skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What problems are people trying to solve with decentralization? The list of problems I can think of and for which the best solution is decentralization, is a rather short list. End in the realm of mass market consumer products it gets even shorter and could very well be empty.
>I consider real-time JVMs with AOT compilation something worthwhile using.

Sure, I don't have a beef with either (although someone could go non-JVM to get either AOT and/or real-time guarantees in a better form perhaps).

But I don't think "the X and Y army uses it" serves as proof that a technology is mature.

It's not like the army doesn't have all kinds of non-critical applications, and all kinds of legacy crap and modern crap apps lying around, doing some thing or another.

It's like saying "Facebook uses our app X" as proof of maturity, when the use could be in some horrible experimental project, that Facebook tried and semi-abandoned, or is the product of some engineers "20% time" stuff...
But when you write "it's a combination of ..." do you mean we must compare? Must I prove that a large enough percentage of Viking culture did survive to be able to call myself Vikingish? That seem arbitrary.

Yes, I know of the political movements you talk about. Yes, I think you can be grateful of being born in one of the best places on earth. Yes, you can enjoy have physical appearance that most women of the world consider very attractive. But being proud of it? Nah...
Rust Jobs: There are no open rust jobs anywhere in the world
This is a couple of days old, and was discussed at length here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16701248 (~ 280 comments).

Since then, however, McGauch (of modified gravity) put out a blog entry (dated yesterday): https://tritonstation.wordpress.com/2018/04/04/the-dwarf-gal...

I'd reword his second last sentence by adding a couple of words in two places: "MOND is one example of a class of bets that what we call dark matter is really the manifestation of gravitational physics beyond General Relativity"; he himself has catalogued several non-General-Relativity theories that resemble MOND especially in the non-relativistic limit (with Famaey, in their excellent and reasonably fair 2012 review https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3960 section 7).

Virtually all of these are metric theories of gravity with extra degrees of freedom beyond those in General Relativity. Consequently, unless they want to be haunted by ghosts (which ruin otherwise well-posed Cauchy problems) the proponents are really making an aesthetic decision to label their new DoFs "modified gravity" maybe justifying the decision with some unusual coupling to the other fields or some argument that the field content isn't interpretable as particles even in principle. It is fairly straightforward to argue that they could make the opposite decision and label their new DoFs "dark matter" (and even particle Dark Matter on the assumption that their matter field is quantizable after all, at least in some effective limit) and the new physics would be identical.

There is of course still interesting physics to be discovered in the non-gravitational sector -- the Standard Model is (probably, hopefully) not the last word there for reasons beyond those motivated by galaxy-scale dynamics or cosmological results like the the BAO acoustic peaks in the cosmic microwave background (cf. sec 9.2 of Famaey & McGauch, although bear in mind that there is newer data since Fig 45.).
That's a good question. AFAIK Stripe already had their magical Dunning rules for retries, which were supposedly already optimized via machine learning. I'm curious if this is substantially different from that.
Silence so far from the Basecamp team about why and what’s next so far. What about paying and existing customers? That’s all a bit strange...
I'm in the midst of integrating Chargebee. Do you feel like this new offering is a good replacement for Chargebee? I don't know what I don't know yet.
cleaner code is not a good replacement for cleaner comments either though.
Ah I just want to clarify, we aren't "required" to activate at an ATM. I'm just saying that we are able to activate a card without having to go to an ATM. I'm sure going to an ATM is an option as well.
Braintree, which has a similar API to Stripe.
I'm getting an annoying amount of spurious clicks even using press-to-click. I dread to think what tap would be like.

Equally annoying is when the palm rejection kicks in because I'm trying to press too close to an edge or something, and the lack of tactile feedback makes it feel like i just stubbed my finger.
Good article, but I think the adoption rate/learning curve graph is a bit too generous. By the time you've hit 10 on the learning curve, adoption's probably already down to 10%. People are exceptionally lazy.
Securities-based loans aka shadow margin.

It seems that nobody tracks them, so it's possible that there is something brewing. If there is strong stock market correction, and loans must be paid back people get into trouble.
After reading about what John Perry Barlow was up to before he died, I'm not sure EFF has our back at all. More like controlled opposition.
Hm. DLL Hell to me was on Windows to have to upgrade a DLL for which some other dependency had to be downgraded which was the original reason for starting the upgrade in the first place.

But I've seen your trick used in lots of places, in a way that trick is a predecessor to containers, you isolate a functional unit and all dependencies somehow from the rest of the system.
Maybe massive was an exaggeration. Before node 8.10, AWS Lambda used 6.10 which was frustrating. If you used async/await so you would have to transpile your code or upload a node binary. So really it's more convenient.

Not sure why it takes 10 months to move to the new runtime.

On the whole I feel like the JS/TS eco-system is getting better and better. Especially since browsers and runtimes are converging towards ES6/7 :)
I forgot to mention:

If you've already bought into Docker, you can actually use Nix to construct your Docker images:
https://nixos.org/nixpkgs/manual/#sec-pkgs-dockerTools

Some benefits:

* Nix provides reproducible docker images; Dockerfiles don't.

* Faster builds: Nix is better at (safely) caching the results of intermediate steps in your build, whereas a Dockerfile has to be conservative (if you so much as change the whitespace in a RUN command, that step (and all subsequent steps) have to be re-run).
Do you know any community of enthusiastic people, visibly driven by their ideas?
I got to discuss this with a couple of friends that share that kid-like type of enthusiasm when they pop ideas that they really find of great value (even if it's not necessarily the case) if implemented. They share that kind of drive in life that makes you leave out no aspect of life (self improvement - be it health, career, etc., helping others, and so on).

We all agreed that most of the time it is great to at least be able to talk with people that share similar enthusiasm and vision/perspectives. It is always a great boost in terms of motivation and not only. It can also lead to forming teams and pursuing one's idea.

Therefore, once again, my question is: Do you know any kind of community, with people that radiate such drive/positiveness? People that do things with passion and drive, and that are pleased to meet others with the same spirit?

PS: Don't get me wrong, most of the people have such moments of drive and enthusiasm, just that for most, the frequency of the ups and downs (the sinusoidal of life) is too high, as they react to negative results/feedback/factors as much easy as they react to positive ones. There are the few others that keep up most of the time.

Thanks!
Except the pain in pharo doesn't come from the difficulty of learning new things or self-improvement but from the buggy environment itself. Learning to save your work every 5 minutes because it might crash any time doesn't make you a better dev, it just lowers your standards.
“And then we take this information where we find it and we go into our architecture team and our performance architects and really drill down and figure out where is the bottleneck. Is it the OS is it in the drivers is it in the application is it in the silicon and then run it to ground to get it fixed.”

This approach is reminiscent of Apple's approach to low-latency touch scrolling on the original iPhone; to Quicktime and MIDI a decade and a half before that; and, more recently, to the Apple Pencil.

I knew executives at Palm who were frustrated by the challenges that both the tech stack and the organizational structure (Conway's Law) posed in the (failed) effort to reduce touch latency to where it felt physical. I know that it took Android many years to reach the point where objective observers described it as equally “buttery”. IMO this full-stack integration and optimization is one of Apple's core competences. It will be interesting to see what it leads to this time. The effort may be too late, but if the past predicts the future, it will not be too little too late.
Apologies for any confusion! No extra fees for existing Stripe Subscriptions users, even after the $1M mark. Stripe Billing is free forever at your current price.
Propserver – Responsive property observation for JavaScript
I remember those old Sun Blade processors. They were absolutely beastly, provided you had to know-how to extract parallel performance from them :D
No extra fees for the first million, or no extra fees period?
Shim allows you to branch to an arbitrary additional root of trust
But that's not my argument (Even though I said ECC matters. maybe you're right).

My argument is that every time someone says "I can build the same thing for 1/3 the price", they are literally using completely different parts. They AREN'T building the same thing.

The idea of an Apple Tax is that apple arbitrarily marks up everything. But if you bought the same parts independently, you'd find the markup is very little. More like 10%.

Look at those $10k HP workstations. They are more comparable to Mac Pros.
I think we're making the same point, but I see removing that friction as a good thing, while you don't.

In your example, the bodega is getting a 50% cut of the aid that it shouldn't. Instead, we can give the recipient 50% of the current amount in cash, and let them buy the drugs directly. The extra 50% can be used in several ways... pumped into rehab or education, reducing tax burden on others, whatever we decide.

In both cases, the drug addict uses all their aid for the same amount of drugs. In my scenario, society spends less for that outcome.
Well, it's even worse than not exciting; it's very slow database, so not the benefits of blockchain and not the benefits of modern dbs.
Deploying jobs to Apache Flink on Kubernetes made more easy
I've worked at Segment.com for the last ~2.5 years. We've had an unlimited vacation policy ever since I joined, and I take 4-6 weeks off annually. Our only policy that I'm aware of is to keep your team posted and not leave gaping holes while OOO.

Frankly, I really like it this way. I would not like to go back to tracking vacation/sick days, check-in/out times, WFH, etc. I appreciate the mutual trust the team has that people will work hard while in the office and stay away enough to sustainably enjoy life and remain productive.

I'll add that I only think this sort of arrangement works if there is strong trust and leadership is a top-down role model in taking off time responsibly. I've never been asked to take time off, and I don't know that anyone has, but I've also never been asked not to.

That said, I can also see this not working if you're shy about asking for things that aren't explicitly handed to you,
then this system may not work as well. I'd be curious if anyone here has felt that way? :)
When the usability of a the service (device, whatever) depends on, or is proportional to the number of other people using it, then adoption rate becomes very important not only for the success of the service, but it's usefulness too.

i.e: There can be a sewing kit that has a high learning curve, but would result in faster production / better products. While this may result in the the kit not being (economically) successful, it would still be just as useful to each individual who bought it, and learned to use it properly.
In case I was misunderstood, my comment above is in favor of them voicing their concern.

The parent said something to the effect "if they don't like it, they are free to go find a job elsewhere", and to that my reply is in the sense, "well, they are also free to voice their concerns".
Cool.
I'm guessing from trying it out that you're using Highcharts.
I've run into really unpleasant memory leaks/slowness when streaming data (especially when the existing chart is already thousands of data points). Are you seeing something similar?
How does your friend like working at Logicmonitor? Any issues?
The new iMac Pros are a good stopgap for pro users on the Apple platform.

They are nice machines with plenty of performance. With 4 Thudnerbolt ports, you have some expandability.
What market you're in will influence a lot of how this question should be answered?

Are you somewhere like the southeastern US where a large portion of tech jobs are government or government-supplier contracts? If so, you want to get your certifications to get your foot in the door.

If you're somewhere like NY or SF it will probably have the opposite effect.
For sure. This is not a big thing, just something we are trying to be thoughtful about. Most of the time we talk about Pokemon and do mazes.
I've never seen a spurious click with press to click, but I am still on a 2015 MBP.
The Engineering Guy has a great video on disposable diaper technology - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYNX8y6lQMc

It's impressive. Not sure how much R&D plays into the costs, but probably more than it may seem.
I don't see droning ISIS terrorists as immoral, sorry.
Yeah, people seem to have missed the forest for the trees here.
Being able to iterate on billing easily seems the killer feature here, to me. I would like to see exactly how it works.
holy shit. Best thing I learned today.
Feel free to look at the sources: https://github.com/bluzi/jsonstore
And then the prince also killed the blacksmiths, because they made swords, and the farmers because their crops had fed the army, and cobbler because they made boots that people in the army wore, and the lumberjacks because their trees were used to construct siege engine, and the cattle herders because their oxen had been used to pull the army supply wagons, and the printers because their printing presses had been used to encourage the army, and the weavers because their cloth and clothed the army, and the tailors, because they had sewed clothes for the army, and the dye makers because their dye had colored the flags and uniforms of the army, and the tanners because their leather had been used to make the saddles for the cavalry, and the merchants because their money and taxes and paid for the state to have the army.

And then the people in the next town all got together and said, "Let us all work together and see that this prince is never able to defeat our army."
An SD reader connected over USB2 is better than no SD card reader. If they cared they would have made it PCIe, but instead they took it away in a move that benefited only Apple. No pro benefited from the removal of the sd slot. It didn't make the machine cheaper, or faster, and in fact it made it harder and more complicated to use. And then they had the audacity to charge more for it.
They said they can't spec bump it. https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

> I think we designed ourselves into a bit of a thermal corner, if you will. We designed a system with the kind of GPUs that at the time we thought we needed, and that we thought we could well serve with a two GPU architecture. That that was the thermal limit we needed, or the thermal capacity we needed. But workloads didn’t materialize to fit that as broadly as we hoped.
Well, imagine yourself in China right now, under the thumb of that regime. Anything is better than where we are today--teetering on the edge of technological totalitarianism.
Eep. Seems like patch should be running red, not ed!

Amazing how an ancient vuln can still be found hidden in plain sight.
Google search for [diapers]. 128 Pampers for $35 from Google Shopping Express ($0.27/ct), 88 Pampers for $25 from Target ($0.28/ct), 144 Pampers for $31 from Walmart ($0.21/ct). Other brands do get a fair bit cheaper - 140 Huggies for $21 from Target ($0.13/ct), 256 Luvs for $27 from Target ($0.10/ct), and we just tried buying some store-brand Target diapers that are 40% of the cost of Pampers. We're fairly brand-loyal as diapers go, though, because we've found that the Huggies blow out a lot more than Pampers (at least on our kid, who is pretty thin) and the Targets aren't nearly as absorbent.
If you mean the clones, that's not exactly what I'm suggesting. I want Apple to continue building computers, but to use industry standard form factors, and to use as many commodity components as possible.

They could get such a product out faster than 2019 and it would be better than whatever they will end up announcing. Instead we have to wait a year for Apple to figure out how to make a computer that is 'pretty' and 'innovative' enough for Apple, even when their professional customers don't give a toss how pretty or innovative it is.
As a former dynamicist, the underlying reason for this correlation is that planetary systems with many planets are always on the edge of dynamical instability. In other words, these kinds of planetary systems with lots of planets are always packed with as many planets as they can support over any given lifetime. It then turns out that the stability criteria imply that the system cannot be any more packed than having approximately log-equal spacing. In fact, if you take a star and put planets around it with a log uniform distribution and evolve it for a while, you find that eventually the planets that remain roughly fit the Bode-Titus law [1]. (I don't think the reasons for this are entirely well understood.)

One consequence of this is that our own solar system has been around for about 5 billion years, and is therefore probably unstable on timescales of 5-50 billion years. Indeed, long-term simulations indicate that there is a few percent chance that Mercury will get kicked out of the solar system
or crash into Venus or the Sun before the Sun dies in ~5 billion years [2] [3].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9710116

[2]: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Stability_of_the_solar_s....

[3]: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2009Natur.459..817L
(PM from Stripe) If you're an existing user, there's no extra fees, even if you are past the $1M threshold. For existing Stripe Subscriptions users, Stripe Billing is included in your current price. (You should have received an email about this earlier today)
Prisoner's Salary Dilemma
That makes zero sense from a business perspective.

"I know, let's put out a boring commodity product that has no unique selling points, doesn't match our ethos, and has a tiny niche market. And we'll sell it at the same razor-thin margin that everyone else does!"

That couldn't be further from Apple's way of doing business.

If you want a cheap commodity tower, just buy one, but don't expect Apple to make one for you.
It's possible to change the PINs on your credit cards to the same value. Not much security decrease and greatly improves usability. I haven't tried it myself as PIN credit is very rare in USA.

PIN does not mean you are automatically liable for fraud losses. Federal law caps credit card liability at $50. Most issuers eat that too with $0 liability to remain competitive.
Increasingly you sign (or in my case scrawl a wiggly line) a pad but I still sign paper fairly regularly. One of the issues with PIN in the US is likely that you'd have needed a whole new workflow and mobile devices at sit-down restaurants. It would arguably be a better system to move to settling up at the table, but it would still be a big and expensive change.
Of Streams and Tables in Kafka and Stream Processing
Really neat, nice work!

Worth pointing out explicitly that this inserts Ben Jojo as a MITM on every connection, but it's still a really cool project.
It's a fascination problem. Everything falls into place when what genuinely deeply interests you coincides with your work, with the source of your motivation to work, and with the source of your mental fitness to do the work. When I think of long-lived scientists, mathematicians, composers, artists who produce brilliant work into old age, these are people who never lose fascination for what they do.
Hasn't Stripe supported updating card expirations for a while now?
Ask HN: First time founder, company growing, can't find advice/mentorship
I'm a first time founder for a tech startup in the midwest. Our area has virtually no mentorship & advisory resources for tech startups. I've tried emailing/calling places out west, but they seem to assume I'm soliciting an investment (can't blame them I suppose).

I have meetings with VCs in about a week, and I really need some guidance on some strategic questions. Is there anyone here who is a founder or investor that would let me pick their brain for 30 mins or so? I know time is valuable, and I'm always willing pay a consultation rate if need be.

A little about the company:

- Concept: we're a platform for women to buy, sell, and share their style. We currently cater to a specific niche

- Founded: 6 months ago

- # of Users: 40,000+

- Sales: around 600k

- Business model: 15% of all transactions on the platform.
Nope. Haven't tried.
I used to work on billing and a bit of payments stuff for a large SaaS company, so I have some experience with this.

When you charge a credit or debit card, send a bunch of messages that end up going to an organization called a payment processor. Payment processors do stuff like make sure your account has enough money/remaining credit and also have fraud checks and other security features. Sometimes, the payment processor rejects a payment because of insufficient funds, suspected fraud, their system being down or a malformed request. Unfortunately, a lot of this stuff is pretty archaic and there are a few layers between your servers and the processor, so it's very hard to debug. On your end, you could simply retry payments if they get rejected, but that might lead to a set of ping pong failures that might even trip fraud alerts to the customer. You can also have retry logic that uses an exponential backoff, just like any other request. That's a reasonable strategy, but you can probably do better.If you're a big company, involuntary credit card churn is actually a pretty sizeable source of churn for you. 99% transaction completion rate sounds pretty good until you realize it means a guaranteed 1% churn rate (assuming people don't sign up again), which is not insignificant. You really want to get this as low as possible.

Enter Stripe: Stripe has handled a very very large number of payments, and they probably have really comprehensive data about failure rates. This allows them to identify patterns and come up with some rules around retries. A simple (fully hypothetical) example is: If a transaction is declined for insufficient funds, retry again on the 15th and the last day of the month (usually when people get paid). These rules can get really complicated. We had some rules that were as complex as "If the cardholder is in Spain, and the card is Amex, retry in three days before 5pm if it's a weekday, otherwise wait until Tuesday."

Overall, this is a pretty nice feature for large customers with high transaction volumes. We did the data analysis/rule generation ourselves and hand rolled the retry logic in our system, but offering it as a built-in service is a convenient (albiet probably expensive) perk.
(Engineering Manager at Stripe Billing) Ah - sorry about that, a last minute fix caused a bug. This is now fixed in production. Thank you so much for reporting!