skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You make some excellent points. I don't have any way to evaluate whether or not class politics will play a role in their future success or lack thereof, I strongly agree that changing form factors and purposes will be interesting. If you imagine a '5G' world where the large swaths of a place are suffused with enough spectrum to essentially create a gigabit network everywhere, can you disintermediate the phone company completely with direct addressed communication channels ? And what will that mean when we are consuming dramas and music directly from the production companies servers with perhaps blockchain micropayments. It will definitely be different :-)
yes, most things are goods that people can buy at their own discretion. However, payday loans are predatory and should not be considered in the same category as unhealthy food, expensive clothing, etc.
it's trickier than you think.

a VERY common complaint i saw while i was at etsy:

"i make bracelets and someone on aliexpress is ripping off my designs and even my photos, what do i do?"

i'm not denying that someone would do exactly what you're describing (purchase on ali and resell on etsy), but it's sometimes way more complicated than that.
I'd imagine it could have something to do with the incentive to take up as much cellular data as possible, the same reason many providers don't let your phone access the built in antenna.
> All that is a roundabout way of saying: for god's sake write your system APIs in C.

Or at least expose a C-compatible ABI.
It's actually not that hard to eliminate the worst of it. You just leave the ad-blocker on, full-time until you visit a site. If the site isn't an abhorrent "content farm" with link-baity headlines and vague, poorly worded nonsense, then "So far so good..." you whitelist them and hit the reload button. Thanks to the race to the bottom that advertising has become, >90% of the bad sites won't make it past this first stage.

If after disabling the ad blocker the content becomes buried in interstitials, auto-playing videos, and is so crowded with ads that the actual content turns into snaketext that looks like someone tried to outdo The Odyssey in haiku form, you turn the ad blocker back on.
So 10x programmers don't work anywhere with a somewhat objective performance metric? I don't think that's a coincidence.
Focus on the words, not the punctuation, just like you do when reading natural language.
I ordered a rustic pipe desk from Etsy a while back and the seller was not able to deliver the item on time. He/she communicated the issue so it wasn't that big of a deal for me. I had a prearranged vacation coming up while waiting for the item to be finished and sent, so things took a little bit longer then expected on both ends.

When I finally got back home and put the desk together, I noticed that there were items missing and some things had not been packaged well so they were damaged/scuffed in shipping. Most of the issues were minor and I decided to not make a stink about it with the seller as I could easily work around and fix the problems. I did however want to leave a review of my experience for the seller to be made aware and future buyers to be warned.

Etsy's policy was however to deny me to review an item outside of a certain time window. I emailed Etsy's customer service to petition that I should be allowed to leave a review even though my window had passed given that the seller could not deliver in the time he/she had promised. Etsy's replies and refusal to allow this left a permanent impression on me and I will never spend another dollar there as a result of this ordeal.
Optimizely Is Hiring an Engineering Manager (Data Platform) in San Francisco
> Or... or...

The point, I guess, would be that losing internet connection for these reasons is not an issue.
I have to completely agree. The times I've bought something on Etsy I've spent hours filtering through the stuff that either didn't seem that interesting or unique or just wasn't handmade. So its more of a time commitment.
A favorite of mine:

There once was a young lady named bright
Whose speed was much faster than light
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
A Guide to the Many Flavours of TeX
i could argue that addictive foods are similarly predatory. they have long lasting impact on the health of a person the same way that payday loans have on their economic health. predatory is arbitrary, the question is what is the impact of the harm. and can people be expected to control themselves or at least regulate themselves when presented with the option, so as to act in their best interest. for many things in the economy i don't believe this to be the case.

yet business gets done and the system at least appears to continue to function. people learn from their mistakes and move on if the damage isn't too great. or they get caught up and stuck and that's a problem that needs regulation.
I've been a Twilio customer since 2011. We use it to send alerts to our customers (both voice and SMS). I like it because it's easy to use. Even if we're paying more than we could be, having an easy-to-use and stable API is well worth it. Also, Twilio is a minor expense in our budget compared to what developing and maintaining a multiple-provider solution with SMS gateways would cost.
How is mismanagement and terrible user experience about the tech bubble bursting? How are you making that leap?
I'm waiting for cycle.js to become the framework du jour.
I honestly don't even want to watch this, out of spite.

Whatsapp is so damn frustrating to me and the people I talk to.

The microphone button is so finicky that I lose hours of my week to trashed messages. I don't know if it's the size of the button being so tiny that a man's thumb easily hangs over the edges, triggering the trash feature with the slightest movement, or some other strange bug. A call comes in, message trashed. An alarm, message trashed. I've literally recorded a 10 minute message and lost it, condensed it to 5 minutes and lost it, condensed it to an angry 2 minutes and lost it and then just given up...

Then there's the volume. Why do I have to crank Whatsapp up so high in my car that EVERY OTHER audio event blows my ears out?

How are these huge usability problems not being fixed with the amount of money that was thrown at it?

I can't find anyone or anywhere to complain about it either. The Contact Us area of the application REQUIRES you to give them your full contact list before you proceed.
Just to try and think through the situation:

I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.

There are about 200,000,000 US adults.

So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.)

So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?

Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).

Ed:

I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
The timing is impeccable! I just switched from a MacMini running OS X 10.10 to a custom-built PC running GNU/Linux, and one of the few things I miss is Little Snitch.
If you have nexus in one or more states where SaaS is taxable, TaxJar can certainly help out. Here's a breakdown of SaaS taxability in the United States: http://blog.taxjar.com/saas-sales-tax/

As patio11 mentioned, SaaS products are non-taxable in CA. For other states you can use TaxJar's sales tax API for calculations. This post describes how to use TaxJar with subscriptions in Stripe: https://developers.taxjar.com/blog/handling-sales-tax-with-s...

Disclaimer: I'm the developer advocate for TaxJar. If you have any other questions, please let me know!
My team tried using RxJava for our Android app with mixed results. While it's easier to model some UI problems with reactive streams, and certainly more fun to write, we found it's really easy to introduce subtle bugs and performance problems due to the high learning curve. Debugging is also worse.
Why do you think water should have no taste? Good water should has minerals and those have lots of flavors.
I left my home country to work in the bay area largely because I was going to a well established company in an area dense with other work. The chance of me moving to the middle of nowhere for a startup is exactly zero.
Twilio even offers this as a feature. It can automatically send notification to the right channel.
Portable SSL-Enabled IMAP and SMTP
Perhaps I'm not a typical person but I strongly prefer SMS for my one-way notifications from service providers for appointments I've set up. I don't want to have to answer a call to hear a recorded voice tell me about the appointment or, worse, actually respond to a real human. E-mail is okay but I don't check it often. For me SMS message notifications fit just right.
A good point that I overlooked; thanks.
This is really disturbing. Pretty much the literal definition of "hook em wile they're young. I am starting to think we need a standard oil style breakup of google/amazon/fb.
I have lived in cities where the tap water, to me, was undrinkably gross tasting. It was probably just fine to drink, but I found myself drinking less water than I should because of the taste. A Brita filter helped a lot.

Edit: and not all cities I've lived in are that way. In my current city the tap water is just fine.
The title is clickbait. There are no exploits involved. He's not dropping NITs on users, for example. Fingerprinting is not a huge issue. The main defense is preventing adversaries from learning one's ISP-assigned IP address. Maybe Tor Project does encourage too much confidence in the "all users look alike" feature. They certainly do, in my opinion, regarding the security of Tor browser in Windows, with no protection against exploits and Tor bypass.
OkCupid | Senior iOS Developer | New York, NY | ONSITE, VISA

Build entire product features. Have the freedom to add your own creativity to the app. Join a company with great culture, low stress and good hours. Check out the jobvite posting for the details.

https://www.okcupid.com/careers
-----
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Pretty sure android has an option to set network switching to be more aggressive.
Perhaps I should be more clear. You can certainly avoid dealing with the FDA if you like, but it won't actually save much time or money. You'll still spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the basic research needed to find something that might be a useful drug. All of that spending comes before you do any kind of human testing.

Also, doing your research in other countries carries its own risk. Here's a recent article about human trials conducted in North America, South America, and Russia: <http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/04/27/a-c.... I'm pretty sure I saw something about fraudulent pre-clinical research in China a few months back as well.
Yeah I've grown to appreciate C++ in many ways, but what I noticed at my last job is that the baroque interfaces give it a viral effect.

Once you have a little C++ code, the easiest thing to do is to continue writing more C++ code, even if it's not the best tool for that job. It's too hard to use a C++ interface from any other language. Even wrapping it in C is annoying, although as I understand LLVM does exactly that for some of its API.

IMO there are a lot of systems where C++ is the best language for about 10% of the code. C++ really is unique in terms of offering zero-cost abstraction. But then the remaining 90% gets written in C++ too. It can be remarkably awkward for many problems, and your build times scale nonlinearly too.

In some way this is inherent ... the compiler's job is to erase all those abstractions and generate straightforward machine code. In other ways it is the fault/result of adhering to the C linking model, which ironically was for interoperability.

C++ is sort of like a universal receiver and not a universal donor. It can assimilate any C code, and thus it gets code in other languages transitively. But other languages can't assimilate it, at least not without great effort.

That said, Clang has a better API than GCC-XML, so the problem might be solved. Athoough honestly C++ just keeps growing more features with C++ 11, 14, 17 that make it harder to interoperate with any other code. It's this huge compile-time language completely separate from the C linking model.
Dammit, we just upgraded a lot of our apps to 4.6.
F# and all ML derivatives are an aberration because they use juxtaposition to denote function calls. That eliminates a lot of parens but personally I find the result less readable.

But compare to, say, C where no one complains about the parens:

int fact(int n) {
if (n==0) {
return 1
} else {
return n*fact(n-1);
}
}

That's six pairs of parens. The only reason it's not more is because some function calls in C are disguised as operators, and those just happen to be the functions that factorial uses. If we wanted a semantically equivalent function that handled bignums you'd have to write:

bignum fact(bignum n) {
if (bignum_is_zero(n)) {
return n;
else {
return bignum_multiply(n, fact(bignum_subtract_1(n)));
}
}

Now you've got nine parens. But still no one complains about C because of that.
Or, you could use Linux. Today.
For those that aren't following it seems that siacoin is looking to provide an efficient distributed storage network made up of individuals that offer a contact to store data. To offer the contract the host puts up collateral that will be given to the renter if the host fails to provide a proof of storage (my guess before reading the paper is that the contract gives a hash and a file size and the host is responsible for giving a file of that size and that hash if there is a dispute).

Seems cool. I have an always on computer & ~100 GB free, I might experiment with running a node.
Maybe I'm slow, but I've sometimes idly wondered why Hamburgers contain no Ham - and your comment finally made be twig: it's Hamburger as in /ˈhambɜːrɡər/ not /ˈhæmbɜːrɡər/ !
Would Google or Amazon be actually interested in buying Docker? Like you said, they'd rather make their own product which would happen to support docker features.
There is nothing in the world that would ever make me believe they weren't spying as much as possible on everyone they could.

What humans could resist such enormous power?
You presume incorrectly. It's a tangled web of federal and state policies, along with the (not exclusively) American fetish for cars and low-density home ownership, which led to the car-centric design. And that's certainly reductive, but helping from landlocked states visit NYC and SF probably never played a role.
I think it's not the kind of question that's best asked of companies. Companies should commit not to collect abusable data in the first place.

Employees, on the other hand, can in fact pledge not to assist the DOJ, even if "correct process" is used. If enough of them pledge that, companies will have to adjust their retention practices, lest their data function as a time bomb waiting to blow their teams up.

I think if you're going to mirror NeverAgain.tech, don't water it down. But the bigger issue is: stop looking to companies to make promises. People promise. Companies can only posture.
Not to defend the NSA on ethical grounds, but at least on practical grounds, I would personally find that many records to be a decent trade-off for 42 arrested and convicted suspects who were likely to commit violent acts at some point. As for whether that's the case, who knows.
I didn't even know these existed until reading your comment. Finally, a new topic to obsessively research :) The last one was indoor air quality and air filters. It sounds kinda lame but it's a really fascinating topic (with a very scammy industry attached to it).

Do you use a reverse osmosis system? Any recommendations?
Twilio's concentration problem is different from their volatility problem with these big players if there isn't a long-term contract with minimums in place.

The revenue concentration problem is well documented and I don't think we add much to that discussion.

The revenue volatility problem is inherent to how short-lived their actual product is - SMS and phone calls are ephemeral, measured in seconds to minutes. As the result, without contracts, the only thing that is stopping the outbound traffic from flip flopping providers are some business rules baked into the implementation. (Inbound traffic has phone number lock-in, which is why we don't change cell providers on a weekly basis.)

For Uber, that business logic is pretty straightforward on their largest volume SMS, making multi-vendor flip flop based on rates fairly easy.

Long term contracts with guaranteed minimums will absolutely protect Twilio from this volatility. It's not lock-in or concentration, but rather way to have more predictable revenues and manage working capital.

In parallel to trying to get long term contracts/guaranteed mins, Twilio should be (and is) diversifying their customer base.
I wouldn't be "happy" to give them all my info. I'd like to be able to share my screen with the person standing next to me, "look at this thing I've found", without worrying some advertiser is going to reveal any personal detail they'd like to infer about me through which advert they pop on my screen.

Especially if we're talking about children and young adults, where even "you watch that tv show?" can be a source for social discomfort.
Πρόκληση ο τελικός για Μονακό – Γιουβέντους
tech companies open up offices in cities to hire existing talent in those communities. they don't open up offices to take talent away from their existing offices, at great expense to the company with no measurable upside.
Is there a similar application for Windows? I was able to google NetLimiter, has anyone used it and can share how it compares?
I agree about the risk of bias. If he cheated, even subconsiously, on the tap vs Soma test, the results are consistent with bottled and Soma being indistinguishable. Which is the opposite conclusion.

The suspicious inability to distinguish bottled water from Soma agrees with this. He wouldn't be able to cheat on that test if he actually couldn't tell the difference, but could cheat on tap vs Soma like you said about water and orange juice.

If he didn't even know which two types he was comparing, that would protect from that kind of bias. However, from the setup, it looks like he does know.
Also, they likely provided intelligence that led back to overseas cells and organizations, which the NSA is supposed to target but which we can't exactly prosecute.

It would be a huge blindspot if we couldn't follow the network graph of an organization based abroad because they route comms through the US.
I don't understand what the stopped clock is supposed to signify. It's a device that show the current time except off by a bit—the number of large changes in the ice flow? like my microwave?
How stable are Clang's internals? Are you supposed to be able to write your own Clang tools and link them dynamically, or are they mostly distributed and built together with the Clang source code? (i.e. like Linux drivers where there is no stable interface.)

I know that LLVM is notable for not maintaining API stability -- not sure about Clang.
You don't need biased subjects to have ambiguous results. Suppose for instance all people from group A can taste chlorine at 20ppm, and below that threshold, those individuals have no perceived chlorine taste. Individuals from group B can taste chlorine only at 80ppm and above. If the tap water has chlorine starting at 100ppm and the filter removed half (as stated in the article) then we would have water at 100ppm and 50ppm. Some observers would perceive a difference and some would not. If the Pur filter removed 90% of chlorine, then individuals in both groups would perceive a difference in taste.

To point, this experiment depends on your taste preferences, as the author has stated that there is a physical difference in the makeup of the water samples after filtration.
This is something which is really a challenge.

In many markets discovery is a challenge (how do you create visibility to all of the customers who might be interested in your product) and then operational costs when your concept is discovered.

When brainstorming things I heard an idea which I thought was pretty cool, create a "trademark" registry in these bespoke market places. It would work by sending the market maker (Etsy in this case) pictures and a description of an item you are going to sell on the site.

They would take those images and descriptions and first verify that nothing else on the site already had both the same look and application, and then they would issue you a "trademark" for the product which you could start selling and advertising. If it was popular and someone tried to make copies, they would not be allowed to sell them on Etsy because when they submitted pictures and descriptions it would be apparent they were too similar to an existing product.

It is interesting to consider what the overall effect of such a system would be, we know that it would give a strong 'first mover' advantage (+1 to the sellers) but also prevent price competition (-1 to the buyers). It would help prevent counterfeits (+1 to the buyers) and might limit a seller selling their own product because the copy had already gotten to the market first (-1 to sellers).

I put trademark in quotes because while this is exactly the role of trademarks in the US, it is too expensive to pursue trademark violations for a $10 bracelet that you sell may 20 a month of. So you need a locally implemented system that can reduce the cost to implement and as much as possible automate enforcement through policy.
Blockstream benefits because the company is doing lightning network consulting.

That is their entire business model. If the lightning network doesn't come to fruition, their company is screwed.
It's hard to keep the bar equal when some candidates are treated as higher value, especially considering if you're putting women at the top of your funnel you can be sure Google is too.
Yes if you're willing to mess with crouton.