skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
(Disclosure: I’m the co-founder & CEO of Tesorio, YC S15)

Awesome discussion. Agreed that this is very tough to just outsource, paying you for your services is the final step in the customer experience. CFOs and even sales or customer success teams want to treat customers very carefully in a personalized way.

Sending out automated reminder emails is called ‘dunning’ and most accounting tools will do this for you automatically. But as people mentioned, if you can’t really exert pressure, how do you get someone to pay? It’s similar to sending spammy sales emails vs. personalized messages that will get someone’s attention. Also, most big companies will just ignore your late fees.

We’ve found that the best teams at this manage their relationships and they know every last detail about the person who actually cuts the check at their client. We’re actually currently tackling collections from another perspective - we basically built a product that combines the best parts of sales CRM and customer engagement tools.

The way to get the CFOs to buy though is to help them with their cash forecasts. A good collections tool is an A/B testing machine that lets you capture information from the folks doing the collections so the CFO’s team can create more accurate forecasts.

Our website showcases our active products (Forecasting, Forex, & Analytics), but we’re currently in Beta with the Collections tool. Would love to show it to you and get your feedback. My email: carlos[at]tesorio.com
I give the guy credit for at least admitting his point of view, disgusting as it is. We can down-vote him on HN and wish extinction upon his mindset, but the scary reality is, at least in the U.S. that his mindset is now spreading, after a long period of time where it was declining.

It's not enough to hope that it's extinguished--you have to actively fight it.
Musical.ly
That is technically correct, the best kind of correct!

Except any department in any hospital or insurer that welcomes you to do research can make that de-identified data available to you with a simple contract.

How do you think college freshmen get in the door to work on research with physicians?

No, it’s not public, but it’s trivially accessible.
So what you're really saying is that it's about culture. And that class is very highly correlated to culture
If one prefers to use vim as a pager for psql, try this:

https://unencumberedbyfacts.com/2016/01/04/psql-vim-happy-fa...

I've been using it for a few months, and it works great for me.
Ask HN: What are some things we could build to make housing more affordable?
Want Better Pay? Learn to Sit in Front of a Computer
I don’t like the overall goals of the bill, but both the 401k change and the tuition reimbursement tax are even more objectionable, simply for being dishonest.

The 401k tax has precisely nothing to do with building a better tax code. It’s about capturing taxes on retirement savings now rather than later to make the bill look like it comes closer to paying for itself.

Similar to the tuition benefit tax. It’s a pure accounting trick. Sure, on paper there’s a ton of new revenue you’re now going to get, but no one is actually going to pay it. Grad students are broke! There’s not some untapped source of revenue there.
I often wonder why they don't air these videos at peak hour, prefixed with a "you're about to see some bullshit - call your representatives" warning. It's better to fight this kind of public enemy on an open field.
tl;dr "people lived through these times and employed their coping strategies – they selectively preserved aspects of their culture and rejected others"

Another example that has been on the front page a lot recently is the Romans. The academics moved from the western capital (Rome) to the eastern capital (Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul). That's like saying if California got bombed, people would move over to New York. Then after 1000 years, the eastern capital was invaded, so they moved back to Rome and started the "Renaissance". The idea that the civilisation fell and rebuilt is a western bias.

Right now we live in a time where communists in China tried to destroy thousands of years of history. Most of the valuable items were taken to Taiwan though, and are preserved in the National Palace Museum.

There are a few empires that destroyed everything in their path (e.g. Genghis Khan), but most of them integrated conquered empires into their own.

"Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers." - Alexander the Great
The point though is that companies act to maximize 'user engagement', a goal which may be at odds with what users actually want to get out of a product or service. Whatever they can do to get just 5% more views or clicks or time on sight is 5% more ad revenue for their investors. Nevermind if that 5% comes from time I'd rather been spending elsewhere and will end up regretting. They incorporate design choices that cause this, whether by autoplaying the next video, implementing a continuous feed, all while controlling exactly how much content they need to show before you finally get sick of it. They are stealing the surplus the promised you.

And suppose you are of psychological steel. Should those who aren't still be exploited? There are entire industries and schools of design whose goal it is to extract as much money as possible from users, take slot machine design for example. (I'd definitely recommend looking up the work of Natasha Schull). Do you consider that practice immoral? Nir's existence is a testament to the fact that product designers use similar techniques
I work on a cross platform team, i.e. Linux, macOS and sometimes WIndows. Zoom did us well, but then Slack calls appeared and its almost entirely replaced our usage. It works well, no complaints.
It's not trivially accessible. It's not impossible, but far from trivial. Startups like Tempus are doing it but I doubt it's trivial for just any startup to get that data
Multiple language servers supporting multiple languages, each able to communicate over something more than the C ABI.

Meaning if your language's compiler and tooling are self hosted, you can write the plug-in in that language and leverage the very tooling used at build/runtime.

In other words, you can choose the right tool for the job. One that already exists and is tested, stable, and full featured. Or, you could rewrite everything in C or something that speaks it, run them all in the same process, meaning one bad plug-in brings the whole thing down.

And if you have to reimplement, that ups the chance that your version will behave subtly different than the real thing.
Asterisk [0] and a combination of SIP soft phones and Polycom physical hardware.

[0] https://www.asterisk.org
Can deep learning OCR not help with this?
It's always about trade-offs. Citus has ACID transactions within nodes, and ACD transactions across nodes. It does not have distributed snapshot isolation, but that means it also avoids the latency and concurrency penalties that come with distributed snapshot isolation.

Because clients talk to Citus using the synchronous postgres protocol, latency is one of the most important factors in performance. A single connection can never do more than 1/latency transactions per second. While you could use more connections, that is often complex, not always possible (e.g. long transaction blocks), and also comes with a significant performance penalty (fewer prepared statements, high SSL overhead, ...). It's important to optimise for latency.

We find the Citus transaction model is sufficient for most purposes. If you think of the typical balance transfer example, then there is no way to double spend or overspend. Distributed transactions are atomic and locks in postgres will serialise distributed transactions that update the same rows and ensure constraints are preserved. Importantly, Citus has distributed deadlock detection, which allows generous concurrency at almost no cost to the application (apart from maybe having to reorder transaction blocks).

Postgres supports different modes of replication, including synchronous replication to avoid losing any data on node failure. Many users actually prefer asynchronous replication, to avoid the extra round-trip and the broader performance implications that would have. It's also the reason we use streaming replication over other replication mechanisms that might give higher availability. Streaming replication supports higher concurrency and thus gives better throughput.

At the end of the day, people use Citus because a single node postgres (or MySQL) database is not performant enough to keep up with their workload. Performance is key. Citus is not a silver bullet for every postgres performance problem, but it has two particular strengths:

Minimal pain scaling out for multi-tenant applications that can shard by tenant.

- Any SQL query is supported when filtering by partition column, including CTEs, window functions, complex joins, etc,
- N times more CPU, memory and I/O bandwidth to process queries, and 1/N as much data to read
- High throughput, low-latency transactions, including UPDATE/DELETE with subqueries
- Citus Warp can do live migration from postgres (e.g. RDS) using logical decoding
- Major ORMs are supported after small data model changes

Superpowers for real-time analytics apps (e.g. dashboard).

- Bulk loading, up to millions of rows/sec
- Massively parallel SQL with subqueries containing outer joins, lateral joins, etc. across all shards when joining by partition column
- Massively parallel roll-ups (again with joins) using INSERT...SELECT
- Massively parallel DELETE and UPDATE
- Integration with other Postgres extensions, such as HLL, PostGIS, pg_partman
- Advanced index types, including GIN, GiST, partial indexes
- Table partitioning (for bulk delete, faster scans)

Citus has a laser-sharp focus on addressing these use cases and makes certain trade-offs because of that.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
...that link is not to google cloud vision
Appear.in is great, but I don't think it's good enough for more than 5 people (which is what the poster is asking about) unless everybody's bandwidth is great.
When max profits means max attention from users this will naturally get public companies like FB to craft products this way
Good simulation, I guess...
ReasonReact 0.3.0 – Power Children
You haven't been manipulated into buying an umbrella at all, because deciding you'd rather stay dry than wet is a straightforward choice; a product that offers you that choice is a straightforward product which provides a tangible service.

To be manipulated, you'd have to exposed to a constant stream of ads telling you how wonderful umbrellas are and what an unattractive loser you are for not owning one; how desirable people with high status use exclusive umbrellas while most people get by under a wet newspaper; and how you should buy a new umbrella every year because they're constantly improving, and this year's umbrella already has more a billion users worldwide and offers 23% more anti-rain features thanks to the exclusive Umbrella Corporation[tm] lifestyle eco-system. (And now here's a video of attractive people smiling, and of a world-famous umbrella designer talking earnestly about engineering, design, and craftsmanship.)

You'd also see paid testimonials and likes on social media sites. They'd appear to be spontaneous and sincere praise, but in fact they'd be factory farmed and produced to order by unhappy people working in open plan offices paid so little they can barely afford the rent.

And you'd have an umbrella that only worked reliably some of the time, so you'd have to keep considering the purchase of an improved model - in the vain hope you could finally end your constant nagging frustration with umbrella technology.

Worst of all, you'd believe you were making a straightforward umbrella-buying decision entirely on your own initiative, using perfectly objective and rational criteria.
By not providing the source code. That doesn't preclude decompilation, but that's just not the same thing.
Sorry, as a Javascript developer, my understanding of the Objects in Java is crude at best, so I may not have made a lot of sense here.
You're kidding, right?

This is a Microsoft product. Microsoft have their own database. What value is it to them to help people continue using competitor's products?

Besides, it's not like Postgres doesn't have plenty of GUI tools already:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Community_Guide_to_PostgreS...
Having read a small amount of theology[1], I speculate that the broad and sometimes conflicting Christian perspectives throughout history make it difficult for the layperson to really grasp "true" Christianity (if there is such a thing.) Even going from say, St. Augustine to Kierkegaard, there's noticeable shifts in thought. I think the burden of proof squarely lies in advocates of Christianity, not the other way around.

[1] It's also been many years since I last touched the subject.
What would you suggest here? It wasn’t even close to a majority.
"The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" was posted here about a month ago. http://www.zoon.cc/stupid/

It defines stupidity in an interesting way:

> A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The point is that if someone is doing something that's detrimental to others, it's a mistake to assume that they must be getting some kind of advantage by their actions. Making life a little worse for themselves and others might just be their way of interacting with the world.

I don't know if that descrbes Pai. He might actually be getting a significant personal advantage for what he's doing. I just think we should consider the possibility that the things he's doing don't have a rational reason.
Google Has Picked an Answer for You–Too Bad It’s Often Wrong
ORM is the Vietnam of computer science.
An overview would be awesome: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-operations-studio/w...
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I feel like the last ditch effort is to go a step further. This may not be actually possible but if we could identify the leaders of the companies and people in the government that are for a restricted internet, blacking out their access as a form of ransom may be the only thing that works. We're to the point of dealing with seemingly hostile entities and the passive, yet legal approaches are clearly not working at all. We're dealing with people that are either too ignorant or too complacent to see what a colossal fuck up this is and it's possible even spelling out the entirety of the impending disaster isn't enough to get them to do the right thing.
But... Is this not already a service offered by the financial industry for an extremely long time? What makes this a start-up?
(Hint: Gemnasium founder here)
If you like this feature, you may want to try https://gemnasium.com then. We have a lot more advisories in db, for Java, Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript. Please feel free if you have any question, I’ll be glad to help!
Traditional Catholic here, former seminarian in a traditional seminary.

>How can someone reject Christianity when they haven't done the due diligence of looking at __primary sources__ for the Christian position?

Intellectual laziness. They just repeat what they see on reddit or sound-bytes they've heard from others who have no idea what they're talking about.

If they want to know what Christianity truly teaches have them read St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. Augustine, The Council of Nicaea, The Council of Jerusalem, The Council of Trent, Cornelius a Lapide commentary, Haydock Commentary, the Catena Aurea, the Latin and Greek fathers.

It is amazing how incredibly prideful and intellectually dishonest people are. If they took even 20-30 hrs of historical and theological study of what the Church always believed before the Protestant revolt, they would quickly realize that they know next to nothing about Christianity or History in general.
Milksnake
Thanks for that reminder. I've been using Acme for years, but I never figured out SREs.
re: the "Modern Firefighting" idea. I wonder if anyone has ever analyzed the cost / benefit of preventative fire fighting. ie. deploying moisture to dry areas. You wouldn't need to dump buckets at a time. Instead more like a mist you get at those water parks in Orlando FL.

Something like this, but attached to a helicopter / airplane flying over dry areas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpSMRVngiQI

In a lot of cases you probably could source the water from wells you would dig on an ad-hoc basis on those dry lands instead of from nearby water sources.
High-Performance Clojure Compiler Library Targeting the Common Language Runtime
I don't think that virtualized grid is an good idea for something that is primarily meant as GUI for SQL database that implicitly exposes the SQL to user.
This is something people want. With the right approach you could actually improve the happiness of hundreds of millions of people. The existing market is tremendously huge.
Don't you think it's about time we removed all the unnessecary independent voices from media so we can stop confusing people? The Russians and Chinese are doing it; we need to catch up - we've got to have unity in our messages. /Sarcasm
Blog posts start conversations.
Freeconferencecall.com
I am surprised that you honestly can't tell. I find this sincere. There are a few such things on the list, like modern firefighting and renewable energy from engineering microbes. So if we aren't cherry-picking, it's a varied list.

Moreover, it isn't always as easy to say what is the biggest idea. If we truly learned to communicate with animals, I can see that having the potential to radically decrease suffering in the world for example.

Instead of complaining some people's ideas aren't good enough enough, see it as a challenge to publish some of your own, you got some good problems there.

I actually loved this list and article, and what I like the most about it was the unpretentiousness of actually proposing real ideas, versus saying something that would sound admirable, but actually not really be an idea.
But absence of spring makes their usage even more convenietnt.
There are bidet-like sprayers for spraying poop off of cloth nappies into the toilet[1]. There are also similar actual bidet attachments for toilets for adults[2]. I was thinking you could almost do the same thing as those and just make it smaller and low pressure.

[1] e.g. https://www.amazon.com/SmarterFresh-Diaper-Sprayer-Premium-S...

[2] e.g. https://www.amazon.com/RinseWorks-Certified-Warranty-Pressur...
Have you seen pgAdmin III? You are not doing any sort of action in that tool within 30 seconds. Worst of all, it's pre-Electron terrible, where they run a local webserver that is probably leaking your database secrets to every local app.
Fisker: electric car battery with “500 miles range and 1 min charging”
I set one up on Twilio for an employer, cost is slightly more than the ~$1/month per DID with minutes charges. It's a small conference with an unchanging set of attendees so I just have it protected with a static pin.

I am in the process of setting up FusionPBX somewhere else at the moment, which I am hosting on a ~$7 a month VPS (lunanode.com). This will support all phone functions for this organisation, and also offer conference calling. PSTN trunking through voip.ms. Monthly cost is slightly more than $12 (including charges for ~5 DIDs and minutes).

> and what website do you use to quickly find a good breakdown of services for a given problem?

I make heavy use of AlternativeTo.net.
This is the basis of perhaps one of the most disturbing paintings of Goya, Saturn Devouring His Son:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/82/Fr...

It is also worth recalling that many Christians, myself included, believe that in the Eucharist we are devouring The Son.

It is a strange world we live in.
You might want to check out some of the criticism advanced by people such as Tristan Harris on the tension between the user behaviors that tech companies optimize their product design, and the goals users hope to accomplish through their use. I do in some ways support Nir in that we should learn how to harness these types of technologies for our own good, to 'supercharge' our ability to accomplish what we want, but I do not trust any company dependent on ad-revenue (or backed by Wall Street in general) to help with that.

I'd also recommend checking out The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu and Addiction by Design by Natasha Schull for background on the history of the commodification of attention and of the
To be the boring voice here... Skype for Business.

The calls themselves are fine, but the applications are garbage. I'd advise against the platform.

Haven't tried MS Teams yet.
There is no such thing as "the parable interpretation" of the bible and "the literal interpretation" of the bible.

Here is a passage from a truly fascinating Christian author from the 2nd century. He starts by saying "we shall be told that these are fictions, no better than fables, like the rest of the strange stories about Jesus." (funny how arguments against Christianity haven't changed for 2000 years)

Origen's reply is this:

Our answer is that to reconstruct almost any historical scene, even if true, so as to give a vivid impression of what actually occurred, is exceedingly difficult, and sometimes impossible. Suppose some one to assert that there never was a Trojan war, mainly on the ground that the impossible story of a certain Achilles being the son of a sea goddess Thetis and a man Peleus is mixed up with it; or that Sarpedon was the son of Zeus, or Ascalaphus and Ialmenus sons of Ares; or that Aeneas was Aphrodite's son: how could we dispose of such an objection? Should we not be very hard pressed to explain the strange blending of a fiction with the universal |74 belief that there was war between Greeks and Trojans at Troy? Or let us suppose some one to doubt the story of Oedipus and Jocaste, and of their sons Eteocles and Polynices, because that a sort of half-woman, the Sphinx, is mixed up with the story; how should we clear up the difficulty? Well, the prudent reader of the narratives, who wishes to guard against deception, will use his own judgment as to what he will allow to be historical, and what he will regard as figurative; he will try to discover what the writers meant by inventing such stories; and to some things he will refuse his assent on the ground that they were recorded to gratify certain persons. And this we have premised, having in view the history of Jesus as a whole contained in the Gospels; for we do not invite intelligent readers to a bare unreasoning faith, but we wish to show that future readers will have to exercise prudence, and make careful inquiry, and, so to speak, penetrate the very heart of the writers, if the exact purport of every passage is to be discovered. -- Philokalia of Origen CHAP. XV. 15
Google Hangouts has always worked well for me and it's free. I'm curious why the paid alternatives are better.
Is it really right to call him a philosopher? I would more fairly consider him a "writer", in the vein of (though nothing like) a GK Chesterton -- capable of opining on philosophical topics but with none of the rigour or fairness expected of an actual philosopher.
To me, Tom Clancy was a visionary. He predicted 9/11 seven years before it happened. He did this by writing a fictional story (Debt of Honor) about a pilot that uses his plane as a weapon to attack a joint session of Congress. This warned us about the risk of passenger jets being used as giant missiles. It's not his fault we didn't pay attention.