skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's a more fundamental problem than the choice of languages (though I share your griefs!).

To the vast majority of the educated population, software is very much a black art and people would have no idea of how to do even the most basic things. That's of course true for more senior people, but I find that it is as true for the generation who graduates today. They can do incredible things with their smartphone that I didn't suspect was possible, but wouldn't know where to start to code something.

Until this skill gap changes dramatically, and that everyone gets out of high school with basic knowledge in programming, like they have basic knowledge of maths, biology, physics or history, this gap will never close.
Instapaper reads me long-form articles on my commute (iOS).

I heard about audm on some podcast, I forget where. I checked it out, and decided it wasn't worth $8 a month to have a human read to me, instead of a robot, a small subset of the content I regularly consume.

Robot-for-free over human-for-pay seems like an apt analogy for our time.

At any rate, I like trials, and if your service is truly great and had the value-add of curating excellent articles from sources I wouldn't normally find, that might put me over the edge. Then again, I cancelled my Audible subscription too.

If you're successful, Amazon surely will buy you.
Ctrl-F Video (https://video.loud.red/) to look for keywords in YouTube videos. Needed it to quickly jump to relevant places in videos. Works well, even with YouTube's auto-generated CC, which surprised me. For some reason it is really popular in China.
College student, doing Android + light backend work.

~80/90/hr.

Caveat is that I've only had 1 client so far.
Please use your local grocery store. I am 31, live in Manhattan and shop once a week for groceries. All these food startups are not solving any real problems, its Webvan all over again.
"Pay what you want^"

^As long as it's at least $15.

It bothers me that Humble Bundle has so heavily embraced this type of marketing.
How did you switch into training?
What is Bitcoin and friends good for right now besides speculating with and trading for other currencies?

A while back there was a BTC marketplace where among other things, I spent 1 BTC on a steam key for the game Portal (a poor trade in hindsight).

But they shut down and the only other place that I can think of that accepts BTC is humblebundle.com - and presumably they convert it to USD right away.

Actually:

> Bitcoin payments have been disabled for the Humble Capcom Rising Bundle.

So, yea, who accepts BTC right now?
If the exchanges trade 'segwit2x-coin' as Bitcoin, it will become 'Bitcoin', and the legacy coin, if it is possible to use at all, will have to be renamed.
It takes a certain kind of person to be a freelance anything. If you're not that kind of person, you're likely not to be a success.
Ask HN: How does your business/company deal with paper invoices?
Does your business/company still receive paper invoices/bills? How do you deal with them?
How does 'training' look like. You give in-person workshops? Sell online courses?
Yeah, that's why we wanted a cloud solution - none of us really have significant sysadmin expertise, nor the time to devote to tending more boxes than we absolutely must. Only having to maintain the actual build environment has been a win.

We've had a couple occasions where we ran out of disk space (though not since we increased the disk size and added a cleanup job), and a few times a build agent has randomly stopped responding and needed to be restarted, but nothing we couldn't easily diagnose and fix.
I find it to be a pretty fun and interesting hobby. I'm regularly picking up transmissions from 200+ miles away which to me is pretty neat. For extra fun, put up a big ol VHF antenna and receive ATC communications as well--you'll need a second SDR for that. Then try to figure out which flight on your plot corresponds to which airband communication.
Switching to emacs (after 16 years of vim)
I had one client, he paid me 65-70$ for scraping escort sites..
He had it coded from some one in portugese, it was pho scraper..
So i added 7 more sites .. and finally i quit becoz i was not getting private time .. every time there were people arround me
Btw i am from india.. ne1 looking for freelancer (php, nodejs, go, etc..) can get in touch..
Hemangiomul TRATAMENTE NATURALE
OTC ?
Seeing 'Boobie Inspector' and 'Fart Master' in the list really does illustrate the internet for you.

Really. Just... don't trust people...
That's not from the early 90's.
The first tier is not $15, it's $1.
If you can come up with an interesting enough formula but with varied enough gameplay you can get some cool stuff. Kairosoft comes to mind and I'm sure they've really made bank on their games.
A DNS lookup can be answered by any DNS server in the world, so even if that goes down you can retry with another one. If the equipment responsible from taking calls from your phone is down there often isn't a second one it can automatically fail over to.
I'm 65 and still coding. My secret is to vape weed every day, which I've been doing since my late twenties when my then boyfriend showed me how to "hot knife" hash.
We're glad you tried the app and hope you will try it again -- our whole focus recently has been on signing additional content partners, so that there's even more overlap between what you want to read and what we let you listen to.

Are there any particular publications we could add that might make the subscription price worth it for you?
A few points:

1. The only party benefitting from the cashback scheme is, of course, the middleman. While prices will go up in the long term, consumers who use cash-back cards do benefit in the short term over those who don't. If you make a transaction in cash or with a debit card which you could have made with a cash-back card, you are leaving 3% on the table. I am extremely skeptical that an individual boycott will be effective. Maybe take your 3% and pool it to lobby for better banking regulations?

2. they entirely eliminate the necessity for such middlemen taking a cut - AFAIK, all cryptocurrency includes some sort of transaction fee.
Social Mobility in a World Without Work
I like reading the top stories by points on Hacker News, not necessarily the front page. So I made this app:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/helvetica-neue-native-open/i...
Nope! I didn't know that. Very interesting.

The Alphas had a motherboard and daughterboard - and the daughterboard was a generalized bus, so a single slot could have a RAM or CPU slot in it --- were Sun servers capable of this too? Or was a RAM slot a RAM slot and a CPU slot a CPU slot and they were not interchangeable?

I'm curious because I've never seen any other machines with a generalized CPU/RAM bus, I'm curious if Sun hardware supported this? If it did, can you remember the model numbers so I can read up on it?
If they did that, they wouldn't be selling expired and inappropriate medication. So why would they? The sellers might also be illiterate...they are selling by color/shape.
> All of your music (well, most),

That's the problem. If it's not well and truly all of my music, then it's worthless. I will take the pain of manual library file management over not having every last one of my tracks available in one big library that I can shuffle.

You can generalize this to, I will never put my music lifestyle in the hands of your company's relationship with the music labels.
I know many people who are doing very well in the mobile development freelancing space, at least in the NYC area. Many gigs are still onsite or at least benefit from some kind of physical presence, so if that's a factor, then it's a much more level playing field.

I'm a full-time mobile developer as well. Haven't taken a crack at contracting yet myself, but I think that the key to success is a tried and true one: connections, connections, connections. If you're going on these freelance-farm type job sites, you're in a race to the bottom for poor quality gigs.

Also, I've heard that it's pretty hard to 'get started on the side' because many decent contracts want more of your time than you can reasonably offer when you have a full-time gig. Kind of a chicken-or-the-egg problem with that, but I figure that's the risk of it.
If enough people are having problems that it becomes a systemic issue (student loans might be in this category), then personal responsibility isn't cutting it. The big flaw of a true free market is information imbalance and externalities. I only have one chance to save for retirement while a financial company may deal with 100s of thousands so it's harder for one side to learn from mistakes than the other.

Like regulations around children's toys I think both sides have fair arguments--neither is 100% correct. I just don't think it's 100% personal responsibility in a modern society.
You're asking a few questions here. I can answer from my experience working at a consulting shop that charged a lot of money...

> Are they charging more because of overhead?

Partially. There's overhead you wouldn't get with a single developer like office space and administrative overhead. A big overlooked piece of overhead is sales overhead. It's much easier to find 40 hours of consulting work a week than 120 hours of work. If its a premium development shop, the developer salaries are probably higher as well. This all may cut into the margins, but it doesn't really explain why they charge so much.

> Why do they charge so much?

Because they have clients who are willing to pay that much. Plain and simple.

> What does the client get that they wouldn't with a single developer?

Some companies are bad at finding and retaining talent. This includes contractors. They also might not know how to manage a project. For a lot of companies, they need something done, but this simply isn't their area of expertise. Some single developers can manage their own projects, but sometimes they need more than just a single developer. The workload may be much higher than what a single person could manage, and hiring 3 individual developers can be much less efficient than hiring a team of 3 developers who already work well together. Perhaps they need a designer as well, or they're looking for a project manager who is really good at communicating business needs with them.
"Machine learning models have no access to such experiences and thus cannot "understand" their inputs in any human-relatable way"

It may be that distinctions like the one you're describing here are useful to make, but I don't think this claim refutes the possibility of ML "fitting a particular piece within a larger, yet unarticulated model."

I think the assertion is more that our current ways of representing elements of human experience are necessarily very lossy - or that there's some aspect of the situation that you can't describe/implement in terms of models of neural nets.
Because it will take you 10x longer to complete the project to a satisfactory level of quality. It's a typical 'Pay me now or pay me later' scenario.
Last time I told someone I want 100€ an hour he laughed at me.

I charge per month, but it would be about 40€ an hour.
I just want to read about things that interest me, have conversations, use it all to inform my understanding of the world, and share what I’ve learned

Isn't this essentially a definition of leisure time? It's at least salon culture[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon_(gathering)
I said there were tons of examples historically and that America was one of them (and obviously not in every aspect... these types of things are always on spectrums and not devoid of anomalies)
Yes, seemingly.
It is a lot. Again, please show me an example application of the blockchain that comes close to that number but that does not need censorship resistance.

The estimate of daily volume provided by blockchain.info obscures our discussion, especially if you consider that the daily volume for BTC/USD pair is around $1B. There could be $1B-worth of outputs in a day all dedicated to providing liquidity to exchanges, but entering/exiting the network is not an application of the network itself.
and it's only $1 to prevent shills from buying in $0.1 increments and defeating the whole purpose of the service.
I use one of these (in a way) whenever I fly. I have an RPi running Stratux with a WAAS GPS reciever and two modified RTL-SDR dongles, one for each ADS-B band. It then rebroadcasts all this info over a wifi network that my ipad picks up and displays with foreflight. The whole thing sans ipad was ~$100, is super reliable, and fits cleanly in a small case. The commercial version (Stratus 2s) is $900 and has reliability issues.

On a side note, these only pick up AC that are broadcasting ADS-B which is most commercial aircraft and a minority of commuter/personal planes. This will change at the beginning of 2020 when the FAA will mandate all aircraft will need it (or at least anyone planning to ever operate in a mode C ring/near a major city)
To battle hackers, IBM wants to encrypt the world
It is both a Hardware and Software problem. Apple's choice of GPU is always lacking behind in performance, and it was only 2017's update of Mac that got them the GPU they deserve for their price range.

OpenGL wasn't updated for years. Making any work to port Games to Mac much more difficult.

With Apple working on its own GPU, and Metal 2 they finally have the groundwork to moving Mac Gaming forward. Of course that is if Apple decide to so.
It is implemented, the command line option is a -prune=<n>
Datestamp, manual entry into accounting software, file the hardcopy away with associated billing companies file for the fiscal year.
Excited to check this out. Have been looking for a viable replacement for Umano since they were acquired by Dropbox in 2015, but have not found anything comparable to their service.

I never pay for apps, but I ended up subscribing to Umano (yearly subscription). Here's why:

-----------------

1. Wide selection of interesting articles, esp. tech and lifestyle ones.

2. Great narrators. Sounds like you guys are already hard at work on this, so kudos there!

3. Value. Umano used a freemium model, and I think it worked really well since the extra features (offline downloads, customizable story intros, etc.) added value once you were hooked on the experience.

I see you guys are taking the "pay for it" approach, and my only concern there would be getting people hooked, esp. since the initial trial period is so short. Umano had time to become an indispensable part of my life (listening while driving, working out, etc., plus it became a super easy way to keep up with current events), and that motivated me to pay for it. Not sure I would have ended up doing so had I been completely locked out without paying first. Also, I liked being able to get a year's worth at a discount. Once again, would not have felt comfortable paying for an entire year up front had I not already been hooked.

-----------------

Just my $0.02. All the best!
Not sure about in the phone, but in the desktop versions, you can click the (i)/Secure icon to the left of the website to review/change your permissions for the site.

For mobile, it looks like you can hit the vertical menu button in the top right, then the (i) icon, then Site Settings...
Here are some scientifically valid answers that are more interesting.

* Restrict calories to 30% less than you want to eat. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19075044)

* Starve your father when he was a child. (https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,195...)

* Don't sit down very much. (http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2014/02/19/27946075...)

* Don't take Prilosec/Nexium/Prevecaid. (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/heartburn-drugs-proton-pump-inhi...)
> Pretty much every time DL is covered by media, there has to be some contrived comparison to human brains

Well, what we've done so far is emulate maybe 1 mm^3 of brain matter - some isolated, very specialized functional blocks in the greater architecture of the brain. They behave as expected - are experts on very narrow topics, but of course fail to integrate their functioning with a larger body of knowledge, because that body just isn't there (yet).

The strength of the human mind is that is has this profusion of little subject matter experts all over the place, covering an enormous array of topics - and then it has an intricate superstructure that integrates the outputs of these narrow expert machines, tweaks their functioning, even subtly alters their inputs, providing coherence to the global output according to the capabilities of the whole system.

We're still far from that complex high level architecture.
Mine as well. I know for a fact that my previous employer paid out nearly twice the raise I asked for just to the recruiter, and that's without factoring in the costs for having other employees run interviews instead of working or HR costs for bringing an employee onboard. Additionally
they have to pay market rate for the replacement employee which is all I wanted in the first place! It seems like a lot of these situations where employees leave for better pay could be a win-win if companies would give just give the employees market rates or something close to it then both the employee and the company would be better off in the end.

You can be 5% off of market or even 10% if its a nice place but once you go past that, do you really expect your employees to sit there and take it? I know my landlord's not gonna wait for me to get a raise before they raise my rent
Sounds like you've only worked for bad managers and companies, which admittedly isn't too hard to do in one's career.

There are employers that give the best of both worlds.
Ask HN: What are the worst cases of online advertising you have seen?
As part of a project I have been researching online advertising. Day-to-day I have an ad-blocker installed as well as disabling Javascript by default so when I installed a fresh version of Chrome and went to a popular photography blog [1] I was astonished to see the page never stop loading as the numerous adverts on site constantly refresh.

The New York Times ran a study on "The Cost of Mobile Ads" [2] in 2015 which analysed popular news mobile home pages comparing the amount of advertising vs. editorial content.

- What are the worst cases of online advertising you have seen?
- Did it make you install an ad-blocker?
- If not, why not?

As of posting current statistics for PhotographyBlog are:
19.7mins
11.5MB transferred
5677 requests

- [1] http://www.photographyblog.com/
- [2] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/01/business/cost-of-mobile-ads.html
I love that this is not just audio-narrating articles from some of my favourite magazines. I adore the Kevin Spacey-esque tone! What happens if some of these magazines start releasing their own audio version? I do remember that some Atlantic articles had this. Also, did you have to get permission from the magazines to audio-narrate their articles?
I think what you describe is common, if not just part of the way everything works. So, not a blind spot, but also not something to dwell on. The in-determinant nature of forecasting - especially with respect to revenue/profit estimation - is almost moot when you're trying to determine if a nascent company is going to be able to make 200M a year in 7 years time. That's why you see so many of the factors for venture funding following well worn qualitative pathways: Tons of users, market size, stickiness, monetization capability, founder grit etc...

They are proxies for expectations based on past experience, given the glut of quantitative measures that aren't strongly correlated.

In the end, you're playing in the unicorn league if you think you are.
None of these companies is anywhere close to a monopoly on food.

Cargill might be big at 100B+ revenue (global) per year but US food expenditures are 1.5T+ per year, so even a company as huge as Cargill is capturing < 10% of the US market. Hardly a monopoly.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-expenditures.asp...
trading systems are very difficult to model because there are more variable than you can imagine. So basically you are creating a model with less information from the domain than you rather need. But this is not the case in all domain.

With AlphaGo there are several things you have to consider. It is not only using deep learning it also uses monte carlo tree search, basically this algorithms is good at exploring search spaces like games. But the key factor in AlphaGo was deep learning evaluating the states.

What I want to say is that neural networks are not meant to explore but to discover patterns. It is something very different. They are very interesting because they work as our brains (discovering and fulfilling patterns), but they as bad in searching as us.
It's certainly good at being descriptive but it's still very focused on the reference style interface.

Which is fine of course, but it doesn't really help with the latter case as anything other than a secondary concern. That's great when your primary usage is as a reference but suffers the same problem as JSDoc/etc when it isn't.

But it's a better form of what it's doing, for sure.
Good old NYC.
His thesis statement is entirely misleading. He absolutely recommends it. The entire article reiterates several times how happy he was and continues to be that he passed up more secure opportunities again and again over the years.

Not sure why the clickbaity title was necessary.
Hello Fresh has improved a lot on this front in the 2 months we've subscribed. Individual meals are packed in paper bags. The aluminum insulation layer has been replaced with a biodegradable material packed in lightweight plastic. I believe they said recent improvements have reduced the size of a meal box by greater than 20%. It's still not perfect (the ice packs seem awfully wasteful, if unavoidable until refrigerated trucks become widespread), but it's dramatically better.
Blizzard is the only large gaming company that I can think of that never stopped releasing Mac games.
"People counting cash"

In some countries (I've seen it in Canada and Sweden) there are machines that deal with the change for you (this is separate from a self-check out machine). They either deal with just the coins or with notes+coins, without any cashier interference
If you want to stick with Azure, blob storage (+CDN if you want both HTTPS and a custom domain) works pretty well and is dirt cheap.
The Dictator's Handbook references more reliable and comprehensive research showing the anti-democratic effects of foreign aid. That said, the counterfactual (watching and waiting) risks anarchy. The World Bank was set up, in part, from the lessons of the Weimar Republic. It's a difficult debate that escapes easy answers.
So you're saying it's a team factor and a single dev can't get into that 200€/person/hour range?
Is there a legal / not crazy expensive way to buy humble bundle books and get them printed on standard 8.5x11, bound in a series of binders / duotangs / twine? I'm going to buy the bundle, but greatly prefer physical pages to reading on a screen.
Not just Amazon... almost all delivery services (pharmacy, google shopping express, etc)

The sole exception I found was amazingly, Safeway's grocery delivery service where the person showed up with a box, walked in, unloaded in my kitchen then took the box with him. Of course, you need to be present for that, but something equivalent for non-perishable delivery would be a huge sanity saver for me.
It's as good as your bandwidth, which means it won't be great for most Americans.
SurveyMonkey's Future Is Focused on One Word: Curiosity
I was going to offer him/her $7.01 an hour. Rats!
I could be wrong but lot of these shipping stores are franchises, so it probably depends on the owner.