skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting, but after you said "we processed 7+ million app reviews" I was really expecting deeper insights.

This is a super exciting data set and I hope you can get more out of it: is it actually worth it to prioritize the features people are asking for? how long does it take to recover from a drop, can this be modeled somehow? how come some apps receive inconsistent emotion? etc
Had a bad experience myself (with the obvious caveat that it will seem sour if you don't pass the the interview, and posting anon but will follow up privately for anyone posting contact info).

The challenge was to code up a regex parser in three hours then discuss in an interview.

During the interview I was asked to add (IIRC) a Kleene operator. I repeated back his explanation of what a Kleene operator is. I explained how that definition would impact my choice of how to implement it. During the implementation, I made repeated references to that same spec. I got it working.

Then, he told me that it didn't work, because a Kleene operator means something completely different than what I understood. He apparently wasn't listening the whole time because I repeated back his spec several times when implementing it and he never corrected it!

(Perhaps this was some subtle test of "see how they react to impoliteness"?)

More importantly though, it was rejected for not being an elegant state machine implementation of a parser, which made it hard to extend. Which is fair, in a way. I knew, abstractly, that that was a better way to do it and I would have gladly read up on the concept and written my implementation that way. But with the overhead of setting up the codebase, docs, and tests, I would have exceeded 3 hour limit that they trust applicants to hold themselves to.

Apparently, the right way to proceed here would be to learn state machines, severely exceed the 3 hour limit, and then lie and say it took me 3 hours. Is that what they're selecting for? Or perhaps for people who already know state machine implementations?
$10 + the very non-trivial cost of administering it yourself.
This is the only information I could find: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602

No personal accounts, but then they go on to define basically everyone as "business"...
So this will be far from exhaustive but ...

Both RDS and Heroku are aimed more at more modestly sized database in that you don't really scale beyond the vertical capacity of a single node. The prices are relatively comparable with RDS starts at around $20-30 a month depending on the instance type and Heroku Postgres at $50/month. Both services will get you an HA feature that allows for better uptime through automatic node failover.

Overall Heroku Postgres will probably feel a little like the Heroku platform: a little more polished and a little more "managed", but with fewer knobs to tweak, which can be both good and bad depending on your situation.

It's too early to say how Google's offering will shape up, but it'll likely be in the same vein as these first two. Lack of HA probably means that you should limit your production use of it, although it seems that the team intends to implement that eventually based off the service's documentation and other comments here.

Citus and Aurora come into play when you're looking to scale beyond a single node. Citus Cloud starts at $990 a month so you're not likely to come into it without some non-trivial requirements. Aurora is similar idea.

Citus' killer feature over something like Aurora is that instead of going ahead and forking Postgres wholesale, the product runs as an extension, which means that you're likely to get better compatibility going forward with new Postgres features.

Aurora is "compatible" which means that you'll be able to use psql and get access to common functionality, but are likely to see a divergence in support features. A similar situation is Redshift, which deviated around Postgres 8.0.2 [1], and at this point it's safe to say that it will never catch up.

[1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/dg/c_redshift-and...
Nr. 3 would be the end for me, I still don't get why they haven't implemented this, it exist for Ios and Android, why not web!!
Milton Friedman’s Misadventures in China
That's​ a very open ended question which is hard to answer. Do you have a more specific question? My company (Tapster Robotics) was part of the first Inde.vc "batch" of 8 companies. We were the guinea pigs as we figured out what worked and didn't. But I liked that we didn't have to move (I'm in Chicago), though we did meet up once a quarter in different cities to catch-up for a few days. With no demo day (and no expectation to raise another round) all our discussions revolved around building the business, not grooming ourselves for the perfect investor pitch. My previous startup followed the "traditional" Silicon Valley model of being in forever-VC-pitching​ mode. This time around, I'm happy to be off that treadmill.
Nice seeing things come up for dotnet core. I recently wrote a Sendy API client for dotnet core: https://github.com/NicoJuicy/SendyAPI.dotnet

And another API for a website screenshot server ( in nodejs --> https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService ), but the connector is for dotnet core: https://github.com/NicoJuicy/WebsiteAsImageWebService.Api.Cs...

I wonder how much downloads you have per day if you put the library on Nuget immediatly
Swift on Server runs on a Linux.
I cannot agree more with your sentiment. As a millennial, I can't wait for the surge in lung and oral cancer in about 20 yrs, when the cannabis industry unsurprisingly starts dodging the "real" health negatives of smoking cannabis.
It is handwavy. Name the source of that energy that will allow providing that much electricity.
Back of the envelope calculations. Even that is somewhat handwavy.

For example, with solar power in Japan, you could get maybe 100% (EDIT: fixed the estimates! They're better but not better enough.) more than is currently grabbed - with massive subsidies and research already there! And it is one of the countries relying on a lot of it! Comparable with Germany in fact, but with better insolation.
It is not enough. Nowhere near. That expansion will provide about 25-30% of current power use in solar, total.

With hydro and tide power, just 10-15% more is available unless you want to destroy all the coastline (then maybe 25%), which you cannot if you want to feed people. Again not enough. Japan already uses a lot of available hydro capacity.

Wind is not really feasible either... About 10% more is available of mostly offshore wind. Everywhere feasible is already installed.

Biomass, maybe 25% more for total conversion - and it is not a clean fuel.

Fusion is too far away for now extrapolating the linear improvements in this technology.

Additionally, everything in Japan (production, services etc.) is already tweaked to be energy efficient...

As it is now, Japan is burning a lot of oil and coal. On the order of ~50% electricity is fueled by those sources. It has increased additionally since the disaster because no other source can cover it.

Serious solutions involve:

1) Clean and safe nuclear fission power. Again. I'm sure Japanese are able to figure that one out, even in their special circumstances which complicate matters.

2) Massive breakthrough in fusion. Good luck with that. There is already much increased investment. Given current trends, even if the linear factor on the development of fusion improves, we're looking at 50 years or so of development time for that to be viable.

3) Solving huge political issues to expand out-of-country solar capacity, import even more green electricity from other countries. We're talking world government scale here.

4) Another undisclosed physics discovery worth a few Nobel prizes.
> Perhaps someone can shed light on a compelling use case for knowing the number of grapheme clusters in a particular string, because I haven't been able to think of one.

If you have a limit on the length of a field, it helps to tell the user what it is in a way they understand. For non-technical users, bytes (and the embedded issue of encoding) and code points are both pretty esoteric, but number of symbols is less so. OTOH, SMS has strict data and encoding limits, and people managed with that; also provisioning byte storage for grapheme limited fields is hard: some graphemes use a ton of code points, family emoji and zalgo text are clear examples.
Thanks for the correction, that's completely what I meant to write yet typed out the 980 for some reason.

I'm thinking of upgrading my own desktop 980 SLI to the 1080TI, that must have upset my keyboard buffer somehow.

Considering how much stronger the 1080 mobile is to its desktop equivalent (within 90%, iirc) is than what was the case on the 9xx series, it is rather remarkable how much power the Razer packs.
"Anything that makes property more expensive increases rents, because it discourages the creation of new housing"

Increasing council tax discourages land hoarding which would actually free up more land for the creation of new housing.

The supply of housing in the UK is not limited by how much builders want to build. It is limited by availability of land.

Moreover, if coupled with heavy investment in council housing (the only thing in the past that has actually ever meaningfully added supply to the market), that would bring down rents a lot.
Not sure whether I know of countries that require no Visa. As far as most open countries go -- Thailand, Singapore, Hongkong come to mind.
I made a thing that automatically pays artists who collaborate on the same song
Gotcha. Maybe we can find a way to think the particulates out of our body?
That's more than 100:1 for inclusions:websites. Ugh.
Verizon exempts FiOS TV streams from mobile data caps
> As a developer, I wouldn't risk investing in this feature.

Are you developing or working on anything related to email?
I think it is an uncommon use case, but I wouldn't say exotic. On the other hand, which of the latest services support it? WhatsApp doesn't, FaceTime doesn't (although they're rumored to soon). So I'd guess it isn't common enough to be launched in the initial versions.

On your second point, yes, you're segmenting by use case, I was segmenting by target customer.
I can be for some advanced things. it's still emacs under the hood though so emacs resources are valid sources of information. That said, it's not busy during the weekend usually and is more active during US business hours.
Does anyone make a mobile car lift, like a truck with an embedded hydraulic lift. Seems doable, just not sure if it would be worth selling because you can tow to a lift and that lift would be [much] cheaper?
This was a common mechanic in the splinter cell games, you'd wait for a guard to go through a door with a keypad and you'd put on your thermal vision goggles to find the 4 numbers. I guess that now that thermal cameras are becoming more ubiquitous this has jumped closer to reality. Back then I can't imagine there were thermal cameras that were small and cheap. Nowadays you can get a flir lens for your phone at about $200 - $300 if I recall correctly.
Why would you join a program not knowing the terms of doing so?
The irony is painful.
I'm sure I did, although I don't recall any hard fail. Could have been social skills too I suppose. Either way, I feel my original comment was the real gripe I had. It left a bad taste in my mouth and that damages reputations.
You should always use a UNIX socket if you don't need remote access.
Mailvelope: https://www.mailvelope.com/en/
How will Vancouver improve its weather?

California has a powerful draw...
Gold as a commodity (bonds). Gold bars are not liquid.
Demonstrating once again that 99% of software development is reimplementation with another layer of indirection.

(Not that I'm complaining; this is a needed tool.)
5 GB is included storage, additional is available for $0.24 per GB per month.

Still, this doesn't seem competitive with AWS. The same money buys you substantially more RAM:
https://aws.amazon.com/rds/pricing/

Edit: sibling comment points out the actual pricing for google is lower.
Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later because that what you've grown used to).

There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page at me.
I know cheap VPS providers but if I could host a small webapp for free forever, that'd be nice!

AWS free tier is valid one year only. Bandwidth is typically easy to monitor (to stay within the 1GB/month), but disabling egress to specific regions sounds much trickier.
Some Economics of Parental Leave
Ask HN: Skype “bug” sending out spam?
Today I was notified from one of my Skype contacts that my account was sending out spam linking to an online dating / pornography site. I have never used this username/password combination on any other site and I had no Skype client running at the time the spam was sent.

When I talked to customer support, I was informed that my account was not breached or hacked, but instead it is just a "bug in the system". I was told to update my software, run an antivirus scan on my Mac, and change my email address (since I no longer have access to my old one) and password.

Here is the exact quote:

Me: I am still uncertain -- was my account (username or password) breached?

Microsoft Answer Tech: Nope, since you were able to update the email address and once again the link is just a bug on the system and our developers are working to fix this issue. Once you are able to reset your password you account is secure, just make sure that you are the only one who knows your password and your email address.

Now I'm no security expert, but this seems like something more than a "bug" to me. Has anyone else encountered this "bug" or found out more about what's going on here?
> If you don't provide opportunity and a good civil environment to brilliant/enterprising people, they will find a way elsewhere.

While I am not certain how true this is in general, it is for me anecdotally. I have no intention of wanting to emigrate and work in SF based on what I have learned on HN. I like the idea of choosing a city based on what i want from that city then doing what I want to do there. Not living somewhere for a one dimensional 'job opportunity' and otherwise hating it.
I think everyone on the team understands that helping unblock other engineers is as valuable as writing some code yourself. It generally hasn't been an issue getting timely review, though we have discussed tracking the average size of the PR queue as a metric if review times did worsen.

Most of the time other engineers on your team will review your code, but often engineers will pop across teams and doing code reviews if they have the time and the context. One change we've made is moving towards tagging a few engineers who might have the right context when you submit the PR.

Thanks for the tip about the title; will take a look!
No you are very incorrect. 81% of the land area of the City of Vancouver is zoned for detached homes and most of these are simple, cheap post war houses or cheap 60s era "Vancouver Specials."
The new review flow on Airbnb asks for more details about specific aspects of a listing.
And now just the Librem 15 is missing, the real machine.
The number of VR companies grew 40% in 2016
Nice, maybe the helper text could be improved then?
Interesting. I've never found gloves I could comfortably work with, especially when the area I'm working on is out of view (which is more often than not with cars). Which inevitably leads to lots of scrapes so I can totally understand why gloves would be mandatory.
Definitely not new. You can easily do this with off the shelf FLIR handheld devices. Used to work in a data centre and our electrician would use the FLIR to inspect electrical panels for faulty breakers. We were chatting about the FLIR and she was like watch this, put your hand on the table then remove it, you could point the FLIR at the table 10-20 seconds later and still see your hand imprint. Was very cool. I think it cost ~$10k or something though.
you use a gradient descent approach, but there's no way to guarantee anything like convexity, right?

I bet you can construct a language where a solution exists, but all of its neighbors' errors (using the topology implied by your gd function) are local maxima.
Apple's target is the 1-5 person developer team with maybe 50kloc of code & 1 mac mini acting as a CI box. Xcode scales ok in these cases.

Backend development tends to feature a lot more developers with a lot more code. Swift starts getting really painful when you hit those numbers. Go look at presentations done by larger swift codebases like linked-in, uber, lyft & airbnb to see where it starts happening.
The incentive for everyone is in not getting murdered, pillaged, or otherwise brutalized by roving bands of outlaw raiders, like in Mad Max or Fallout. Also, the whole thing runs on pure, unadulterated money-grubbing.

A libertarian world really is a nightmare for the people who believe that the government world does not essentially do exactly the same thing, but with better PR, and maybe different price points. The government version of freshman physics assumes a spherical cow. The libertarian version assumes a spherical pig. The Internet argues about the flavor of the milk.

The truth is that no one will admit there may be warts on their favorite goblin baby until they are growing one right on the end of their pointy little green nose. I have already spent an awful lot of time on the Internet arguing both for and against libertarian ideas. The only good thing that can really be said about the adherents of alternate political views is that at least they recognize that change is only possible if you try something different. You can't really ever predict the outcome of a system when you divorce its ideal workings from the real people who will eventually be running it.
Common usage would have you believe that all keels need a keel weight, but many catamarans have sharper structures on the bottom of their hulls that are called keels. Generally a keel is not retractable, a centreboard is.
In Lily's case, it seems there was potentially fraud occurring too.. If that's the case, I wouldn't mind seeing some jail sentences:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/02/01/dron...
Again, I am not trying to argue whether too much force is used too often or not. I am simply stating that, even if we lived in a world where reasonable force was used every time by police, we would STILL have cases of citizens being harmed by the use of force by police. Since we know this, we can't use the fact that someone was injured by police to be our yardstick for determining if a police officer did the right thing or not.
Masochists, no?
> better predicts job success

How do you rate job success?
The thing that amazes me about decisions like this is how, well, chintzy they are. It's brand sabotage on a really deeply profound level.

I mean, on one hand you have Microsoft pushing really, really hard to be taken seriously as a vendor of premium, Apple-level products. Their Surface machines are slick and innovative. Windows 10 is more attractive to developers than any Windows in maybe 20 years. Azure has gone from a punchline to a solid, well-regarded competitor to AWS.

And then they sabotage all that with cheap, cheap, cheap decisions like forcing ads into the file browser. Ads! Right in the middle of a product they've been strenuously trying to position as high-end and premium and luxurious, they slap something straight out of the playbook of NetZero, the 1990s free ISP that was pitched at people too broke to afford AOL.

There was nothing premium about the NetZero experience, nothing high-end. It felt cheap because it was cheap. It was cheap crap aimed at people who couldn't afford anything better. And that's fine! But it's a long way from what Microsoft desperately wants people to think Windows 10 is. They're willing to pull the rug out from under all those years of engineering effort and marketing wizardry, just to squeeze a few more pennies into another product's quarterly revenue numbers. Talk about penny wise and pound foolish.

I guess there's still some truth in Steve Jobs' famous 1995 statement that "the only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJWWtV1w5fw)
The cost structure service is actually what I've been working on recently. We spun up a fairly lightweight flask service (on our kubernetes cluster) that is capable of serving the cost structure to the rails app and for analysis. At its core, it uses a small DAG library we wrote, and on top of that has a migration framework that can represent cost structure changes over time as distinct versions that can be served simultaneously.
Or present a random 5 digit pin the user needs to enter before entering their personal pin. If the user has touched every button, then you get no information from that.
Ask HN: Am I an Idiot?
I am in a "Physics I" class but apparently I need "Physics I for engineering" class. I am even in the lab for that class. I've realized this too late to change much so might as well ride it out.

Doesn't help self confidence when I can't even sign up for right classes though. Lesson learned.
Last time I started the signup process (2 months ago maybe), when I selected the "remote" option, there was a message informing me that they didn't recruit remote. Same with location (USA only).

Nice UX informing it so upfront anyway.
Oh good I thought it was novel. I guess individuals have nothing to worry about, as long as the idea is ancient.
Pretending you care can help your career
It looks similar, but we're actually very different than flippers.

House flipping is about finding underpriced houses (either by having a sharp eye, or by buying distressed houses), and then optimizing the amount of money invested vs. the return.

Opendoor is much more focused on the customer experience, trying to give fair offers to every home - everyday homes, not distressed ones. We typically don't spend very long renovating our homes. We'd rather reinvent the buying and selling experience itself, and do a larger number of transactions.

More info: https://www.opendoor.com/blog/flipping-the-real-estate-indus...
We have about ~40 people in the engineering org, including the data science team who all frequently write code as well.
> Doesn't work, though. An iPhone is not an "occasional indulgence".

It absolutely is. You can buy a decent used iPhone for a couple hundred bucks. This is a purchase that will be used for hours each day and last years. Amortized, its hourly cost is almost nothing, a fraction of your alternate options. Purchasing a good phone is thus a rational economic decision to maximize utility, because of how often it gets used.

> Fancy chocolates, or a meal at a mid-tier restaurant are an "occasional indulgence".

You can buy "fancy chocolates" once a month for two years for the equivalent cost of using an iPhone over that period. As for a meal at a mid-tier restaurant, you're looking at eating out once per quarter versus getting to use a nice phone for hours each day. The poor aren't stupid. The phone is simply a much better use of their limited funds than these frivolous wastes of money that for some reason you are projecting that they should rather indulge in.

> An iPhone is a massive class-signaling purchase that requires expensive ongoing payments to use.

Bullshit, it's a necessity of modern life. If you don't have a phone and Internet access it's nigh impossible to even find a job. Employers of all levels expect you to be accessible, if for no other reason than changing your shift time on you.
Anterofit: Wrap REST APIs with Rust Traits