skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post - All the points you raise are valid. I've been in this business for 8 years, seen a dozen products (HW/SW/Apps) go through FDA/CE approval and end up on store shelves. I co-designed the only product at the Apple retail stores that use blood as a user interface. Most engineers/product people in the industry share your frustration. We're keenly aware of the problems, but it's a problem with the ecosystem and hard to solve at a startup scale.

Basically, we're seeing little movement because open data has huge perceived risks and minute upside.

+ Open Data = Risk: The reason big device companies don't make open APIs for data is that it opens them up to risk. If some 3rd party creates software that uses device data and a patient ends up in a hospital, or worse, who will the family sue? The 2 person startup experimenting with health software, or the multi-billion dollar device company that didn't police every app made with their data? It's slightly irrational, but from the perspective of device company execs, opening data creates huge potential problems and risks with almost no upside. Also, the data privacy laws in the US and Europe scare/confuse many.

+ Open data attracts almost no customers: Unfortunately, there is no real money making/saving opportunity with data. A lot of promising concepts, but until there is a business model, there won't be a huge amount of focus on this area. Once there is, it will explode.

+ People won't pay for better products: Most people with diabetes have multiple meters, most of which they receive for free. The device companies work on a razors and blades model so are incented to keep costs down and use retrograde technology. When companies try to make higher quality products, relatively few people buy them.

So the best selling market today is a product that was originally designed to be a disposable meter for use in the 3rd world. It's super cheap and does the job while some of the awesome products you mentioned flounder.

Diabetes, and healthcare generally is a hugely complex market. The web of stakeholders blows the minds of most people who enter it. It will change eventually, but it's extremely difficult to bring a startup mentality to the industry because it usually requires thinking about physical manufacturing AND opening your company up to regulation AND operating in a Byzantine payment system. Possible, but improbable. If you're working on something in this area, we'd love to talk.
seems fishy
1. The dashboard is in a rough spot right now--I haven't quite finished the transition to the next-gen dash--but it does do "realtime" visualization of events matching arbitrary queries with under 50-ms end-to-end latency. It'll push about a thousand events/sec, depending on size and rendering complexity. The websocket protocol is pretty straightforward, if you wanted to build one-off system diagrams with streaming updates.

2. Yeah, that would be great. The historical event store space is pretty terrible right now, and it's such a big problem that I doubt I could realistically tackle it. Librato Metrics and Hosted Graphite are both approaching this as a service, and there's openTSDB if you have Hadoop people in-staff. Riemann has out-of-the-box integration with librato and graphite, but I haven't set up an openTSDB cluster yet.

Modbus: that'd be cool. Implementing a Riemann server (i.e. a thing that accepts events from the wire) is pretty straightforward, though I'd need to understand the protocol. If you're interested in building it, I'm happy to discuss how.
>May be just a matter of preference but for me "our site is experiencing server errors" is much clearer communication than "seeing unicorns." The latter requires me to learn a new terminology in a high pressure environment for no good reason.

If you don't already know that "unicorns" means in this context, then you are not a GitHub user, and thus it being down is not a "high pressure environment".
Our company would also love the option of paying for shared folder, instead of teams. We currently have teams, but it's not quite what we want, and if we temporarily want to share a folder with a client it is an big hassle.
> As long as everyone knows what to expect, plans can be made reliably.

Expectations are the flaw with CPI targeting.

Toy example: imagine NGDP is $100 and the CPI is 100. Fed guidance says 0% CPI growth. I have income $10 (note that NGDP is aggregate nominal income). I sign a deal with you for you to finance my house and promise you for $7 next year, assuming I"ll live off of $3.

Now a supply shock hits, with enough pressure to raise CPI to 110. The fed responds by dropping NGDP so now national income is $90 (I know the math here isn't exact but it's irrelevant to the point). If I'm the average person, I take a 10% income hit, dropping me to $9. I still owe you $7. My consumption now has to drop from $3 to $2, a 50% drop! I might not be able to do it so I might default on my loan. In any case I'm really screwed, and if I do default (and many other people also default) we'll have a financial crisis on top of our supply shock. One way to think about this is that the debtor has to eat the creditor's consumption haircut. Europe, cough cough.

In contrast, under NGDP targeting, NGDP remains the same, prices rise 10%. Now my income will still be $10, I will pay my creditor $7, and my only hit is the 10% inflation. My creditor has the same exposure.

I'm not trying to create sympathy for debtors, of course you could argue that they were over-leveraged and deserved what they got. But under NGDP targeting, debts will always be repayable in principle (because enough money will exist in the system) so systemic risk is minimized; minimizing that systemic risk is good for everyone.
How is BTRFS these days?

Also, since you seem to be knowledgeable about Linux, why do you use Dropbox at all, instead of just git or rsync or scp or whatever?
Riemann originated as a system for discrete calculus over metric streams; e.g. Riemann sums.
Study: Home air conditioning cut premature deaths on hot days 80% since 1960
>The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation.

Depends on the ratio of the people paying in to the payout. Social Security would be pretty easy to fix by reducing the payout a bit and raising the tax a bit. The big problem, of course, is Medicare, and I expect that's why a single payer plan is inevitable in the US.

These programs have problems as currently constituted, but they're fixable even if the population isn't growing. However, whatever problems we have will be exacerbated if the number of people working is actually falling.
> it's funny that "issue tracking" is somewhat constrained
> to software development

In other industries they're just called something else, "help tickets", "work orders", etc.
I should probably mention, before it's pointed out, that I mean REST is still in its infancy for web apps. It's more than proven itself as an excellent system architecture through the www.
ack '(?=silver).*needle' haystack

is really not the same as:

grep needle haystack|grep silver

Because with the double grep method, a match will be made whether "silver" is before or after "needle"; while with the single ack command shown above, a match will only be made when "silver" comes before "needle".

Also, I'm not sure why the author uses

ack '(?=silver).*needle' haystack

instead of simply:

ack 'silver.*needle' haystack
Wonderful experience. Thanks for sharing.
Make your mobile pages render in under one second
We'll all be speaking APL.
Jeff Bezos interviewed on Charlie Rose
Is it possible that the unused machine has the wrong date? Perhaps that confused the operative system file dates and Dropbox.

(I have an old machine that hardly use now that has problems with the motherboard battery and sometime it travels in time to a funny date like 2000 and all the security certificates are marked as wrong.)
One abnormally bad semantic error can be worth a thousand syntactic errors.
> Intermingling personal and work accounts

Yes, this is a bad idea.

The problem seems to be that this particular service provider has "one person, one account" and "one computer, one account" baked deeply into their design. Which makes it difficult-to-impossible for people to use more than one account.

This approach probably simplified things when they were making it; as a startup, maybe the complexity would have been outside of the development resources if they hadn't made these simplifying assumptions of the model.

But by now these assumptions are so deeply baked into every part of the service that it'd be really hard for them to change.

This is just a guess; I'm not affiliated with Dropbox in any way, and I've never even used their service.
I've heard this over and over, but the reason it won't become a "trend" in terms of people around the nation talking about it, or even people in tech-early-adopter capitols like SF and NYC, is that founders might try to pattern match what's getting funded (terrible idea and motivation to build a product), but people really just don't care about enterprise/b2b startups (press, startup people, casual americans reading 'Wired' and discussing startups/apps at the dinner table). So even if it's taking off underground, it will only take a few more SnapChat* series-a announcements to shake people back to meteoric growth, no sales-cycle, brand building type of companies.

*Everyone was writing articles about them this week - and with good reason. Startup people (founders, employees, press, wannabes, VCs, angels) love reading that kind of shit and talking about things like 'Will Facebook's X kill Company Y?', etc... If it was a b2b company, it wouldn't have gotten any attention. Not 'just a little attention', but like, none. On top of the great things the consumer sector provides (customers, no sales cycles, meteoric growth, easier to build, etc), this reason above is one of the biggest reasons enterprise will never be a real "trend".
While afaik not as complete, there's also

http://www.themoviedb.org/

The main thing missing night be the ability to identify movies uniquely by imbd id... Something that can be very nice while searching.
Patent for watching TV viewers by Verizon - end of privacy
Someone once told me that success and fame don't change a person. They merely amplify that person's qualities; you're still the same person.

Also. One of the advantages of Silicon Valley being an insular bubble at times is that however successful you might be, there's someone within a few square miles who has accomplished more. It's easy to get constantly humbled.

For every Drew Houston there's a Mark Pincus and for every Mark Pincus there's a Bill Campbell.

Obviously take everything I say here as just my own personal experience and my company is very very very early. But these are just some personal notes & thoughts.
Aren't your aspirations part of who you are? I don't see the ambiguity in that distinction.
PasswordCard: Mentally Encrypted Passwords in Your Wallet
Can you either charge for this or release it as OSS?
Difference Between Stealth Mode And Quiet Mode
Haha, great read. Still love Dropbox though. Great and fast responses, way to go Dropbox. Keep up the good work.
Lots of people use Dropbox just like this, without local backups. For many people I know, that's part of the point - versioning helps, too.

It's certainly neither 'dumb' and nor is mentioning a friend who did this down-vote worthy.
Something like this could be done with an app that I had helped to build called Reminders with Friends [http://www.slyceapps.com/reminders]. We allow you to create goefenced reminders and send them to other users.
Thanks for this! I manage a bunch of sites that get less than 10k visits/day and I always thought the speed data was really lacking. This is a huge help.
Vulnerability in FB Camera App Allowed for MITM Account Hijacking over WiFi
Don't worry... Guido will fix everything next month ;-)
Wow, awesome 3.4.13 uses 17000/7904 on my system at the moment.
Let's say I start with a Personal account. I use it for a few weeks. In this time, you are saying there won't be a Personal folder, right? So in a few weeks I am added to a Team. The Teams and Personal folders appear. Does this mean all the file paths for files inside my Personal folder change to /Personal/<prior path>?
There's a lot of validity to what you say, but unfortunately this paradigm breaks because most languages are top-to-bottom.
As much as I'd love a bottom to top shell history for the reasons you describe, I'd end up scrolling in a zig-zag elevator pattern to read the command outputs.

This is of course not a criticism, just an observation.
Indeed. There needs to be a business model based on patient monitoring device test data. A per data upload value to the health system.
I had unlimited 3g data in 2007 for $30. Today, to get something similar, it would cost $70. We're going backwards, not forwards, in terms of wireless data. There needs to be some fundamental reforms to break up the AT&T and Verizon duopoly and to open up a significant amount more wireless spectrum for data transmission.
Time stamps, collaboration, accessible from anywhere, etc
It's sort of been worked around already anyway. I see two Android phones connect directly all the time nowadays when running various software. There are whole libraries and STUN servers designed for the correct hole punching procedures, which work most of the time. Some apps don't even have the code path written for piping all the video call data or whatever they are usually sending directly through a server anymore. If they can't go direct, they just don't support users on that network.
I disagree. I used to use LESS since I could use node, but quickly realized it's inferior to the Sass/Compass combo. 99.9% of the servers that you are able to run node.js on will also allow you to install/run Ruby. What are the other reasons that I'm missing?
You know, I didn't say anything directly about people with advanced degrees in the sciences in my first comment, and I think I should have left it at that because you're picking a fight with me over a topic you brought up.
I get the criticisms against Instagram. There's a lot of validity there. But seriously, at the end of the day, if you don't like the changes...stop using the service. There's no entitlement here.

http://xkcd.com/1150/
There's almost certainly a distinction to be made between a "popular" and "successful" startup; there are startups that are successful but hardly popular, and vice-versa.

People in the popular state tend to have the challenges of handling fame; when pushed into the spotlight, managing one's image becomes a challenge (among the others of a business).

People in the successful state tend to have a slightly different set of pressures; past success doesn't guarantee future success, so maintaining business growth and product development sit on your mind.

Of course, there are folks at the intersection of these two groups, and you can imagine that they have both sets of pressures, and perhaps some new ones as well.
I think it's still pretty unclear what this function might do, since the inverse of a map isn't well-defined. I think this is a type signature that makes sense and has a fairly obvious most-likely meaning:

boo :: Map a b -> b -> Set a

I'm not sure how you would conjure up just an 'a' in general.
I think I actually know people who died due to cincgars vs other radio incompatibility. :(
I've been looking at chore monster and chore wars for much the same purpose. I've tried using dry issue tracking systems, and for as creative as these "gamified" options are, I still don't see them having enough hook to truly integrate into the family routine.
PressureNET Data Visualization: Graphs from our Android barometer network
To Thine Own Self Be True: A Social Network Experiment
Note that imode stuff, while still alive, is a blast from the past, but Japanese phone makers are still ahead of the curve in terms of hardware features and hardware integrated services (specially NFC, which exists in a really daily usable form)
I'm a front end dev using Bootstrap on some sites and appreciate CSS animations, and I stopped reading after that sentence. Are me and parent not in the target market for a utility like this just because we find the copy distasteful? It's pointless affectation.
If you look for similarities, you will be able to find them. If you look for differences, you will be able to find those, too. Is a platypus a mammal even though it lays eggs? (Yes. But why does the categorization matter?) Is Pluto a planet?

The thing about the MBTI, and other personality tests, is that they're tools. You have to treat them as tools; they're not authorities. They're methodologies. I enjoy taking personality tests and classifying myself and the like. I like having a label; that's a facet of my particular psyche. But I don't give them a huge weight; I let them influence my self-reflection and then I move on.

(Incidentally, astrology is far more complicated than personality typing. The popular kind today is just a simplified natal horoscope; here's a more complex natal horoscope that's a lot more interesting: http://chaosastrology.com/ Also take a look at http://www.friesian.com/elements.htm for more fun.)
What's so toxic about upholding social norms? You say "social norms", I say "social capital". About 40% of children grow up without both parents in the US, and the number is closer to 60% of poor children and 20% of well-off children. Before 1960, the average was 4% for all demographic groups. Growing up in a traditional family is a huge leg up in life. Popular media doesn't reinforce those traditional norms, so it's nice that we have one source that encourages the values of successful people.

If you ever have children they will be better off for your boring traditional life - encouraged by your upper-middle class friends on facebook.
And for every Houston, Pincus, and Campbell, there's a McAfee.
if you fall asleep wondering about how success will change your life you're not thinking about the right things
I didnt see 3D Printing on that list? Though the cost of home 3D printers probably wont drop to 500 or less, so maybe 3D printers isn't 2013 but 2014/2015?
What actionable results would someone who doesn't pay for the service be able to gain by this litigation?

Can a free user actually receive financial compensation from a lawsuit like this? How would a company's liability even be measured in dollars for this service?

Bandwidth expenses incurred by the user?
I use Astrid Tasks on my Android devices, and I've used it similarly. It lets you create task lists that can be shared among multiple users, so it's really handy to have some shared lists like "Home", "Shopping", etc. that sync across other people in the household. Plus it comes with a nice home screen widget, allows for recurring tasks, supports comments on tasks, and other helpful things.
I recall a discussion here a while back where an employer related the story of interviewing a talented engineer who was a perfect fit--until he said he was going to play some "hoops." That single word disqualified him as not fitting the company culture.

I can imagine how diverse THEY are! Somehow, I can't see them being culturally homogenous but technically diverse.
Gazelle- a sensible Lisp for Javascript
When migrating an account into a team, the account and all the data in the account becomes managed by the Teams admin (shared or otherwise). Letting an existing account to join a team lets us smoothly support the situation where a user has created a Dropbox account separately and needs to move that account into the team.

For most cases though, users should create a new account for the team. The Dropbox for Teams sign up process guides users towards creating a new account when joining a team for this reason.
Have a look at Astrid Tasks; It's what I use, and supports all of that.
"There is no evidence that changing the tone would make it more efficient and more effective, but there's evidence galore that the opposite would happen."

What is this evidence? Do you have an example of a project that failed because the tone of its community changed from hostility to politeness?
The HN title is wrong; it's already been fixed.
info@infometers.com
Every extra file I have to look through when programming is an added cost; abstractions add more than just CPU overhead. The highest-priced EC2 instance on Amazon is under $5/hr; you won't find a decent programmer whose time is worth anywhere near that little.

This may be relatively minor on a small project, but adds up quickly. It's extra overhead when onboarding new developers, more time spent debugging (deeper stack traces, etc.) more time simply waiting for grep to run. I'll argue that you actually spend more time refactoring as well, since you're encouraged to spend more time on the upkeep of this over-abstraction for the sake of "clean code" rather than getting real work done.

Probably more important is that you don't know your six-months-from-now problems now, you know them in about 5.9 months. I've wasted a lot of time building the wrong abstraction layers because I made bad assumptions about our future problems. At first, I thought that was a failure of my programming abilities; I've come to realize that was my failure of my psychic abilities.

This isn't an attack on you or your style, merely a few observations about what kind of effect it would have on my own work. If it works well for you, awesome! However, it seems like most of this would only be really effective by v3 or so of a product: v1 answers "is this useful and worth investing more in", v2 covers "ok, let's turn this into a real product", and v3 is that giant scary internal rewrite (that goes great thanks to your now-high unit test coverage) that creates what you would have made from day one if you actually knew what you needed.
If you read it, and apply a bit of thinking, you should see that it isn't just about "having a metro version of VLC". It's a huge codebase update, and as they also mention, this work will be applicable to other open-source applications looking to run on Metro and/or ARM.
How did this rude and in poor taste comment make it to the top of the thread?

Peteris is a solid HN contributor with 216 submissions to date, many of which focus on math or programming or shell tricks, which puts him head and shoulders above those that submit the daily sewage from techcrunch.com (or those, like me and you, that don't submit at all).

Here's a quick sample of some of his top HN submissions:

1. Announcing his business, making virtual machines accessible over the web (and open-sourcing the code behind it): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1534973

2. An introduction to pipe viewer: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462244

3. Top Ten One-Liners from CommandLineFu Explained: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200900

4. Low-level bit hacks: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1811104

5. Using Fibonacci Numbers to Convert from Miles to Kilometers and Vice Versa: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1050151

6. How I went to Silicon Valley and raised $55,000 for Browserling: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2808314

7. How to steal a botnet: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1072225

etc.

And, his submissions often provoke even greater discussion in comment threads, even when they contain a mistake (as in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3684515).

Peteris is legit (and a really nice guy besides). No matter how much you know, it's likely that he's written about something you don't know. He has earned enough respect from the HN community that he deserves to have corrections to his articles submitted gracefully and with tact, not with accusations of incompetence.
<sarcasm>

You must be some kind of computing god! No mere moral could ever understand Windows 8!

</sarcasm> (not directed at you)
Pretty shallow analysis :)
Oh, "that" Conversation Comes Up - Post-Divorce Holidays
It's affectation that serves no purpose for the library other than to make me think the author has some issues.