skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The 'existential' issue with Slack, is not their growth rate or multiples ...

It's the fact that they don't necessarily have 'vendor lock in' - and substitution is easy. And it's an easy thing to copy.

It's designed for small teams, and small teams can switch to the 'next, cool thing' in a heartbeat.

At the end of the day it's just chat. That's it. There's nary anything special about it. They did a good job of it.

That said, brands to have sticking power, and if there is no reason to change then why?

They have some new MS execs, who might teach them the ways of 'sinking their claws in' :) and becoming incumbent.

I should add, the larger the company (even with small teams), the bigger the switching costs. After about 500 people, IT kind of becomes 'detached' from the people, and doing anything on one's own becomes harder, so tech becomes entrenched.

This company is the next 'IPO pony' the VC's are building up, hoping to push onto markets at high valuation to get a big bang.
> 15 dollar arbitrage between bitstamp and gox right now??? 15 dollar arbitrage between bitstamp and gox right now??? thats ridiculous, anyone know why?

> Because MtGox is a money black hole, absorbing all your money and refuse to pay back. The only way to exit is to buy bitcoins there and sent them elsewhere, this explains the consistent buying pressure there. An arbitrage is meaningless if your money cannot leave, right?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=273410.0

People including me saw the signs and exited.
I like this post. I always wonder why a fund that has a good thing going would let other people in. If the fund managers have their own money in the fund they probably can make more money through the fund than they can make with fees. So most funds and investment advice that go to the regular investor are probably not very good.
I view this like much of the rest of communications software (or even software in general). Over time, it tends to go to zero. It can be useful to compare it to video services or even personal messaging. In personal messaging, you have an insane amount of services like Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, GroupMe, Allo, Hangouts, iMessage, Signal, etc...

I could see something similar to Slack as a free, open source project. It could possibly develop out of something like Signal [https://signal.org/]. Making and supporting an open source solution can be a viable business too (e.g. CoreOS, Docker). I doubt that it would kill Slack either. It should be interesting to watch, and will benefit the end users as a whole through an improved Slack and/or a similar free option.
>The advice in the article works well for simple things. Simple things can, and should, be perfect.

That seems backwards, as the argument being put forwards is that UX is all about trading off a complex, options-rich interaction with a simple, options-poor interaction. So good UX delivers simple things. The hard work comes in the skilful reduction of a potentially complex interaction to a simpler one, and recognising that there are tradeoffs.
To add: it's 'Softbank'. They have so much money to invest ... they are looser with their cash I believe.
Something interesting

On their last raise @ $3.7b it was thought they were doing around $64m/year - so a 57x of revenue!

On this round they're raising @ $5b with $200m/yr - a ~25x of revenue valuation.

(1) http://www.businessinsider.com/thrive-leads-slacks-round-of-...
Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet officer who averted nuclear war, has died
It seems equivalent to ad blocking.
Facebook is certainly in trouble. But as for other entities, it's too early to say they were all foreign. I would not be surprised if a few Americans knew about this. Let them sweat and maybe turn each other in.
Great link! I found it very possible to read; I read it at least 2.5 times across multiple physical and digital copies of two editions. Turning the words into actions is the hard part for me. Surely this is the format that's going to work :)
Are "hostile" and "adversarial" the right words for the point you're trying to make? Cryptocurrencies are powerful, and they offer no recourse in case of user error. You might say the same of a chainsaw or a nail gun, but nobody would call them "hostile" or "adversarial."
XNU uses a heavily modified Mach 3.0, which is a microkernel, but it doesn't use it as a microkernel, and never has.

In XNU, things like file systems, graphics and device drivers are all running in kernel mode, in the same address space as the kernel. The Windows kernel has the same design -- it's designed as a microkernel, with separate modules internally that communicate via a form of IPC, but everything is running in one process (as opposed to a real microkernel architecture where file systems etc. are userland processes).

With XNU, Apple forked Mach 3.0 and have been making a lot of changes to it over the years, even though Mach itself has progressed since then. On the other hand, XNU inherited Mach's high syscall overhead (considerably higher than Linux), and to my knowledge Apple has moved a lot of stuff into ordinary syscalls rather than Mach messages to remove this overhead.

Edit: Interestingly, around the time before Leopard, when Darwin was still a thing, there was a research project called Darbat [1] that tried to supplant parts of Mach with L4, a more modern microkernel, and actually run XNU as a userland process on top of it. Unfortunately, nothing came of that project.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/staff/2006/06/4407/
An auto-updating OS doesn't really help you with web application vulnerabilities. Even something like Clair would be unlikely to help - they likely knew about the numerous struts vulnerabilities they faced and simply chose not to care (and prioritize other more exciting business prospects - like selling identity theft protection)
I wouldn't call it a slippery slope so much as events precipitating the situation. The revolt in 1857 led to the dissolution of the East India Company and a formal takeover of India by the British government [1]. The British Raj lasted almost a century and could have lasted longer had the British Army and economy not been so weakened by WWII.

It will be interesting to see what happens should a country attempt to seize Chinese assets en masse. The PRC is not known for its lack of ability in the Great Game. We are still decades away from the circumstances that allowed for decolonisation movements in the mid-20th century to be successful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_India_Act_1858
IBM is all marketing
As of iOS 11 and macOS 10.13 Safari does support WebRTC and streaming API. And I don't see them supporting service workers any time soon because that's a stupid fucking idea.
All available evidence suggests that cryonics is likely pseudoscience in theory and certainly pseudoscience in practice. Irreversible brain damage occurs within seconds (and total brain death within minutes) of oxygen deprivation, and freezing cell tissue in water ice permanently destroys it.
How to Kill a Possum
Bonfire – The new group video chat app from Facebook (Houseparty clone)
ETH Address: 0xA6ea58E8CAecfCc47DC8E57551d79748484D19bA
Microsoft already has Microsoft Teams which works well and is included in Office 365 now:

https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat...
The plans exist. Google Fi is $20/month with unlimited calls and texts but metered data. You can also buy prepaid minutes and data from several carriers with no monthly fee, you just pay for it as you use it, but then you're paying for minutes as well as data.
Equifax data hack is spreading around the world
That’s why I use an iPhone. Have you seen how mad advertisers are at Apple, makes me laugh.
they do have the cash.

but, who or what gives Google the capability to write a new OS? (e.g. are they currently employing a group of highly experienced, top-notch OS engineers? have they formed these engineers into an effective, efficient team? etc.)
Is it Linux?
Its about time Facebook faced the music.

The giant tech companies have enjoyed eye-watering revenues thanks to the magic of network effects and the dopamine boost that social networking gives the human brain.

By keeping their support/human costs low, they've delivered massive profits.

Now we start to see the pushback. For Google, it was Europe's right to be forgotten.

Now for Facebook, its the concept that its simply not acceptable to allow hostile foreigners to use your platform to disrupt political debate.

Its time these guys paid their way. Their profits have always been fuelled by very deliberately staying away from this hard stuff. That can't go on.
Arguably the main focus Chinese economic policy over the past year or so has been to close loopholes in the existing (strict) controls to prevent capital from leaving the country. The RE markets aren't collapsing.
Taking money from a foreign entity to run political ads is against the law.
It is not true that they mainly (or even significantly) employ chinese on Australian Farms - these farms are generally managed by the previous owners or managers and staffed by Australians, with australian Agronomists. In actual fact, very little changes on a day to day basis, except there is more funds available for infrastructure and capital goods purchase (and property values are driven up).

Which, when you think about it, makes the best managerial sense - What the hell is a chinese person going to do coming to australia and farming - they don't know the conditions, they don't know the land - that's a quick way to destroy all the value they hope to create. Local know-how is essential in agriculture. + they wouldn't be able to get enough on 457's to come in and run it even if they wanted to import all their workers.

Source: Australian, from a farm, neighbouring farms have been purchased by chinese buyers
There's one model that guarantees income: the subscription model.
Finally Bringing Auto Repair into the Digital Age
Cash is oxygen. It gives startups time and options. Startups are fragile, so those are great things to have on hand.

The question is whether money can be raised at acceptable terms. Uber had a lot of leverage because everyone wanted to invest in Uber.
Whether the user knows it or not, there is still software running on the device that is working in the interests of the vendor and/or the DRMed content creator and against the interests of the user. Yes, most users don't care, but some do. If you were the seller of a hypothetical restricted Fuchsia device, you might not lose any sleep over the users that care. As the potential buyer of the device, I will take user freedom into consideration and I will criticise the device if it's not up to my standards.

Also, users don't care about these restrictions until they do. The user might be completely unaware that there are restrictions on what they can do with the device before they decide to install something like a system-wide ad-blocker (which are becoming more popular) or maybe an app that can download YouTube videos.
Yeah, that's one of two main things I come back to each time I consider this from outside the USA. Hacking and influencing is at least a relatively bloodless way to secure the result you want, and, for the most part, the US population voted the way they did. Every Trump failing was on full show and repeated over and over by the media and people voted for him regardless. Maybe Russia tipped things in his favour, but it's not like it was from 30% to 51%.
Seems cool that you can pass “handles” to resources like network connections between processes. That could definitely make some server software easier to architect.
PST File Size Improvements and Enhanced Contacts Retrieval from Exchange Server
Google debuts Tez, a mobile payments app for India
> don't use their site

Or, use their site, but the end user always dictate the code that runs on their own machine. If the server don't wish for a user to skimp the mining, make them submit the proof of work result first, then serve the content.
Why do users have to understand root to benefit?

Users don't understand what a CAN bus is, but open access to CAN buses is better for anyone who needs to maintain a car.
I didn't say "copyright law and morality are unrelated." Everything is related to morality at some level, so I don't think it adds anything interesting to say that copyright is either related or unrelated to morality in that roundabout way.

I said "Copyright is not about morality." Copyright is about promoting creativity first and foremost. It has zero moral value apart from whatever starlight it might reflect from the more fundamental value of creativity when it's in the right point along its orbit (when it works effectively).

Suppose you're building a startup to help poor people. That's obviously about morality. But how about your choice of javascript framework? You just use whatever floats your MVP without torturing your devs too much. And as soon as it outlives its usefulness, you can throw it away without a second thought and there's nothing morality has to say about it.
Bitcoin has smart contracts. That's what people usually don't understand about ETH - its much more of an extension of Bitcoin and ColoredCoins than most people can ever realize. In fact this article shows exactly in what way this extension came up. Ethereum's history in two steps: 1) try to generalise Mastercoin 2) the same on its own blockchain. Grasping the internals of Bitcoin and its smart contracts capabilities is almost an requirement to understand ETH. Actually its very similar to going from assembly to a higher level language.

I worked on a Bitcoin project which in a strange turn of events led to Nick Szabo becoming an advisor there. But the limitations of Bitcoin are so large that all the attempts failed - Counterparty and Mastercoin were clearly never as succesfull as ETH for very good reasons.
Since the article doesn't specify what types of professions were studied, thus I am skeptical of its conclusion. While this ~3hr/day productivity might be true for typical corporate/office workers, but they make up only a small percentage of the total work force! What about the productivity of bus drivers, doctors, cooks, masons, mechanics? Somehow I think that the average roofer doesn't spend ~2hrs/work day reading social media and news websites.
Yeah but when you're using a chainsaw there is no one who is attempting to weight the machine in a certain direction potentially putting you in danger. And there is no one with an incentive to do so.
I've spent probably $10k the past two years on Alibaba.
I find their credit card processing is all over the place with declines or Alibaba themselves blocking the cards (which have been used before). Their solution is always asking you to send in validation paperwork (photo id, passport, picture of the card, etc.), which of course is sketchy.

All in, the products have always arrived close to as described. That said, I've only dealt with high reputation sellers and I've seen others locally burned pretty badly.

If I were selling anything consumable such as soap, i'd really want a good test on the composition to make sure I wasn't importing something that would cause serious harm down the road.
I agree. 8-12x ARR seems to be the standard multiplier for valuation of a SaaS startup. This is also growing ~100% YoY at this scale. That being said, 25x seems very bullish. Even 20x kind of jumps off the page to me. Keep in mind, it's also the SaaS darling in the valley right now, so it's gonna get a bump.
Can you explain how?
Is Online Advertising Worthless?
"I disagree...When I can choose my mechanic, I own it."

I think we are in agreement here. You don't personally need know everything about everything you own. But someone needs to know enough about it that you can use their expertise or learn from them if you care to.

The myth is that it's about who knows -- the right laws (or the right consumer pressure) will open up the right information, and freedom will supposedly follow. That's a minor factor, sure, but I believe it's more of a myth.

The real thing holding us back is that nobody understands these complex software stacks, we are just building them bigger and bigger and understanding them less and less.
What is Dynamodb used for internally? Looks like it's being used for fulfillment and checkout as well.

Is Amazon entirely based out of Dynamodb nosql ?
If longbets.org was really serious about long-term bets, it wouldn't be restricting years to only 5 digits. Haven't they heard of the Y100K problem?
i mostly agree. as a mere mortal android app programmer, i feel a significant amount of pain when i build apps using the android SDK and the standard set of tools. there's a lot of weirdness, confusion, unexpected behavior, anemic documentation and irregularity. (it's getting better, but not fast.)

i guess Google's Fuchsia push is motivated by some other, internal concerns.
I'm glad other people perceived the delays and realized they were unacceptable and indicative of something bad as well as bad management / development practices.

Some people have tried telling me in the past that I'm full of shit for pointing out the delays and what they meant. I moved my coin away about a month or so before the big hack.

Stay sharp, friend.
Why would you ever free an object if something else might be pointing at it?
Google generalises units based on region
> If global warming was just a problem of waste heat, we could shut everything off and things would be back to normal in a few days.

Regardless of cause, the law of conservation of energy says otherwise. Also this isn't the type of law that congress can change.
Being anti-user isn't about providing an overwhelming value to all users of a product, but to make sure that no user ever gets stuck with no way out.

Opera v12 is a great example of that. There is no browser with its feature-set. In purely objective terms all other browsers are strictly inferior when it comes to usability and range of features outside the web rendering core. It also provides a number of data storage features. Now Opera ASA has given up on it, and because it's closed sourced not even small things like changing SSL ciphers can be fixed.

So millions of users were forced to switched to worse alternatives, and some were forced to manually extract their data.

The kick in the butt about this: There's a leak of the source code on the internet, but collaboration on it is nigh-impossible because any site hosting it is breaking copyright law. This despite Opera v12, with the Presto engine, being 100% and entirely abandoned and with the sale of the "Opera Browser" to a chinese malware company, there not even being any way for the public to know who actually owns the rights to v12.
I strongly disagree. Comparing Coinbase to MtGox is insane. For starters MtGox had their US bank accounts seized a year prior to the company imploding.
They’re mining Monero.
That problem is actually simple to solve. You append new versions until you hit some threshold, at which point you actually compact/GC. You don't have a 1:1 mapping. Getting the best performance requires careful tuning, but reducing erase count by a large factor is quite straightforward.
You know, you could just mute them all except one. That's what I do - only #engineering and private messages are unmuted.
Tried the Chrome extension, but it just toggles between "Enable No Coin" and "Unpause No Coin." I didn't disable it, but I have to enable it? Repeatedly? And I didn't pause it, so why would I be unpausing it? Where do I look if I merely want to find out whether it is currently 1) enabled and/or 2) paused? And how do I toggle either or both of those? Does it need to be this complicated?
The chat room isn't what's worth a billion dollars. The fact that they basically own the productivity chat market is.
Well, I would imagine their focus isn't so much automation so much as congestion. While automating X amount of cars will reduce congestion a little, a mass transit system (automated as it may be) would reduce congestion significantly.

So, unless google has been testing high capacity transit vehicles, 4-person max vehicles aren't what MV is excited about.
Sure, the same as what prevents anybody from single handedly moving the price of any asset. Liquidity.
Yeah, and there are sites which will prevent you from viewing their content if you have an ad blocker enabled. That's their prerogative.
You're not wrong - this is pretty cringeworthy.
Very cool, thanks for the reference!
Seems to work for me, hurricane or not.
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2017/09/17/kim-nilsson-...

Pretty sure they got the guy behind a lot of the thefts when they arrested that BTC-e guy earlier this year.
"Install kubernetes in 15 minutes or less -> bare metal" leads to this:

https://coreos.com/tectonic/docs/latest/install/bare-metal/r...

There are over 15 non-trivial subtasks there (counting "foo and bar" under one bullet as two subtasks). Worse, this is just prerequisites for before the actual installation!

I really want something like what CoreOS claims to be to exist, but always feel like the victim of some inside joke when I actually try to install it.

Does anyone know of any alternatives that can be setup in a matter of hours and not days?
Bush II is still easily the worst president of the last 100 years, at least. Trump has yet to come close to the Iraq disaster, though he has at least 3 more years so who knows. Obama wasn't bad but his problem was that he governed as if the country were not in decline. He was a prosperous times president when we needed a turnaround artist.
They should just bring back Google Wave.
Off topic, but regards "VR with Eye Tracking [...] Imagine this technology being used in a VR Silent Hill or Resident Evil. You put the headset on and start playing. You see something move in your peripheral vision, but by the time your eyes have saccaded, it’s gone. No matter how hard you try, you can’t get a good look at it. With only hints and sounds to go on, your imagination fills in the rest. [] Such a game would be –without a doubt– the scariest game ever. I can’t wait to play it."[1]

My fuzzy recollection is there was a CAVE setup (at siggraph? some years back) which used a head-mounted backwards-facing tracking camera, and the hemisphere behind you was filled with tracking markers. So if you quickly turned your head, out of the corner of your eye... apparently it created "something is behind me!" creepiness.

There's also a VR game prototype that mutates the world behind you when you are facing away. "Wait, was that chair there before?" It's disturbing.

The Shadertoy Fovea detector[2] illustrates how narrow your high-res fovea is.

[1] https://geoff.greer.fm/2016/05/14/interesting-tech-that-is-j... [2] https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dsXzM
> but alike IM they also just don't respond sometimes

Don’t people “just not respond” even more with email? Maybe I’m an outlier but I probably reply to less than 50% of things that come into my email.

And if you need a realtime convo, come tap me on the shoulder or schedule a time to talk. That’s the main benefit of slack (and email): async communication. Async is good.
That's the easy part. The hard part is scaling, marketing, and building a business/platform around the product so that you take it worldwide.

Several people have built Slack clones and there's even multiple open source projects out there. Building a company and business at a scale like Slack is the incredibly difficult part and nobody has managed to replicate that.
All crypto on Coinbase is insured, according to:

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/portal/articles/166237...

This counts for a lot IMO. Of course there are still questions of whether and how the insurance comes through. But it's a big step to make such a declaration, and the implications on security are significant.
Is there a good overview of the types of wallets, their architecture and evolution?

As someone trying to get into blockchain stuff, this is kinda wild.

Also, what exactly is a wallet? If the coins are really just outputs in a hashed block how do you 'access' them?
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