skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If the PR firm doesn't get it, chances are that your customers won't get it. I'd personally spend a good amount of money to work on your core messages and brand.

After that, advertising is one way to go if you have a clear = small market that you want to attack first (unclear from your comment, you say "anyone with spreadsheet skills")

Finally, you could invest in blog posts/tutorials to showcase how your SaaS can solve problems in different domains. I find this very useful because if you try to write a 3 steps tutorial and you find out it's 10 pages long, then you may be encouraged to simplify your product from a "new user experience" point of view.
Books-a-Million, another large bookstore chain
The blockchain isn't as radical as you want it to be
Ask HN: What is your current analytics setup?
Recently I have been looking for analytics for the upcoming project of mine. While Google Analytics seems like a great product I want to put my money where my mouth is (I ruthlessly block all trackers, GA being one of them). My current solution is GoAccess for the server-side analytics + manual log reading. What do you use for analytics?
I really think that all of you who are salivating at the prospect of the GDPR destroying FB should prepare yourself for disappointment. The intent behind the law might be good, but it's unlikely to accomplish what you want it to.

1. It's a bad law, because it's so overly broad and vague that it's going to be impossible to be fully compliant. For example, an EU resident hits your server while they're on vacation in Australia. You've stored analytics, IP addresses, etc. Congrats, you're now in violation. That's the tip of the iceberg. The law also broadly contradicts loads of other laws about how data must be retained for legal and compliance purposes. So now that everyone is breaking this law, regulators are free to just decide who they want to punish and how much. That's incredibly damaging to the fundamental idea of the rule of law.

2. It sets a really bad precedent regarding jurisdiction and the internet. So now any jurisdiction in the world can declare that if you do something they don't like that even remotely affects them, you owe them whatever they want. What if some oppressive regime passes a law that if your website is shown to one of their citizens and doesn't have a message praising their leader, you owe them 100% of your global revenue in perpetuity. Why not? You've violated their laws regarding behavior towards their citizens!

3. As item #2 gets at, countries can pass whatever laws they want, but they're limited by their ability to enforce those laws. If the EU gets overly broad and punitive here (as I'd argue they have), then companies will either just leave, or shift their digital operations to jurisdictions where courts can't enforce those laws.

Ultimately, I think that the realistic path here is that Google and Facebook will fundamentally change almost nothing. The user experience will just get worse, because we'll have to constantly be agreeing to a long list of terms about how our data will be used, etc, etc. And people will just agree and move on. Look at the cookie thing. Yes, I know you think it's different this time because of X, Y, and Z, but I'm skeptical. We'll see.

Regardless, the idea that we're suddenly going to live in a new golden age of digital privacy because the GDPR has good intentions is laughable.
Sure, I guess
I've seriously contemplated a roll-your-own "dumb phone" solution not only for myself but also for my mother and in-laws (they're all in their 70s). An Adafruit Fona would provide all of the telephonic functionality I'd care about, and then it's just a matter of choice regarding microcontroller, display, etc.
Syncthing is pretty nice. It's not a filesystem, and it doesn't deal with conflicts particularly well, but it's as close to a cross-platform, distributed solution that "just works" as I've been able to find.
Ask HN: Would you pay to have tamper-free videos?
Good day. I'm doing a project in a 'collaborative solutions' course on AI and its effect on the world. Our topic is focusing on the recent 'Deepfakes' extravaganza where people have used the software Fake App to make fake celebrity porn (and some funny Nicholas Cage videos). Our premise is that in the near future, journalists and governments will need a way to verify that their video recordings haven't been tampered with. If I were serious about turning this into an Minimum Viable Product, I would do that instead of asking, but I'm not really sure I could pull off such a task by myself (and I have doubts that anyone would be interested). Any thoughts?
Isn't throwing exception in promise same as calling reject?

The receiver of the promise is the one who should handle rejection. Not the one creating the promise.

If the receiver doesn't handle it you can register global error handler and log all unhandled errors.
Honestly, I feel like you might be overestimating the degree to which this is specific to video games.

I certainly recognize the sort of behavior you're describing, and it makes intuitive sense that online gaming would worsen it with anonymity and dehumanized opponents.

But in practice? As a teenager I watched people say "I hope you get cancer" or worse on the field, in the locker room, or even in the cafeteria. Or jump straight to knowingly personal mockery, or just beat somebody up because it was fun to hurt them. And it doesn't necessarily go away when people get out of school. "That guy likes a different sports team than me, let me tell him how he should die painfully" is something people think and act on every day.

It's still quite possible that online gaming sparks this behavior from times and moments it would happen otherwise. I certainly don't mean to presume anything about you personally - you know your own story better than any generalization.

But as a social pattern? I worry that we're mostly upset about online gaming and cyberbullying because they're new and different. We tolerate an amount of cruelty and violence outside of those settings that I think we're very slow to acknowledge that maybe the digital harm has just made more visible something we've been dealing with for a long time.
Best Valantine DIY Gift for My Valantine
Also, the founding fathers were no strangers to protectionism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry_argument
Or just set up self-serve stations. Literally every item has a barcode.
Unnecessary treatment can be wasteful, harmful or both. Medical professionals and public policy experts have debated how much cancer screening improves average outcomes.

Portraying anyone who questions the value of medical testing as irrational and selfish is denying the fact that smart, thoughtful people have a hard time defining what is best practice on average. As many as 3/4 of positive cancer screening test results can be false positives, and if you get one, you have to then do further testing and possibly treatment, which entails risks.

'overscreening for prostate, breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening “is common in both men and women, which not only increases health care expenditure but can lead to net patient harm.” ' [1]

My father was diagnosed (and eventually died) of cancer shortly before the age at which periodic screening was recommended, in the early 80s. Nowadays, screening is recommended at a younger age, and if he had been tested, then it might have been caught in time. However, I reject the idea that anyone is irresponsible based on hindsight in a single case. It's just bad luck. And public policy needs to be set based on what is best for everybody.

[1] http://www.ascopost.com/issues/october-15-2014/overscreening...
My entire goal in life is to be able to use a full stack open device. Maybe we'll see it with Purism and the like.
Their stock spiked by 60% and they're on the frontpage of news, at least for a couple of news cycles.

Mission accomplished.

----------

Companies have noticed that saying "Blockchain" and a few other buzzwords is enough to get a ton of money out of investors, especially since it seems like the majority of investors don't even know what Blockchain can do.

Kodak is +200% (maybe 250%+) after announcing their blockchain plans. Its no different than previous buzzword mania (ie: "Deep Learning" or if you remember the 2000s, "XML").
World's first virtual reality holiday, in-flight meals included
We were afraid that AI will take over and take away our freedom, but I think some companies have done a great job at ruining their products, and our lives as well.
Asimov – How can the amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased? [pdf]
At one time, one of the apps (FlightRadar24, maybe?) would send you a free radio receiver, as long as you hooked it up to the internet so they could get the data, too; and you lived in an area that wasn't well covered.
It's all online gambling.

This is the company (Infinity Networks LTD) they have a 15% stake in (names cited here http://inpublic.globenewswire.com/releaseDetails.faces?rId=2...)

* Daniel Doll-Steinberg runs Virt-U ( https://www.virt-u.io/team/ )

* Ron Dimant runs http://www.mumbojumbo.com/online-games

* https://www.virt-u.io/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/One-Pager-V... -- Atari CEO is an advisor to Virt-U -- Google Cache cause they deleted that: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kgfTZn...

* Virt-U did an ICO recently -- https://medium.com/virt-u/virt-u-network-token-sale-a-virtua...

Separately, they also have some sort of partnership with http://www.pariplayltd.com/
Always a good time to re-read Cosma Shalizi's classic "So You Think You Have a Power Law — Well Isn't That Special?"
(http://bactra.org/weblog/491.html)
The Kautz graph
Sears was/is a total mess. Went there to buy something (before they closed the local store) and it took 10 minutes to checkout, with the clerk fumbling between the iPad, a CRT register, and credit card scanner. What a cluster F.
Agreed. Looking forward to when I get my new phone: https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
I was just looking at that. I also learned that the Ubuntu OS is still community driven and has ports for several common phones, like the Nexus and OnePlus One phones.

https://docs.ubuntu.com/phone/en/devices/devices
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices
"Replication tests show that these predictors capture, respectively, ~40, 20, and 9 percent of total variance for the three traits. ".

This seems very low, almost like saying genes don't have any practical predictive power, right ?
We could see the (continued) decline of the global internet. China is already its own bubble; it's not implausible that it could spread to other regions due to conflicting interests.

If we continue down that path, will there be the equivalent of free tree agreements to limit the fragmentation?
I would stay away from Ubnt routing. Which features that requires disabling packet processing off-loads and the performance impact is not well documented and varies between models and software versions.

There appears to be many bugs related to off-loading as well. The below example is what finally made me decide not to consider Ubnt routers. It may be fixed now, maybe, but even if it was broken for way too long and shrouded in too much mystery, not even making it obvious which models are effected (the thread title was not always that specific either). I can't take Ubnt seriously, even for a home environment, after seeing how basic forwarding is that poor and it's not even their highest priority.

The only good thing that this proves is that at least they don't censor their forums, trying to hide issues.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/UDP-packet-loss-on-Cav...
"Most coin offerings" I'd agree with you with, but I'm specifically curious about what these relatively established companies think they are doing. I have a bit of a hard time imagining a well-lawyered company coming up with the plan to just say magic swoon words to boost the stock price, then all the inside stock owners sell, because that's at best perilously close to inside trading, if not obviously on the wrong side of the line.

(And remember, "raise the stock price" on its own isn't really a motivation. There has to be a plan to sell the stock on the news, or to avoid a take over bid by making the company too expensive, or placate a board of directors, or get new investment at the higher valuation, or something else for which "make the stock price higher" is a tool, because it isn't really a terminal goal on its own.)
I suggest to everyone I know to try going a couple of weeks without a smart phone. You can still stay in touch over calls/sms, but is much easier to distinguish useful screentime, as in the time I'm working on a computer versus fluff screentime when I'm feeling awkward or mindlessly scroll feeds. It helped a lot with being present, not being bombarded with notifications and actually valuing communication.
Promising cancer vaccine would use patients own cells to train the immune system
We could give everyone in the world a job right now by banning construction equipment, computers, cars, assembly lines, or any form of automation really.
Aren't there plenty of hybrid dating sites with the option of just being friends?
I feel like we're in a consolidation phase. We have a ton of tools/software and the big developments have been in how we use those tools aka devops. I'd put things like kubernetes/docker in this category, but there's obviously huge room for growth around this tech.

I do think there's room for new tools tho, but by definition, they're on the cutting edge and not especially visible if you're not looking. Things like stream processing are already incredibly useful and only getting better. Machine learning could be in this list too. It might not be a 1000% improvement like caching, but that's part of a maturing industry.
Companies exit geos (or never enter them) all the time. [1] No, it's not usually just about some law. But it may well have to do with nature of the market, regulatory climate, need to work through partners, cost of labor, work rules, etc. It's nothing to do with nationalist egos and everything to do with "it's just business" to avoid markets that aren't profitable or introduce too much business risk.

I really couldn't care less if there's some demand for my product/service in some market if it doesn't make business sense for me to sell there.

[1] For a random list. http://fortune.com/2015/01/16/international-retail-exits/
Do you have any plans to integrate curator recommendations? Or just regular users?

Big fan of including a "bottom 100" section, a lot of platforms don't do this but I find that sort of thing very interesting, so thanks :)

Also I LOVE the hidden gems section, was just wondering if you had any plans to go beyond 250.
The super macro answer is injecting liquidity. By making an asset illiquid to more liquid/tradable it "unlocks" value. So is the argument in general for tokenization.

I am not a Finance guy, but that is the only argument that made some sense.

For the companies, at least the honest one, at least for now its cheap money with not too many strings. But regulation will come whether you like it or not.

Tokenization may enable small or medium companies to be partially owned by outside investors and traded.. but there are many things to happen before we get there.
Porn is an outlet for many people who have trouble finding as much sex as they want. Or can't get.

If we deprive these people of porn, we are essentially depriving people who are underprivileged (unable to get as much sex as they want, regardless of the reason).

The privileged few who are attractive enough to have frequent sex will be able to do so while the underprivileged will be deprived of a sexual outlet.

Sexual frustration can be terrible, and depriving people of porn could lead to a building of tremendous tension in society.

If we're being realistic, this would probably drive up demand for prostitutes, which is an industry that thrives on human trafficking and enslavement. So getting rid of porn would increase human trafficking and enslavement of people.

So many lines of argument that lead to the conclusion that porn is a net good for society....
Side note for those buying books for their grandchildren: Arabian Nights includes a great deal more sex than you might assume.
Scale-free: distribution of connections follows power law across hubs. Other type: it doesnt
That book got me back into math. Using functional equations to teach concepts is very powerful. You get to say I want these properties and derive things like the exponential function.
Check with library and schools.
>It's more profitable to have a little bit of employee slack time than to have customer satisfaction way down and customers walking out without buying things.

For big box stores, but B&N are on the decline, while real estate and lease prices have likely risen.

"you staff up" works when you can actually pay for the excess, but B&N clearly don't want to. But you missed the point of my take in that they aren't willing to invest in assets for customer satisfaction. They're on the way out, so why would they care to staff up for holidays either?
Scrambled Hackz! I also remember running across this video.
Show HN: Free Tax Help – free tax help from industry experts
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He doesn't mention it in those terms, but that's what the "Mental Representations" section is all about.

Compression : finding patterns :: forest : trees.
Now, why do so many systems seem to follow log-normal??
Brexit: Angela Merkel says she is still curious about what the UK actually wants
I absolutely can blame a company for the actions that they, as adults who are responsible for their actions, take.
Facebook also spies on people who have never used the service.
Wow, that sucks.

Side note: What is the harassment of asking 'Do YoU lIkE tO eAt BaNaNaS'?
I know the banana<->penis euphemism, but it doesn't seem like that is the case here.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the article or the comments is that the Franklin Method is just deliberate practice applied to writing.
I believe the problem has now shifted to a slightly higher level and especially when working in a microservice/containerized world. For example, given the number of specialized services you mentioned, we see more applications with polyglot persistence stacks underneath. If they form a part of the same application, how do you collectively manage them? What does it mean to take a consistent snapshot? These and a bunch of other similar questions need to be answered.

There is some work we are doing (https://kanister.io) to help with these issues but there are a lot of emerging solutions in this space. Look at CNCF's landscape for some more detail.
Can we return the word "crypto" to its proper usage, for encryption? Then we can come up with a new term for cryptocurrencies.

I suggest "tulips."
You have to supply your own hardware, but Flightaware provides a Raspberry Pi image that does that (you get a free subscription if you send them ADS-B data).

https://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/
An embarrassment of riches in the categories that are served does not preclude the possibility that there is a need that isn't well served at all yet.
I think we are going more and more into the direction of renting almost everything. If you use ebooks like Kindle you don't accumulate a book collection. Same for record collections. Devices become useless once the connected cloud service shuts down. Eventually we'll probably have cars that get obsoleted quickly. I bet the same will happen for household and other robots once they get more powerful. You will have to pay monthly rent to use them.
I feel like a major repo issue has yet to show it's head. We got a sample of what it might feel like with the NPM namespace fiasco that happened recently, albeit a different problem than scale and accessibility.
> I was so worried the phone would die before the car arrived.

I've had my phone die well before the Uber arrived and it wasn't a problem, it showed up at the place I requested.

Once the ride is initiated the drivers phone becomes the primary client. It seems quite flexible with devices going offline (as it should, mobile networks are unreliable).

> use some of the apps nowadays that wouldn't work when you haven't updated them for a month.

This is a worrying trend but I don't think it's really that bad yet. My primary phone died recently (famous Nexus 6p bootloop) and I used my old Samsung S3 with stock Android circa 2014 and I was surprised how many of the apps still functioned properly without updates (including the ancient built-in pre-Chrome webview Browser app).

... basically my expectation these days was that they wouldn't work. But in practice 99% of my phone use is SMS/Messengers + Maps + Browsers, and they all worked perfectly fine, web standards don't advance that quickly at all, and the messengers are all using simple protocols where they had no problem.

So it's typically the edge case 1-5% 3rd-party apps like Uber that are of concern.

It's really not hard to develop APIs that are versioned. This is becoming a standard best practice among mobile/web app developers (via SemVer standard). And there's no excuse for a big company like Uber to not support ~1-2yr old apps.
1. Static Website generators for non-blogs
2. Half decent wrapper libraries for tools like FFMPEG in NPM
3. Plug and Play game server with stat tracking that can be easily used for any game
4. More versatile compression formats for media, ability to serve up 360/720/1080 from the same file?
Is your life virtuous and pure? Or do you just hide or anonymize yourself when you do shitty things?
No, he didn't. You are reading too much into his prediction because you know the outcome. He wrote:

"Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan."

There's nothing in the prediction which implies that the solar power would be based on PV. I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats.

Solar One, a solar thermal power plant built in Mojave Desert, produced 10MW of electricity back in the 1980s.
As a short person this sounds like genocide.
I've seen the distinction between "disagreement" and "being a dick" disappear.

I could phrase a hypothetical opinion two ways:

1) "I think abortion is wrong because I believe in the sanctity of life and that life begins at conception."

2) "Anyone who is pro-abortion is a baby murder."

In the first, a viewpoint is stated in a respectful manner. You may agree or disagree, but the speaker wasn't deliberately demeaning or hostile. In the second, the same opinion was expressed, but in an overtly hostile way.

If we'd like a plural society in which many viewpoints are exchanged, we have to continually challenge ourselves not to conflate the two when hearing or responding to someone else.

And I get it -- it's not easy when one is passionate about something, even when one is willfully trying not to knee-jerk.

But if I either speak disrespectfully, or assume that someone else is being disrespectful regardless of their actual phrasing, then we all end up in the gutter.