Superman, Spiderman every few years.

It becomes like Shakespeare or the opera: you don't go to see a new story, you already know it by heart. You go to see the performance and the innovation within the framework. You get to start asking questions like, "Who was the better Spiderman?".
We're working on an upgrade guide, but in short, it's a completely different library. Major difference is that routes are actual components that are actually rendered, where before they just had their props stripped and plugged into the routing machine. Now your routing is composed like the rest of your react app.
For background on OpenHunt:

Launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10759879
Shutdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11233967

After meeting with people from Siftery, their product seemed closest to my goal of trying to democratize product discovery.

Original source code is still available here: https://github.com/OpenHunting/openhunt
That's what I assumed, but it wasn't totally clear that was your intention.

Like I said it does help but it's not a panacea.
South Bay has changed a lot too. Even when my family moved there in the late 70s / early 80s, there were still a few orchards left here and there. Almost all condos and town houses now. (Wish I have some pictures to share...)
None the less, why is pay down immediately bad?

Because, you know, people start to suffer, can't afford to make rent or mortgage payments, take their kids out to the movies, etc. Stuff like that.

Which I know may seem kind abstract, from where you sit. So I'll point out a second major factor: As (middle class) incomes decline, do does purchasing power (in areas of the economy that really matter). And with it, the (meaningful) parts of the economy slow down greatly as well.

Note that I emphasized the "middle class" part. Yes, we know that as wages go down, the money doesn't really disappear, and is still active in other parts of the economy... namely, in the bank accounts of richer people. But by and large, richer folks tend to allocate their money towards "dumber" or less meaningful parts of the economy, dollar for dollar, while folks in the middle and lower-tiers tend to put their dollars into more fundamental sectors. Which is why when their incomes go down, everyone suffers.

It's just how things work, when you start to consider the whole system. And part of the bedrock of modern economic theory -- and one of the root causes of this thing known as The Great Depression, way back when.

It's only bad if it is down and things cost the same. Shouldn't purchasing power be the relevant metric?

When wages go down, it's not like boom, prices come down to meet them, not at the same pace anyways. (And if we're talking about a sudden wage hit to a certain class of workers -- basically you can't count on any commensurate price decrease at all to come to their rescue).

But more generally -- any analysis which only looks as one or two "metrics" -- and neglects to consider the effects on the system as a whole -- is fundamentally flawed.
Developers keep making apps, even when the price is so low.

So far, the cost of people willing and able to build large, complex systems in teams keeps going up.
Which BaaS options are recommended now?
I've had the exact same problem both with the Flex and then with the Charge HR. Their hardware quality is just terrible, especially given that they're expected you to pay >$100 on their devices! I now go out of my way to actively dis-recommend Fitbit (as I've done in this comments thread).
Reading the first four paragraphs I wasn't sure whether this is self-promotion or an ad for Zones. But then I read the rest and saw it's an ad for Microsoft.

There is a lot of fluff and hyperbole wrapped around very little content. I think by now we get that MS has woken up from deep hibernation and are becoming more spritely, and that the new management seems to work, and that they actually have some desirable products.

They still don't play fair, no mention of the Android patent nonsense. They're still behind on ARM development; all the mentions of ARM point toward some future promises. There are (perhaps deliberate) vague statements; what is "Ubuntu-compatible"? Can I run an Ubuntu-packaged version of Steam on top of Windows Subsystem for Linux? Oh, guess not. How is Azure "the best place" to run Linux things? By what metrics?

I feel sort of brainwashed and molested by the language in that article :)
Checks and balances work on a societal level and our judicial system is deliberate and slow (as it should be). While legal challenges are resolved, literally millions of people can be caught in the crossfire between ideologies, causing unimaginable harm to them and our society.

I'm happy none of this has impacted you yet, but many of us know how this slippery slope goes after watching first hand how it happens in other countries. Many of us have friends and relatives who we are afraid won't be able to return to the lives they've built here. Many of us are scared that we're next. If you don't panic when the very ideals of your democracy face an existential threat, it won't be around much longer.
One of those photos includes a place I rented in the 1990s.

Thank you so much for that.
The apps were not disabled. The export feature hasn't been working because of a bug on their end. It seams like the claim that Parse "firmly believes in data portability" is complete BS.
Hi. Do you mean Ixquick.eu? Ixquick.eu is sister to StartPage that delivers metasearch results, but without Google or Yahoo search results. (It used to deliver Yahoo results, too.)

We ended our contract with Yahoo for Ixquick.eu because they were reported to be working with the US government to access user information See: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/technology/startpage-to-dr...
I think HN passed your objectivity test with flying colors. The top comment is sticking its neck out and the top reply is a pretty succinct summary of how many people feel (myself included).

> Maybe.

> Here's the thing. Think about this as an MVP slapped together in a weekend, about to hit the biggest batch of software testers around. They're going to find show stopping bugs. And every one of those bugs is going to be someone's life, uprooted.

> Visa allocation changes _going_forward_ are certainly a reasonable thing. Fully within the realm of policy.
But I'm going to bet that these changes are going to be of a far wider scope than expected and include people on current visas, and I wouldn't bet against visas getting revoked and workers having to go home the next day or get deported.
I can speak for NZ. I originally got a Holiday Work visa (if you're under 30, America has several agreements. You can live and work in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland if you just graduated and a few other countries. I highly recommend them).

My holiday work visa ran out and I switched to an Essential Skills visa. I wish I had ticked the other box and gotten "Work to Residence." It cost more but you get a residence without travel restrictions after a few years. You can also apply for a full resident (a few thousand dollars) visa and you become a resident, but with travel restrictions. If you leave for more than six months, you lose it. If you stay past a certain point (I think it was 2 years or something like that), you can apply for a permanent resident without travel restrictions.

The US doesn't have the concept of "Resident without travel restrictions." If a customs agent asks you questions and thinks you don't actually live in the US (e.g. you only visit once a year), you can potentially lose that green card. It's arbitrary though, because the US is only of the only countries that doesn't do a customs check on exit (it's impossible to determine if someone overstays in America, unlike every other developed country in the world).

For most countries, to immigrate you must be on their essential skills list. I've considered getting another Australian visa (I lived there too; holiday work visa only), and the process involves putting in a letter of intent. If you're selected, you can apply. The fees are steep (usually a few thousand dollars), but if you're selected, you get residence and a window which you must arrive by. After a few years of holding a job or being able to support yourself in your field, you can apply for permanent residence.

Immigration without an essential skill is extremely difficult, for all countries. This is a stark contrast to immigration only a few decades ago, when countries like the US and Australia were in desperate need of all types of workers.
Profitable yes, but the question is how many hoops you will jump through to see the SW movie next year and the year after that.

Remember, Disney put out 'Land before time 13' because they made money on the first 12 'Land before time' movies. But, 13 was never going to see a movie theater.
Quick... everyone run to www.graph.cool !! It's parse but for GraphQL!
How is this really relevant to the argument?
The point is, we need to rethink the path that currently leads from "X created it, and deserves compensation" to "Y receives a copy and should pay for it". With physical goods, it's a case that for Y to have their copy, X must make some additional marginal expense, and the obvious way to recoup this expense is to bill Y. In the digital space, it's becoming more and more obvious that Y getting a copy is utterly disconnected from X's work - X only has to make one piece of something, and copying is essentially free. Just like paying for a physical thing feels natural, paying for a copy of a digital thing feels unnatural - it does not fit the way the medium works. Hence the need to rethink the whole chain, so that X gets paid, while Y doesn't have to pay per copy.
Chris Roberts! (robertsspaceindustries.com)
Thanks mcescalante, we appreciate the kind words!
Terrible analogy. Star Wars fans everywhere loved it to the tune of 2 billion dollars + and 90%+ on rotten tomatoes. As for the next one, Rogue One, earned over a billion dollars, making it the second largest opening this year. Episode VIII will do very well.

Yes, there were issues with Ep VII. No, those issues did not make it not awesome.
Have you looked at Clojure? It's a modern Lisp that feels designed to be simple, yet powerful. It works on the JVM/.NET/JavaScript platforms, so it's reach is almost universal.

https://clojure.org/

https://clojurescript.org/
If I discuss ideas between me and another person society does not benefit; only the two benefit.

If I subscribe to a magazine and journal, only I benefit.

So, why should the people who don't use mail pay for the people who do use mail?

> but is still the one with the least capability of censorship (yes, it can be done, as Communist and Fascist dictorships did, but it requires massive manual effort).

Why do you think it has the least capability of censorship, especially versus the internet?
Do you ever buy groceries? Or do you have a personal assistant who does all that stuff for you?

Maybe you don't buy groceries, but I do. I need to eat, so I buy food from a grocery store. Conveniently enough, my local RedBox is located at my local grocery store. There's always something I can buy there to restock my refrigerator or panty. And if I wanted to watch RedBox movies, it'd be very convenient because I could pick it up there, along with some food.

If driving to your local grocery store is such a pain, you might want to re-evaluate your choice of city to live in. I've lived in a bunch of different places around the US and never seen a place where just getting to the local grocery store was that much time or trouble. (Work, sure, because the commute can be long and rush-hour traffic congested, but not the grocery store.)
How to Manage a Successful Data Consulting Project
I feel the same on groceries. ~12 years ago a $120 bill at the store meant an overflowing cart and an armful that wouldn't fit, without even coupon-clipping or anything. Now it seems like it means a 1/2 full cart at best. And I don't buy expensive meat or similarly-pricey things (much). Seems like prices took a big jump around '08-09, but I'm not sure the data backs that up so maybe it's just in my head.

[EDIT] then again I guess I buy maybe 1/20th as much cart-(and caloire-count-)filling cheap garbage food like breakfast cereal and potato chips as I did back then. Maybe that's the "problem". Eating junk is hella cheap.
Can you share how you create so many cards? Or are there good resources that you followed?
>No, the story isn't about redefining college degrees.

You're misunderstanding what I wrote. I'm not saying that universities like Harvard and Yale need to add "Bachelor's of Science in Air Conditioning & Plumbing" in addition to "B.S. Physics" and "B.S. English" to their curriculum to serve blue collar workers. I'm also not saying that existing college degrees' curriculums need modification to accommodate future factory workers.

This is what the author is saying:

1) regardless of what you label it, there's a new crop of "training" emerging to educate future factory workers to run more sophisticated machines. (E.g. John Deere and Siemens were examples.) Some of the new machines require more complex math and more complicated interaction. This new knowledge is not a traditional 4-year college degree but something like a 2-year Associate Degree in Mechanical Operations.

2) A problem still remains: that training and related career is a lower social rank than the traditional 4-year bachelor's degree even in a classless society like America. (E.g. see the Mike Row video I linked.)

3) To try and counteract that negative social stigma, the author is trying to convince us to expand the meaning of "college degree" to include that non-traditional apprenticeship training so high-school kids who choose the JohnDeere/Siemens Training path do not feel like losers in society compared to the kids who go to university and study Accounting/Law/Physics/etc.
So the earth is flat - told you so :-)
Email migration@parse.com for generic last-moment migration assistance.
Actually you are only partially right. Shigeo Funaki was the creator, Toru just made the graphics.
Brazil with all those walls and fences, be it planned or in execution? Makes me laugh harder.
> why should I pay for the bits on my hard drive or something to be reconfigured into an arbitrary state

Just pipe /dev/urandom to files and sit back with the popcorn.
And the support for your argument was "Obama did it"?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/01/...

But you feel like "Obama did it" is an apt corollary to the scale, scope and circumstances of this week's events? Because of an actual event, and the resulting review and re-examination of existing Iraqi refugees which caused a slowdown in the acceptance of new Iraqi refugees for several months, you know because of finite resources... and no explicit orders or stop immigration that equates close enough to Trump's EO? I mean there's just no way to discuss that rationally with someone who wants to make that comparison. It's intellectual laziness and textbook false equivalence. If Obama did nothing he would have been crucified for that by Republicans. And because Obama did the most benign thing possible he was likely crucified for that by Republicans. And because the thing he did had tangible consequences, but wasn't unreasonable, that's now justification for Trump's EO? Forget double dipping, some people are triple dipping.

But let's compare anyway. A review of existing refugees which caused the slower acceptance of new refugees in response to the discovered failure in the system.

VS

Trump picked some countries seemingly at random from a large pool of Muslim countries in order to fulfill a "campaign promise" regardless of actual need or circumstances. The countries he picked haven't been a hotbed of terrorism against the U.S. He selected no countries that he has business interests in, even if they have had citizens who've carried out attacks against the U.S. His executive order effected people with green cards and visa's people we've already researched and vetted, not just new immigration.

Yeah, they're the same event all right /s. So is your BS ignorance or dishonesty?
Release of Mithril 1.0
> I don't know were people have the time to watch that many series

Netflix exists solely because people want to binge watch their favourite series.

They're betting that once people have finished binge watching all of Friends in a weekend and are wondering what to watch next, they'll pick a Netflix Original™ from the list of suggested shows.

I don't have Netflix and rarely watch series (except those like Silicon Valley) but I know a lot of friends who do have Netflix and will happily spend an entire weekend watching a series from start to finish.
> Why do you think Parse was a failure in the first place?

Because the title of this post is "Parse.com is shutting down today".
Absolutely.. the middle class in particular has been significantly eroded... There are some quality of life bits that have significantly improved, but overall it could prove to be interesting. Rent/property costs are a much larger portion of expenses, and though I don't know that food costs will ever reach pre-wwii levels, it's getting expensive too.
The docs are super good. I love the "embedded browser" that shows how it works.

Shameless self plug: our book [1] has a whole chapter on Routing in React with this new v4 router. After you've finished reading the docs, if you want a tutorial style walk-through of this router v4, we build a Spotify-type clone over the course of 75+ pages.

[1]: https://www.fullstackreact.com
The crowd can help your startup more than AI can
I actually find the opposite - when I am out at a movie there seems to always be someone rustling chocolate or whispering loudly to their neighbour, or someone has brought overly boisterous children, who normally don't really want to be there, to the screening.

At home, I can dim the lights and really get into a movie without any distractions.
Are you a nodechef cofounder by any chance? I host with nodechef and am happy with them so far.
While duplication is (almost) free, the current model do has some kind of price lowering as the "main costs" are paid. Cinema tickets are pretty much "the max" per person you end up paying. Then comes DVD/VOD (used to be VHSs). Then it eventually ends on some cable channel/bargain DVD bin
Unknown! All of these are unkowns.
Is your experience emblematic of the that for most customers? Some of the things you mention seem like fundamental design flaws, so I'm curious if most customers have issues?
"Americans won't do these jobs..."

...at the slave wage being offered.

That's the part they never mention.
Watch the credits until the end, and that doesn't even include the catering.
I did not claim that, I merely added something to your statement.

With Snaps too easily the caveats are ignored. Theoretically you could run your own store. Practically it needed an environment variable, plus (at least at that time) the server code wasn't open.

Snaps are IMO quite a success (seems more used than Flatpak& AppImage), but always find a bit unfortunate that its limitations aren't mentioned. E.g. only today I learned that it doesn't do user installation. Similarly the sandboxed and running on multiple distributions.
I wish more developers had his mindset and put their ego aside. He is totally professional and open to ideas even from "competing" technologies.
I go grocery shopping once a month.
How to Focus Your Activism When Everything's Terrible and You’re Still New at This
Telling people they can "always return [back to where ever they are from]" is pretty offensive and counter-productive.

They aren't here to make you happy, nor will they leave for that end.

Taking the same tone: why don't you find a career/job where you feel you have enough competitive advantage?
Jonathan Blow, developer of The Witness.

[1] http://the-witness.net
Lyft surges to the top 10 on App Store after the #DeleteUber campaign
CSS Grid – Table layout is back
The data export feature was replaced by the database migration tool we launched on January 28 last year. We highly recommend using the database migration tool as this will ensure that all of your data is copied over and synced to your new database prior to switching traffic over. Tons of apps have migrated in the past year using the db migration tool.