skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My main takeaway is: don't squeeze money out of your
customers by severely limiting the free plan.

Seems to me how well offering a free tier will work depends heavily on what your product is - and whether it provides a logical place to separate the tiers so users are motivated to pay without losing the goodwill the free tier aims to generate.

For example, if you're a SaaS version control system, it's easy: Charge per-user-per-month for private repos and corporate-single-sign-on-system integration.

Boom, no hassle or difficult sign-up for free tier users, practically every company with more than a handful of developers has to pay, companies with 100x as many employees pay 100x more, no need to annoy free-tier users to push them onto the paid tier, no semi-permeable paywall where users can clear cookies or open multiple accounts.

But if you're a social network, or a tool for debugging regular expressions, or a chat app, or a newspaper, or a streaming music service? Much harder to draw such a tidy line.
https://youtu.be/dAojpHR-6Uo?t=29 , for instance.
Advertisers Warm to Fledgling Alliance of American Football
>The same answer to both these questions is why why ad-personalization is "good".

Not at all. This assumption that ads themselves are unavoidable is ludicrous.

>Now we can move onto discussions around fraud, ethics, leaking, micro-transactions and a million other things.

Enormous blunders of fraud and ethics out of sight unless we look directly at ads, targeted or not. And if you’re like most, you’ve got a banal understanding of how advertising and psychology game the limits of the sensual system.

As someone who spent most my life producing them, I must be honest: ads are the bane of our existence.

Ads have hollowed subsumed and proceeded to hollow art and culture.

They have wrecked our landscapes.

They have reformed our workforce into consumers and producers of something entirely foreign to our sustenance and enrichment.

They have malformed our conception of private and social responsibility.

They have rewritten the very rules of power!

Targetted ads are just a technological conclusion of an existing problem.
> The Alliance, founded by television and film producer Charlie Ebersol and Pro Football Hall of Famer Bill Polian, plans to track players’ positions and formations through wearable devices, and to stream that data to fans for use in play-by-play gaming. The league will also use the data to track and ensure players’ health and well-being, the league said.
> startup-focused programming school

Curious what are these? They place into a startup after you are done?

surprised that they are teaching category theory if that is the case.
The assumption that "we" have "real information" to share is not something I'm confident in.

(I do share links to studies I find interesting, but I don't really believe I can evaluate them and know which ones will hold up.)
Nice article, bad examples.

Spotify restricts the amount of songs you can skip to 10 in the free version. And next they play you an ad where they stage the (premium) feature of unlimited skipping as some revolutionary game-changer for music players. This anti-feature has literally no other upside for Spotify other than annoying users into subscribing. Which is all completely fair, since it is free after all but I can't find any mechanism which is more to the point of

“Provide incentive for prospects to sign up for freemium but do not provide too much value so that free version of the product is enough.”

I'm on the fence about the assessment of Dropbox as well, it has a load of dark patterns like nagging or bait and switch even and especially for paying users, so I'm not sold it wants to be my friend...
Probably still rings true in 2019, but I think it should have a (2009) tag behind the title.
Does that mean that you don't trust yourself to separate them in practice?
We sell Major Tom, our ground control software, and support contracts for KubOS.
Sugar is absolutely addictive. And juice is just sugar.

Whole fruits are healthy because of the fibers and nutrients in the pulp+skin. The fiber slows absorption and helps with insulin spikes.

Even "fresh juicing", which is crazy popular, isn't the same as just eating the fruit.
I was a bit unclear. There was an actual memorial created. There was no evidence found that the user Karyn was a real woman who passed away. (The theory put forth in the news article was that it was a male role playing as a female).
Very relevant blogpost:

https://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle/
Do you think there is a difference between things that you don’t want and things that are immoral?
This feels like multiple straw man arguments.

> “Do you want to be forced to watch an advert you have no interest in?”
> The same answer to both these questions is why why ad-personalization is "good"...

I don’t want to be forced to watch any ads. Personalization isn’t “good” because I get forced to watch something I’m more likely to be interested in buying. And just because I’m more likely to be interested doesn’t somehow make losing privacy okay. Ads don’t become more moral when they work.

> ...and why TV, printing and all the rest are having their collective arse handed to them by on-line

Personalized ads have nothing to do with why online is growing and why TV and print are shrinking. The web exploded precisely because of the amount of content you could get without any advertising at all. Ads and privacy concerns are now slowing the growth. TV and print are just dying because they’re nowhere near as convenient.
Story of the Roku Player (2013)
I can imagine swift really taking off in this space. It’s going to be a battle between Julia and Swift for who does the best automatic differentiation.
I'd argue that unsolicited advertising in general is immoral, and ad customization (or targeted ads) is even more immoral because it's more effective.

The reason I'd argue that unsolicited advertising is immoral is because it's a means of enticing or perhaps even coercing people to buy things that they would not otherwise buy. It's an attempt to control customers to enrich the sellers and marketers.

In certain cases, where spending or consuming is actually harmful to the consumer, advertising is even worse. For example, let's say I have an eating disorder and can't resist buying a certain brand and flavor of ice cream. If ads are not targeted and I'm shown ads of, say, motorcycles, I can resist those and not buy them, but if I'm shown ads of my favorite ice cream I'll be tempted to buy it, overindulge, and harm my health. Gambling ads seen by gambling addicts, alcohol ads seen by alcoholics, and so on can similarly be harmful in financial, psychological, and social ways.

Solicited ads are more of a gray area, because at least the consumer would be looking to buy whatever it is that's being advertised, and they want to see ads. In that case, the best outcome is that the ads help the consumer make a more informed decision. But the reality of advertising is that ads are often misleading or outright lying, making emotional appeals, or trying to psychologically manipulate consumers in to buying the product or making positive associations with the brand. So even the case of solicited advertising is very problematic.
What about Nvidia-equipped laptops that come with Ubuntu pre-installed?
For me the problem is not 24hs availability.

Some ideas anyway:

You can offer "infinite" space in the shared folder (get a lawyer before writing infinity in the official site).

Share a file while you chat (to ensure both computers are online).
Public Records Belong to the Public
Seconding a fresh Florida-grown grapefruit. I used to pick them a lot as a kid. It's rare to find someone with a residential grapefruit tree in FL now.
As Scott Aaronson put it[0]:

> I’m not making the much stronger claim that this is the best possible use of $20 billion for science. Plausibly a thousand $20-million projects could be found that would advance our understanding of reality by more than a new collider would. But it’s also important to realize that that’s not the question at stake here. When, for example, the US Congress cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider midway through construction—partly, it’s believed, on the basis of opposition from eminent physicists in other subfields, who argued that they could do equally important science for much cheaper—none of the SSC budget, as in 0% of it, ever did end up redirected to those other subfields. In practice, then, the question of “whether a new collider is worth it” is probably best considered in absolute terms, rather than relative to other science projects.

[0] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4122
I wouldn’t even go that far. The dev lead over one of the teams is far more qualified to be the lead over that team because of his company knowledge - he’s been there for five years. He’s a smart guy but I don’t know how well he would fare outside of our company. This was his only job out of college.

I’m one of the three oldest developers - two of us are in our mid 40s and one in his mid 50s. The “architect” is well qualified but he has a lot on his plate. The other dev in his 50s also fought against being made a lead.

Edit:

I usually don’t comment on downvotes, but I’m really interested in knowing what could possibly be offensive or disagreeable about this post.
Ask HN: How are some successful OSS projects being run?
Working at most companies today as a software engineer requires you to follow certain methodologies (daily stand-ups, kanban boards, sprints, backlogs, the need for often non-technical managers, etc)

How do these methodologies compare to successful community-run open source projects ? and more importantly, if they are different, why don’t proprietary / company projects follow the open source model methodology wise ?

How are some successful open source projects run (in terms of development methodology) ? For example the Linux kernel, OpenBSD, or Bitcoin.
Flick – Data Driven Instagram Hashtag Research
Agreed. At what point do people own their own decisions? I get these ridiculous YouTube conspiracy recommendations all the time.

Sometimes they're hilariously entertaining. Most of the time they're so off the mark that I don't watch them. If Youtube really wanted to increase my engagement they would stop showing irrelevant ads and stop crippling the free YouTube app. I mostly go to YouTube for movie trailers and videos from Deep learning courses. That's it, the end.

What YouTube appears to want is for me to pay to use it and it gets in my way and makes YouTube inconvenient in every possible way to try and persuade me to throw money at it. This will never happen but hey keep on trying.
You're right - it's not that simple.
To take an anecdotal example. I was slightly interested in knowing why so many people now took credit cards. Not 'traditional businesses in shops' - but food-carts/stalls, beggars - pretty much everybody. Tiny little calculator things I could tap my card/phone on.
Even went so far as to work out which the best ones were, what rates were, reviews of the various companies - I was just interested.
I then spent the next few months being bombarded with adverts for them from one company (the best provider, if I wanted this service).
I just wished to could click to stop them showing me the advert - I DON'T WANT IT - please spend your limited money on selling to somebody who might. You're seemingly an awesome company and you're wasting your money.

Or when I proposed. I worked out that a jewelry-maker usually just adds a fixed % to the costs to come up with the final price. I bought a 'modest' flawless diamond and then got my local jeweler to put it in a beautiful mount, for a fixed price.
6 f'in months over every page I looked at, being covered in diamonds. Each and every one of them wasting their money. Now in perfect data-mining-world, they'd have worked out I'd booked a wedding venue and a ring, so unlikely to need another ring.

...Actually, this gives me quite a good thought.
All the tracking we have, is "one-way" - and it's hard to correct the f'ups.
If we could maybe accept the tracking and learn to live with it, the trackers could be more upfront and ask us direct questions. Or at the very least have a "was this advert of interest to you" button.
A/B test it obviously - as most people will say no to everything, but I'd be on board.
If it is going roughly that's on the director. Soft skills come into play when trying to make changes. IMO, "forcing" change means there are already leadership skill gaps with the director.
Very cool article! I've been looking into getting a split board for ergonomics for a while now. I appreciate the comparison between all these different models.

Some of them look really good (the matias and the cheap kinesis especially, since I'd rather not solder my own board) but I can't get over the fact that some of them don't even care about the insert key. I need a full nav-group (eg pg up/down, home/end, ins/delete)!

Ergodox is still king though it looks like. So thanks again for the post!
As someone who's used EXWM exclusively for over a year: Getting it up and running is very quick, finding the workflow you want can take a while - it depends on how familiar you already are with Emacs.

For example you might initially keep using tools like dmenu to launch applications, and over time move to using things like ivy/counsel for that instead. My window management (inside of emacs) habits also changed a lot.

If it's of interest, my emacs configuration is here: https://github.com/tazjin/emacs.d

Most of the EXWM specific stuff is in `init/nixos.el`.
Sure, given how many questionable firms from Theranos to Juicero have been successfully funded.

So long as dumb money continues to flow, there is little to fear. When this bout of irrational exuberance does abate, tech will have bigger things to worry about than consumer protection laws.
In my view, "Functor" and "Monad" are the wrong emphasis, while "map" and "flatMap" are the parts that really matter, and are much easier to teach in comparison.

Most programmers are familiar with "map" today, and "flatMap" is not much of a stretch. But once you understand these two things, you're 90% of the way to understanding monads and why they're useful.
I'm not going to "defend" fruit juice, but grapefruit juice is quite good and usually contains less sugar than orange.
> Also, legally, neither one is treason.

Haha ok man but no for real that's actual treason.
Thanks!

It's less a spec and more of, choose the tool that fits the job. A lot of these documents fit the overall structure of "high-level situation & recommendation; industry / product / customer context; more depth on recommendations considered; FAQ"

I don't have any examples, anymore (I left Amazon some years ago), but here are a couple of links that have reasonable takes on the structure and guidelines:

https://www.anecdote.com/2018/05/amazons-six-page-narrative-...

https://use-cases.org/2018/01/03/the-evil-genius-of-the-amaz...

https://www.geekwire.com/2017/prepared-6-page-memo-geekwire-...

Bottom line: the purpose of the document is to drive a high-quality decision, so include what will help, and leave out anything extraneous. (I know, that's not very actionable.)
This post should also make people realize how powerful youtube and tech monopolies became.

By changing their recommendation algorithms, they can change the way a whole society thinks! Just look at the recommendation from the blog: "Recommend more round-earth videos".

So far, this extreme political power has been used without the platforms managing it, but it would only make sense for all of those platforms to use it in their advantage.
I'm not certain of any of this, but if I may go by personal experience, I would say the two qualities are orthogonal. I have known intellectuals who could be bullied into just about anything, and I've known an "anti-intellectual" who wouldn't step out of the street if you told him there was a truck bearing down on him.
For me that's totally reasonable. It's for the kernel developers and NVIDIA to sort out.
> It's been suggested that all of the pyramids' stones couldn't have been cut with two-foot-long copper saws.

Pyramid stones are made of concrete and cast in place. It's very primitive technology, which is known for few thousand years.
I also wonder how much of this coincidentally lines up with Chris Lattner landing at Google. As Chris will admit, and as was left out of this analysis, Swift has also been given the humble goal of achieving world domination. All joking aside I'm very thrilled about this and have enjoyed tremendously watching the Swift language mature since its launch due in large part to the open source community and the Swift team's admirable commitment. Onward!
I yearn for the times when the tech community still believed e-voting was a bad solution in search of a problem.

I mark my votes with a pen on a piece of paper. No polling place in my country is more than 300 yards from the voter, at least in cities and towns. I can stick around and watch the counting close enough to verify the count. Costs are neglible compared to the overall budget, with most of the staff being volunteers.

Maybe it’s different with some ballot initiative every second week, or whatever the Swiss are doing. Maybe it doesn’t work as well if you vote for 26 up and down the government from president to dog catcher, to dog-to-be-caught.

But in those cases, I‘d still rather give up that surplus of choice, rather than the system that is not just safe, but so obviously safe even old people don’t believe conspiracy theories about it.
I'm part of the same University at Buffalo group as the author. If this interests you, we've open-sourced some of our stuff, including a VHF/UHF communications radio and star-tracker software.

Radio: http://lfradio.space

GitHub: https://github.com/UBNanosatLab
The survey was of the victims, not of creepy surveillance marketers.

Given your way, you'd have us in the therapy chair from A Clockwork Orange.
I worked with a guy early in my career whose title was "Keeper of the Magic".
There continue to be election integrity issues with vote by mail. The benefits may outweigh the risks.

From an election integrity standpoint, the modern implementations of vote by mail is little different from electronic voting.

--

The jurisdictions that I'm aware of scan AND tabulate ballots as they are received. This permits peeking at early results. Citizens expect that votes are not tabulated until polls close on election day. Administrators argue that the pre-scanning and tabulating isn't really a count and that only the final report is a count.

--

Until very recently, vote by mail lead to a novelty participation bump followed by a long decline. Explained by losing the culture of voting. Postage is now prepaid in some jurisdictions, which may have lead to a +4% boost in participation, matching prior poll site participation rates. But it's too early to separate the prepaid postage boost from the overall boost in 2018. Time will time.

--

The transition to vote by mail is driven solely by appropriations (pork) and administrator's desire for centralization.

With vote by mail comes new business models. Whereas with poll sites we'd only pay per ballot to accommodate projected turnout plus 10%, we now pay for every voter every election. Vote by mail ballot packets are ~$2 whereas poll ballots cost ~10c. Additionally, all new tasks like signature verification and ballot tracking are new opportunities for rent seeking. Again, per voter per election, vs time & materials.

There's all new gear to buy, of course. One could argue this is no different than any other IT lifecycle.

--

Another way vote by mail is like electronic voting is the complete loss of voter privacy (the secret ballot). Elections are administered per precinct. Received ballots are binned. So very likely that your ballot will be the only one from your precinct in the bin. To protect the secret ballot, ballots must be sorted into precincts before processing (opening). This adds considerable effort and expense to the entire process (logistic nightmare). Last time I checked, my jurisdiction still was not doing the legally required precinct presort.

--

Because voters are no longer able to fix their own errors (like with the mark sense poll based systems mentioned elsewhere), administrators have to adjudication voter intent. Now that ballots are optically scanned as they are received, like a fax machine vs the mark sense systems, voter intent is adjudicated electronically, meaning there's no paper trail. Makes the manual recounts and audits kind of tricky, if not completely suspect.
I think one reason people like comprehensions in python is because they provide an intuitive syntax for both map and select/filter. As I understand it, reduce still provides functionality that you can't get from comprehensions alone. I feel like comprehensions are expressive and readable unless you try to do multiple maps in the same comprehension.

I looked up the select/filter syntax in ruby. I guess the main difference is that the name of the element you're iterating over is left implicit compared to comprehensions, but equivalent to filter.

details.select{ |item| item[:qty] != "" }

[item for item in details if item.qty != '']

filter(lambda item: item.qty != '', items)

I'm curious if the implicitness is cumbersome when you need to do a selection that combines multiple lists. How would you express the third line of the following in ruby?

A = range(65,69)
B = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']
[a for a, b in zip(A, B) if b=='C']
Gravitational wave observatories are not the same thing at all. They're a new kind of telescope, and new cosmology and astrophysics results are going to keep coming in. Confirming yet another prediction of GR is icing.
> “Provide incentive for prospects to sign up for freemium but do not provide too much value so that free version of the product is enough.”

For me, Dropbox, Spotify and GitHub all do this - naming them as examples of companies that don't is plain wrong to me.

Dropbox: 2gb of storage is nothing (weird and a bit sickening, but still).

Spotify: The ads experience in Spotify is probably one of the worst user experiences I know - so no real value here.

GitHub: no private repos for free users (might have changed?) made me choose Bitbucket. No use without private.

All in all, I don't really agree with the article: I actually do believe that a not-amazing-but-still-great experience is the way to go. See: Asana. It's OK++ for free, but I pay because it's better when I pay.
A Nice WordPress Theme for Affiliate Marketers
Right, we weren't there but from the description it seems like serendipity.
RedPRL Proof Assistant
Tangentially: anyone know where this use of the word "staff" comes from?
That blog keeps rambling on about the same old thing over and over. Maybe the author is crazy. What is being proposed here, to abandon all physics research because it has become hard? And in the end constant nagging is not fruitful to anything, unless the author can reasonably argue for a new line of research.

As an aside, Physics is not even suffering from true scientific issues such as reproducibility and direction of research.