skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That seems like a very good idea. I got one secondhand (given away) a few years ago for my little one and in the process of hunting down some replacement wheels and a new battery for it I stumbled into a rich world of powerwheels enthusiasts who optimize them for kids or for themselves.

The computerized hackability may be a little outside of that community but you'd have some great shoulders to stand on as far as the equipment.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14668250 and marked it off-topic.
Dealing with fairly low-volume stuff, my concern about using the database alone has to do with who owns what schema and how changes are managed.

Being able to send off a rich asynchronous message is nice because it means you do not need to have some co-owned table in a shared database that two different components are reading and writing from.

Or, worse, a widespread pattern of every service exposing a piece of its database to other services with an unsatisfying level of logging or control for what really happens.
If you receive Scott's emails for longer than one week, you will quickly have the answer to your question "why not to scrap".

I think enough people turn to premium member exactly because a personal touch of Scott and his team. You have this feeling this is not simple aggregate -- I always enjoy reading Scott little tips "when you buy ticket to certain city, don't forget to visit specific point of interest". I end up researching those and always came up with fun info, making me believe Scott is pro and knows what he is doing/researching for me. A scrapper will be inhumane and you will quickly realize that and most likely convert 1% of what they convert.

Scott - I am very curious how did you initially advertise your newsletter? First weeks/months you were live - how did you get your initial traffic?

Thanks!
It's not Jepsen, but we actually do a fair amount of system and integration testing, some of which does things like kill nodes (randomly, the controller, etc) and validates data is delivered correctly. There is some ongoing work to add other fault injection tests: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/KAFKA-5476

This has already caught quite a few bugs, including one that led to a change to the replication protocol which is included in this 0.11.0.0 release. See the community KIP here: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/KAFKA/KIP-101+-+...

One cool thing that happened recently with these tests is that they were modified to make the client implementation pluggable: https://github.com/apache/kafka/pull/2048 Confluent uses this functionality to test all of its clients (librdkafka, confluent-kafka-python, confluent-kafka-go, confluent-kafka-dotnet) in addition to the Java clients. This not only makes us confident of these clients from their first release, but has also found dozens of bugs in both the clients and the broker implementation itself. Getting automated testing across many clients has really stepped up the quality and robustness of both existing and new features.

If you're interested, the tests themselves are here: https://github.com/apache/kafka/tree/trunk/tests
there are many many benefits to blockchains and cryptocurrencies that aren't covered by things being illegal.

For one, when I try to transfer money between banks it takes like a week. When I transfer ether it takes 15 seconds. If you'd like, I'm happy to provide a longer list of more examples, but illegal activities are far from the only reason to use cryptocurrency.
True. But vinyl album art is bigger, which is nice if you are interested in having a cool collection of art/objects.
Do you really see those things as having equivalent sureness of proof as climate change? I grok the things you listed quite well, and I've been following climate science as a hobbyist for years, and by comparison climate science is a mess compared to thermodynamics and even evolution. And I say this as a person who fully believes that anthropogenic climate change is happening.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14667704 and marked it off-topic.
I believe the dot product for an array is a.dot(b) ?

Would a.mult(b) be terrible for the first example?

I assume the third example is R-style:

df[df['foo'] < 10 ] ?

I don't believe I can ovveride 'is', or 'instanceof', plus df has to pre-exist:

foo = make_df()[foo['col'] > 10]

why does it have to be R-style? is that necessarily more powerful than something more pythonic?

df.filt(lambda x: x > 10, ['foo'])

or even

df.filt(lambda x, y: (x > 10) and (y > 10), ['foo', 'bar'])

new_tbl = make_df().filt(lambda x, y: (x > 10) and (y > 10), ['foo', 'bar'])

vs

df[(df['foo'] < 10) & (df['bar'] < 10)]

also, I believe James Powell does a talk wrt the inconsistencies of pandas/numpy interface.
Welcome! I don't know of any rite of passage, but maybe I gave you your first upvote? ;)

> I'm guessing there is some kind of a relevance check for the speaker version compared to the phone version.

I would bet on that & expect it too... I'm sure all these voice search products are experimenting with how voice search needs to be tuned differently than text search.
Lawyers, what's really bad about React that no big corps allow using it?
I'm not normally considered a hipster and I agree the advantage to vinyl is that it encourages active participation with music (and the art is better).

I consume most of my music digitally essentially in the background but if I want to have a music listening session, alone or with friends, I reach for vinyl.
> It does not take 10~60 minutes to sign a bitcoin transaction... It doesn't even take a second.

Why are you only considering signing time? Signing a bitcoin transaction is not sufficient for the merchant to be confident that they can give you your goods. You must submit it to the network and the merchant must be reasonably confident that it will be accepted in a block as-is and that the block will not be orphaned.
If I had the resources, I would rebuild all of the consumer-facing web apps using blockchain-based smart contracts. I expect that all web apps will be rebuilt in this way to an extent, either from within or by way of competition.

So "impossible" is a charged word, as is "easy". I would say that it was previously far more costly and difficult to implement the following:

- programmable, highly-reliable, do-it-yourself financial instruments

- services that cannot feasibly be shut down

- verifiably revocable authentication

- data that cannot be modified or deleted

- functionality that cannot be modified or deleted

- complex business interactions involving numerous parties that can be verifiably traced, from start to finish

Disclaimer, because everyone loves to bring up The DAO incident: the above capabilities hold true unless the community decides otherwise after a ridiculously onerous debate. Even then, the unaltered data/code can still live on.
Your tax status doesn't necessarily indicate what your goals are. SpaceX and Tesla are for-profit and the Susan G Komen foundation is non-profit.
Nope. The IPCC consensus has been reached through a lot of hard, unpaid or very poorly paid, work by people passionate about helping others, that all the time know they could easily get bought to spread falsehoods and reap large rewards.
Nickel Cadmium (typical rechargeable) and Silver Oxide (watch batteries w/ mercury) are bad. Lead Acid (cars) are very recyclable, and considering there is no new lead production in the US, will command a premium for recycling. I don't think Carbon Zinc and most Lithiums are a problem.
Aaronsw's take on this (from January 2011): http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko
I should also mention that system/integration tests of the new functionality was a requirement for releasing it. For example, here's one of the tests https://github.com/apache/kafka/blob/trunk/tests/kafkatest/t...
I strongly disagree with the claim that "React Is Much Simpler." React on its own may be simpler, but by the time you add libraries for routing, HTTP, dependency injection, date/currency formatting, animations, and all the other stuff that Angular provides out of the box, the complexity starts to look pretty similar.

Furthermore, because you have to rely on third-party libraries for all the features that React doesn't provide, you have to worry about separately keeping them all up-to-date. What if there's a critical bug fix in the latest version of your HTTP library, but it's only compatible with the latest version of React, which isn't compatible with the router version you're using? In my experience it takes a lot more time to keep dependencies up-to-date and working together with React than with Angular.
The author advocates "serverless" from the get-go because a "single server is not enough for anything non-trivial these days".
I completely disagree. Servers are beefier than ever and scaling up has never been cheaper.
Look at how StackOverflow operates:
https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

They have 4 SQL servers that handle 500 million queries per day. 125 million queries per server. There are a lot of apps that can get by with less than 125 million queries per day :)
Cool I like the tooltip idea. We're working on a lot of changes right now so I'll definitely keep this in mind.
"The embrace of Bitcoin is largely driven by dissatisfaction with the modern banking system but the designers and proponents of Bitcoin have made the fundamental and fatal mistake of believing that the problem with modern banking is that paper and digital money have no intrinsic value.
Since digital coins must be created out of thin air the creators of Bitcoin developed an ingenious method of making coin creation take computational power, thus imposing a cost on creating new coins, and allowing them to limit the total circulation of coins.
These measures give Bitcoin an intrinsic value (the cost of creating a new coin) and make inflation impossible by setting a hard limit on total currency issue."

This is just filled with misunderstanding. The purpose of mining is not to give intrinsic value to Bitcoin. It is to economically incentivize a fair system of transacting without centrality. The cost of mining is the price the Bitcoin system pays for distributed, trust-less consensus.

Just like fiat, Bitcoin has no intrinsic value. Just like fiat, Bitcoin is a bubble that seemingly never pops, because it is a collectively imagined means of transacting. A discussion of the disadvantages or advantages of Bitcoin should start with this understanding.
This is basically it. I'm always amazed at how much reimplementation of TCP we see at a high level in distributed systems. Backpressure, message ordering, retries, etc. all work pretty well in TCP.
Also, when has this sort of issue ever been an actual material problem? Like, we wrote our app with Django (or whatever) and then got in actual trouble because of it. I find this argument against React very suspicious.
So basically, anyone who is a respectable scientist who disagrees with this is a shill?
I mean, I disagree with the authors' conclusions about Angular and React, but he wrote one negative sentence about each and then moved on. I can live with that.
ETHPonzi: A decentralized Ponzi Scheme
Landing page app
Depends on what the idea is, you can start with a mailing list, i.e. a list of customers.
Yes, I basically agree. I posted this link about Direct Primary Care elsewhere in this discussion:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/01/direct-prima...

Direct Primary Care is on the rise in the U.S. It is a saner solution than Obamacare, which forces premiums up crazily for everyone and is a terrible model. If we, as a nation, want to insist on market based solutions instead of the government playing a more central role, then Direct Primary Care is a far saner answer. You pay for basic care out of pocket in a way that helps keep costs down and you get insurance for actual unexpected emergencies and major health events.

The other problem with health insurance is that it doesn't serve the preventive role that car insurance serves. Car insurance is required by the state you live in and the details vary by state, but if you get too many tickets or have too many accidents, your premiums go up. So, it serves as a deterrent to bad driving behaviors. Furthermore, it doesn't just cover your losses. It covers damages done to other people. If you get in an accident and are found to be at fault, your insurance pays for their repairs.

Unlike car insurance, health insurance does not play a real role in pressuring people to behave more responsibly. So far, we have found no means to really do that effectively. Health issues are far more complicated than safe driving issues. You don't drive 24/7, but being alive 24/7 impacts our health for good for ill and in ways we don't completely understand. So it is a very hard problem to solve.

What we do know is that when people do not have access to basic health care in an affordable manner, health outcomes are worse and, thus, more expensive. So we need to find a means to get health access to more people in a way that is preventative. Direct Primary Care and government funded services seem to do that. Health insurance really does not.
I definitely am not a fan of R's inconvenient convenience functions. A saner set of wrappers for R base graphics is on my long to-do list, at least something with better defaults. Someone had started a project that goes in the right direction called "compactr", but it seems abandoned: https://cran.r-project.org/package=compactr
Siri had wolfram alpha integration at launch. Then Apple got overconfident and removed it.

Google "Siri getting dumber" for reference.
Definitely great business and great example of side business.
This effort is ultimately kind of laughable. Coal is going to collapse not because any global warming regulations, but because it is no longer cost competitive with natural gas, solar, or wind. And many jurisdictions have committed to upholding the Paris Accords with state & local laws. [1]

It's a dying industry that will die out for the normal reasons - economic forces - regardless of what the federal government does.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Climate_Alliance
Thank you for an insightful answer.
The fine folks at .feedback seem to be Kurt Vonnegut fans.

cdn.feedback serves up this on an otherwise empty html doc:

<!-- There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind -->
> In my experience unit tests work adequately for domains that are heavy on complex logic and light on integration (e.g. writing a parser). In domains which are light on complex logic and heavy on integration they fail badly (e.g. most business apps).

There's a testing methodology we used at my last company called "Change Risk Analysis" or something. Essentially, the point was that you separate business logic and integration code, and you write unit tests for the business logic. There was a metric that combined the the cyclomatic complexity with the test coverage to produce a "risk" score for methods and classes, and all code (or at least all new code) had to be under a certain risk threshold.

I would also add that domains that are heavy on complex logic and light on integration are also highly amenable to more sophisticated verification methods, such as generative testing and model checking.
Yes, there was an article about this in last week's Economist. Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile are the top 3 lithium countries. Due to the politics of Bolivia and Argentina, Chile is the best positioned to take massive advantage of it.

https://www.economist.com/news/americas/21723451-three-south... [Paywall]

https://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/06/daily-... [No Paywall]
Exactly. I started skimming the article like I do most these days, scrolling to the punch line while collecting the gist. When I got to the part about the ball being a knock-off, I was struck with excitement because I knew I wanted to read this whole thing, word for word.

Almost as good as the story about the missing German family (http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...)!
These have been great. HN should jointly write an introductory FPGA text! Thanks!
HEVC and HEIF Will Make Video and Photos More Efficient – TidBITS
Jolla’s Chairman Launches Token Investment Platform to Fund 1,000+ Startups
You're not really transferring Bitcoin though, you're just adjusting a ledger of who owns what. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing with some gold, you could probably even create a setup where it is done at lower transaction costs.
Yeah, that's the correct interpretation. I got there, eventually.
Adding computer vision to DropBox photos to compete with Google and iOS
I use google assistant for controlling smart lights sometimes with "ok google, turn on/off the lights". At one point I tried "Ok google, turn off the lights in ten minutes" and it just searched it. That seems super simple and like something it shouldn't have had any trouble with, but here we are :/
Opinion-based, factless essays like this are why webdev is such an unmitigated cesspit. Some random person on Medium proclaims "Angular has already lost to React no matter how hard google tries to hide it, React has a really dangerous license rendering it obsolete for serious enterprises and Vue.js is mainly driven by a single genius developer (high bus factor)", pieces of cargo-cult gossip that mixes half-truths with generous loads of alarmist ignorance, and attempts to distill it down to absolutes under the guise of providing a public service.

By the time we get down to "backend", I have no idea what the author is trying to say, and whether it's actual advice or pent-up frustration bubbling up into resigned cynicism. We namedrop a framework for good measure.

If we collectively chose to interpret articles like this as satire, they'd provide more value by highlighting the fallacies that lead to the propagation of opinionated (but unfounded) information.
I moved from webdev a couple years ago so this is a helpful article on the current meta, but I disagree with this:

> All this stuff [managed NoSQL document databases] is way easier to grasp than the old days of PHP, MySQL and jQuery plus Linux server management.

Even though you can say "Javascript [is] everywhere", I still think using it for frontend/backend/NoSQL has just as much problematic context switching as the MySQL/PHP/JQuery days.
Fitbit does not attempt to track sleep stages w/o HR monitoring; it's just Awake, Restless or Asleep. Yes with nothing but accelerometer data stillness can be mistaken for Asleep, but I think you're misremembering when you say "deep sleep".
We don't really care about laypeople in this discussion, that's the domain of journalists who are expected to do their homework.

Biased scrutiny is the best kind. Scrutiny needs to occur and I would rather the people doing it sincerely believe that community at large is wrong rather than someone playing devil's advocate. They should make the best possible case against climate change they can.
This was always my issue with TDD. I never tried it, but I know that the way in which I have written software for more than a decade is "get a loose set of requirements, start digging, write some code, figure out what works and what doesn't, change things, repeat until done."

I never saw a way in which I could write a large number of tests up front.
And I would argue that cryptocurrencies do none of those things. What value is being stored? Owning some BTC just implies that someone at some point burnt some electricity and computing power to solve a rather insignificant crypto problem.

This is precisely what I don't get about cryptocurrencies. There is no intrinsic value, and they're not even backed by the full faith and credit of, well, anyone. I don't see why it's "worth" anything.

And, we don't need a digital currency. We already have a bunch of them (the US dollar among them). Most money in the world doesn't exist as physical coins, notes, gold/silver, etc. It's all bits in a computer, but those bits are backed by a sovereign entity. That's why we are able to use them as currency.

If anyone can explain the fundamentals of why BTC or any other cryptocurrency should have any value whatsoever, I would really appreciate that.
> how do you feel about the fact that React has ~4 major routing libraries?

I think it's worth mentioning that the API for the largest one of these (react-router) has had breaking changes with every single release, and takes a totally new approach to routing each time. So the question is more, 'How do you feel about changing your approach to routing every time you write a new app?'

Or maybe I'm just too old and bitter for React haha
Anybody else irked by the use of the word "myth" to mean "a position I am so confident is false that I'm now going to talk down to the opposition"
S.E.C. To Let All Companies File I.P.O. Documents Secretly
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12692552, someone from the Facebook team linked to this: https://code.facebook.com/pages/850928938376556

You may find both helpful.
I think there's an argument for doing those things yourself if it's genuinely cheaper or of higher-quality, but you can't realistically make that argument with vinyl.

I think with vinyl people are looking for more of a sense of ownership. It doesn't feel like you own an album, and don't get the feeling that it contributes to some part of you, when you click "save" in Spotify. It doesn't take any effort or any sacrifice (money) to do that, so it comes with no opportunity cost. But buying a record is more deliberate and usually means that your ownership of it comes at the expense of something else you'd instead buy with that money.

I admit it's a pretty wishy-washy argument, but for most people, the prospect of buying a vinyl record has to be rooted in something psychological because objectively speaking there aren't very many good arguments for it.
Further inspection, looks like terrible prices, the advertised rates are based upon such things as 7 people sharing.
That looks really nice. How big is it? And is the software it's running open source, and made to be extended?
Yes but with a gold ledger you'd have counterparty risk, because the ledger would refer to something outside itself. With Bitcoin the ledger is the currency.
Forget about questions, I cannot even get Siri on Apple TV to recognize what I am saying. I have often wanted to keep a kind of journal like this poster but I suspect it would recognize the correct words about 30% of the time.

My wife who, unlike me, is not a native English speaker has probably a 10% success rate. This is why any kind of forthcoming voice-response Apple device is completely a nonstarter to me.
Then people play vinyl records through a turntable that outputs via an A/D as a USB device.

Some DJ use vinyl records which contain nothing but a time code track. This feeds a system which plays out the proper audio segment from downloaded data.[1]

[1] http://djtechtools.com/2014/03/20/building-a-dvs-timecode-dj...
The main issue isn't solved by replacing fiat currency with a digital crypto currency. The problem that must be solved is how do you manage (the creation/destruction) of a medium of exchange in a manner that is equitable to ALL participants. The current system uses a combination of central banks, plain ole banks, and government bonds. I'd argue that their management hasn't met the goal of being equitable to ALL participants, however, I don't see how crypto currency improves on this.
I find Trello extremely useful to organise my own projects. I have a board similar to the one you describe, cataloging my ideas and their various stages, and also a board per project that I start building, which is typically organised as a traditional left-to-right agile board.
I recently subscribed to the UK version of this (https://www.jacksflightclub.co.uk). I didn't know there was a US version, I guess there might be lots of similar services. I wonder who came first.
Uber's Opportunity to Remake Silicon Valley–For Good