skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Facebook has the resources to take any idea from anywhere and turn it into an app that gets a heap of attention and rockets to the top of the App Store chart in less than a day.

The scale of Facebook resources (or Google's for example) makes it easy to clone pretty much any product that fundamentally enables two or more users to interact. At a certain scale of resources, most software products are easy to clone because rarely are they based on some fundamentally new/patentable/distinguished technology. What's hard to clone is the interaction, and it's for that reason that this probably wont make much difference to Snapchat. I've only used Snapchat a couple of times in the past and the type of interaction it enables doesn't relate to the way I think of Facebook at all (and I suspect this will be true for most Snapchat users). Ultimately, almost any app, at infancy, is easy to clone - Facebook could have cloned pinterest/twitter/path/quora etc (and at times it tried), but that's not what killed them/would kill them. If they do die, it will more likely be from not tending to their community & executing on their vision. Frankly having Facebook clone your product is probably worth its weight in press alone.
Honestly, I don't think danidiaz was trying to be clever so much as not knowing about the existence of filterM. A good chunk of the code was just an implementation of it:

filterM' f xs = map fst . filter snd . zip xs <$> mapM f xs

So, given filterM, the code would have looked like

nexist n xs = take n <$> filterM (fmap not . doesFileExist) xs

Which doesn't look clever at all and it's fairly easy to understand.
Isn't focusing on the placebo effect ignoring the broader and more important question of the impact of state of mind on the body's ability to fight disease and heal itself? Once that question is well understood I imagine the understanding of notions like the placebo effect will simply fall out.
Not all of us can be so selective with people we work with.
Speed is an important factor. I like optimizing it because increasing speed has no downside if it's done properly. Optimizing speed usually has side benefits as well. For example, cutting a lot of heavy images results in a more attractive page. Optimizing data queries on a production site leads to improving tests.
If I may add something to my original comment: it, of course, wasn't meant to show that US people are bad in general. I just wanted to take apart a country that praises itself as kind of the pinnacle of civilisation, to show that it isn't so.

The same could be said for any country -- though the US, by it's sheer power and constant warfare over its interests and for its economic benefit, plus it's bizarro half progressive/half medieval internal landscape is one of the more dangerous examples.

That said, most of Europe has similar atrocities in it's past and/or present -- and some other countries too (e.g. Japan and their occupation of Manchuria).

Now, civil wars and intra-country badness one can understand, even wars with neighbouring countries over some dispute. But what is especially dangerous and hideous is when countries exploit or invade peoples and countries that have never done any harm to them.

Kind of like the British Empire ruling over India, or France over "Indochina". Or the african-american slavery. And what's more dangerous is being hypocritical about it, in the "yes, but we built them an infrastructure", or "yes, but we brought democracy to them" sense.

And one last thing that's extremely dangerous is to thing that those things are "of the past", and now "we have progressed above them". Not so. For example, segregation might be in the past, but 70% of prisoners being non-whites still holds. The massacre of the native indians is in the past, but that doesn't mean that they have their lands back now. Or for Europe: colonisation might be past, but that doesn't mean that old colonial powers don't interfere constantly in their old colonies, pushing specific politics and politicians. An example: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/inside-france...
>So I'm not seeing any problem here.

I suppose if the target audience of this application is "st0p", then you'd be correct. The rest of us don't necessarily get the luxury of choosing what sort of sense of humor our employers have.
They had someone, who seemed to be doing a good enough job. Now they have to find someone else to do that job, while competing with a new fork of the code.

And the cost of obsolete code is not a bit of web storage; it reflects on the project as a whole. The GNU userland tools have been important for Linux. But what happens if people move to different user land tools?

It's not super important, but it is a shame that people leave projects.

Perhaps if free software and open source software had invested in a bunch of diplomats to translate the flames between De Raadt, Torvalds, Stallman, etc things would look very different today.
Contemporary math does not attempt to make its claims verifiable in the sense you describe, because it proves them. There might be a flaw in the proof itself (and there is active research in creating programs to check proofs).
Sometime proofs in math our of the form you describe. For example, the (most well known) proof that sqrt(2) is irrational is a challenge to find the simplist fraction of to intergers that equals sqrt(2). The proof then goes on to show that any possible response you can provide to the challege is false. Simmilarly, for any mathametical claim, if you can provide a single counter example then you have dissproven the claim. Not being able to provide a counter example does not prove the claim.
Thanks for the response, and I agree with you by and large. Regarding the exact skin dosage (something the medical field goes to great lengths to minimise), the jury is out as far as i can tell, as testing of the equipment has been miminal. I wouldn't be that surprised if backscatter imaging did turn out to be safe, my problem with the technology is that it is basically untested and has not had its safety validated via independent large scale testing. With any health related screening test (especially one imposed on a massive population) there is a high bar set for causing minimal harm, as there should be. With backscatter screening there appears to be no decent safety checks, poorly qualified screeners, and worst of all, minimal/no evidence that the screening test catches any of the problems it's supposed to. I see it as a pointless radiation dose.
> But there seems to be a big difference in kind between what's being suggested for hypermedia APIs and the example of RSS.

Well, RSS is just a simple example: its domain is small. Which is why it's nice to talk about. If you need bigger and more powerful things, than stuff gets complicated.

> With RSS, the client doesn't need to know very much--only one method is supported (GET),

I should have said ATOM and ATOMpub; it has a slightly more complex edit/delete workflow as well.

> The IANA define some other generic link relations, but there seems to be a very big gap between generic link relations ("self", "back", and so forth), and application-specific link relations that are necessary for non-trivial apps.

Right. The idea is that you use app specific ones at first, then, as you find they're useful and stable, you make them a generic one.

> How is GutHub's API useful to hypermedia libraries?

This is backwards. It's more like "how are hypermedia libraries useful for implementing the GitHub API."
> Failing all that, you better hope your idea is patentable but even then to survive as a patent troll you have to be willing to commit the legal resources and talent to make that work.

I think you're conflating ideas that are easy to clone with ideas that are easy to derive, and thus leading yourself to the pejorative "patent troll" for something that's nothing of the sort.

If you spend years designing something, figuring out the optimal way to do things, doing experiments and testing, etc, and then patent it and license it (and sue those who copy without licensing), you're not a troll, you're using the patent system for precisely the purpose for which it was designed: to protect investment into ideas that are hard to derive but easy to copy.
They reset the timout everytime you type another letter. That approach seems to work quite well, unless you are a very slow typer.

However I have just implemented another approach to deal with that issue. Now, the history is updated either when the current field lost focus or when you move the mouse, after you entered something. Please try it out and let me know what you think.
What are your criteria for this? "Beautiful" and "drives conversions" are two different things.

Also lots of threads on Quora by special interest (e.g. https://www.quora.com/Onboarding/What-products-have-the-very...)
Where can I buy it without the Pirate Bay Link?
Hi! I am also a programmer (14) and would love to talk you and maybe code together! Email: Zbaker1398@gmail.com
I see this piece suffers from dramaticism and romaticisim.

>On our computers and phones, we plot a route not from A to B but from ourselves ("Allow current location") to anywhere of our choosing.

And we did the same with paper maps, except we had to locate ourselves on the map. That the tiles are "off the screen" or another fold in the map is irrelevant. But it makes for nice romanticism.

>But satellites know nothing of the beauty of hand-drawn maps, with their Spanish galleons and sea monsters, and they cannot comprehend wanderlust and the desire for discovery.

Both 'hand drawn' maps and satellite maps only have as much embellishment as the cartographers and publishers find appropriate. Digital maps could have embellishment (and do in the form of easter eggs); regardless, they could have monsters and sea serpents just as well as their paper/vellum versions.

>Digital maps are the enemies of wonder.

Huh? Really? I feel they allow me to wander even more than with traditional maps. I can take a trip down Asakusa or Tallinn and see what it might be like if I went there in person, albeit more realistically with less imperfection (erroneous imagination).

The whole article is about personal projection, which is fine, but it should not pretend to be insightful.
I'm still a little confused. It seems the "poke" is encrypted, so they encrypt the picture that's sent. But then the encryption key is deleted.

Does that mean the "encrypted photo" is deleted after 2 days, or is the photo's "identification key" (like a hash or ID) deleted after 2 days?
Tech Millionaires under 30
College offers you a way to live for free, do very little work and a massive range of social opportunities. A degree is inevitable and honestly secondary, they are not the problem.
Bash autocompletion is included, though I haven't tested it yet.
> The fact that thousands of mathematicians have used ZF for about a hundred years without finding a contradiction makes me confident that even if it's inconsistant, we should be able to patch it up easily enough. But honestly I don't expect that to happen.

As an example of this, the Greeks assumed that every number was rational (actually, that any two numbers could be expressed as an integer multiple of some common unit). When they did prove that this was false, they re-worked math without it and found that (almost?) all of their other theorems still worked even without the assumption that all numbers were rational.
Ask HN: Recommendations for screensharing demos with prospects?
Hi HN,

I am trying to set up phone calls where I do demos of my startup to prospective customers.

I'd like it to be simple, intuitive, lightweight.

- Ideally it's easy for users to type in a URL or go to the site and type in an access code without me sending them something (if possible, but not required).
- supports linux (for me) -- gotomeeting was really bad about this initially
- Cheap/free is good, but I'm willing to pay for quality
- must be web-based -- can not require software downloads
- ideally supports a wide range of browsers -- I expect my customer base to be largely using legacy IE versions...

I recall seeing something here on HN before that looked really good, but I can't seem to find it now. Any recommendations are appreciated.
That sounds like a self-fulfilling statement.

There are other options than the two you've outlined. What if they find someone to maintain it, who isn't that good? How come the GNU Hurd hasn't yet been disposed of?
(most ignoring the post and going off on a rant)

When I read the title, I see "Why I left a culture of strict rules and judgement to be happy and do whatever the heck I want."

It's kinda simple really. Why go to college when you can work for yourself, get hundreds of thousands (millions?) of dollars to play with, and not have to study, try, and stress out about getting The Right Answers all the time? Going your own way removes an entire level of judgement from your life. You get to cut ties with the voice constantly whispering "I may not be good enough." But -- then you may never know how good you can be. It'll take you longer to figure out you don't know what you don't know.

It almost feels like "Why I stopped training 8 hours a day to qualify for the Olympics and instead decided to become a fisherman in Hawaii." (Sorry, my analogy machine is on the fritz.)

Be happy, do good work, but not everything in the world can be a my-first-crud-app (though, we haven't found a limit to my-first-crud-app success yet -- there are still tens of thousands more that can be made and generate significant income for the owners). The most impressive things to come will take comprehension obtained through learning, pain, failure, growth, then finally, one day, understanding. If too many clever people abandon the pain of learning for the joy of quickish superficial success we won't be advancing the world very quickly.

Life is pain, highness.
I don't particularly want to pay for software, but I'm willing to (really, happy to) if it makes my service better, more reliable, etc.

I really don't care if instagram publishes all my photos for money as long as I can too.
Wait, my engineer-sense is tingling. Why are they just deleting the key? If they really couldn't access the Poke after deleting the key, wouldn't they want to save storage costs by deleting the encrypted message contents too?

Unless, of course, the key isn't the only way the message can be decrypted.
The incomplete list of children Obama has killed with drones
I'm not actually trying to use patent troll in the pejorative sense, so I should have clarified that. I agree entirely with your point, but it doesn't disagree with my primary argument that patenting an idea and licensing it isn't a simple endeavor and still requires you to put more into it than an idea.
Yes, I use "scrapy crawl <spider> -o <spider>.json" (see bootstrap.sh). Sphinx can not index JSON files directly, but it can index an XML stream written to stdout by a given command. So I have written a script (sphinx/xmlpipe.py), that reads the JSON files generated by scrapy and writes the crawled recipes in sphinx's XML format to stdout.

There are alternatives to Sphinx? ;)

* Sphinx is ridiculous fast, as you can see when searching. But even building the index takes only 340ms (from which 220ms are spend by the python script that generates the XML) for 1699 recipes on my 3 years old notebook.

* Sphinx don't require a RDBMS to index documents from. It can index documents from any source. You just need to write a simple script that brings the documents in the XML format expected by sphinx.

* Sphinx is not only a full text search engine. It is also a multi-value store. You can add extra information like the title and url to indexed documents. And so you don't need an additional database.

* I need the ability to limit a fulltext search to sentence boundaries. I don't know if there are other fulltext search engines that can do that.
I suspect it's even less than that. A fancy (= expensive!) bicycle hub dynamo has an efficiency of about 70%, and that's assuming that it's operating at peak efficiency, and that there are no additional mechanical losses in the lamp.
This needs a better title (it's about YouTube's lack of an appeals process for takedown notices).
I should have mentioned in the post that I do have an iPhone 4 (with Retina). I regularly switch between that, an iPod touch, an iPad Mini, and 1st gen iPad.

For me Retina feels "brighter and more crisp", but it does feel like "it's nice, but not a game changer."

For me the form factor and weight of the iPad Mini wins over the higher resolution display.
>data scrapper

What's wrong with the data? Why are you getting rid of it?

Also: your server is struggling with the small amount of traffic you're getting..
Fails because ow my eyes are bleeding.
> It almost feels like "Why I stopped training 8 hours a day to qualify for the Olympics and instead decided to become a fisherman in Hawaii." (Sorry, my analogy machine is on the fritz.)

You clearly haven't met Leo in person...
get a tablet and a wireless keyboard. Maybe a nexus 7. That way youcan be portable and type up stuff when you need to. Plus you could write notes on it, though. Some people like to do that on their tablet. (I usually don't) . The nexus 7 is a small tablet granted but it's powerful, built well and if you don't mind spending the time figuring it out, probaby producted. Plus wouldn't you like to have 8 hours of battery vs the 1.5 hours you'll get on a cheap laptop?

just a thought.
Snapchat was a clever take but not particularly defensible.

The real test is whether FB will allow a strong competitor to survive and continue to consume its api.

Basically Twitter did the same thing to many of the basic tweet consumption & production apps -- the killer move Twitter made, though, was cutting off api access to those competitors, which FB have not AFAIK done. (Though another comment mentions that the find friends via FB feature is gone from snapchat, I haven't seen anyone commenting that they were cut off by FB and will assume it was snapchat's decision to remove it.)
Odd, I haven't really felt a difference between my iPad Mini and my iPhone 4.

I definitely don't have perfect eyes; I wonder if that's a factor.
Seems somewhat silly, the idea that it's difficult for a company to not store your stuff.
Dropbox was (and is) a great implementation. Photostream is basically hit or miss as to whether it will sync a photo to my personal photostream, and we wait for hours for "shared" photostreams to pick up.

Meanwhile, when I share anything in my Dropbox, personal or shared, it basically syncs real time - as in, while we are talking on a chat, I drop a file into my shared folder, and seemingly at the same time I say, "I dropped a file in our shared folder" the person at the other end says, "Yup, I got it"

It's beyond me why Apple still can't get photostream to be that responsive with their resources and control over the platforms.

Dropbox had to figure out when a file landed in a OS X folder - Apple controls the operating systems!
www.theminecraftmovie.com
Likewise: when I was debating buying a Macbook Air and a Macbook Pro 13" with Retina. To me, the higher resolution display wasn't worth it.
HN is filled with this kind of crap these days
There is http://www.screenleap.com/

I have participated in online presentation / demos where this was being used. Trouble-free it was.
Do moderators have the ability to change titles? When I posted this, the title was "Achievement Unlocked (thoughts on bogus DMCA takedowns)" I don't know when or why it changed.

EDIT: I updated the title of the blog post to "Thoughts on YouTube's DMCA Takedown Process." Could a moderator please update the title of this submission? Thanks!
This doesn't work at all on a Retina MBP in Safari. First image didn't animate at all, "Lenna" image flickered but at a rate that didn't make it really visible.
Papers from the 14th Space Manufacturing Conference (2010)
They did not get 800lb by happenstance, so stop being silly with all these trojan APIs and put-all-your-data-here-in-my-cloud trap, build your own stuff.
Get in with the agencies but still do your own stuff. You need to network to get work and they do the vetting of your quality of work and administrate it. It's annoying they take margins but just keep making yourself valuable and you can pass up work when you want.
Making sure no pokes end up getting stored on a backup, or in a cache, or temporary directory, could be tricky. Having to only have one thing, stored specially, to clean out might well be easier to organise in a big already existing framework.
Would you care to contribute something beyond what was discussed in the article? Do you also think gnuplot and Gnutella should change their names? Given that Nikos controls the gnutls.org domain, should be obligated to turn control over to gnu? For free, or can he charge them for the transfer?
Rockefeller did this in the 19th century. He would enter a new field and go around and offer a good payout to competitors. If they took it and he liked their company he would put them on his board. If they didn't take it, he would push them out of business. Eventually he had a monopoly.

Seems like smart business to me, just as long as you offer competitive compensation first and you don't do it all the time.
I wasn't arguing that our current "property rights regime" doesn't count as regulation. I was only arguing that that regime is voluntary; you do have a choice to opt out. That choice may not be very attractive, but it's still a choice; choices don't always have to be between equally attractive options.

In short: something can be a regulation and still be voluntary. Speeding laws are regulations, but lots of people choose to violate them.
Except the mentioned are not software but services. I think that it is a bit more complicated than that. Consumers need some legal protection and the current EULA and TOS with - no rights for you sir, any, at all - should be sent into oblivion and declared void. Then we can talk about money.
I think the arbitrary choice of 48fps is the problem. I know it's easier to down-convert to 24, but it seems 48 just isn't right for our eyes.

The human eye can process about 60fps. I love the idea of more frames, but 60fps might be better, and eliminate the "fast-forward" jittery look.
This might be the most elegant post I have seen.
Yeah, far be it from Facebook to use the pictures you post to gather personal data on you.
Hmmmm. Dunno. If you have baisc experience and a proper grasp of programming and live in the westeren world, you might not know beforehand if an employer had humor, but you can still choose your employer.
Difficult because of automatic backups, archiving, and such.
That may happen for some of the gifts, but I have made a habit of buying things that the receiver wants, but doesn't know exists -- i am pretty good at it too.
Parent Pep Talk: The Key to Winning is Getting Better at Losing
You did say your analogy was on the fritz, but still... the "training for the olympics" analogy has a huge flaw: When he gets his degree, it probably wouldn't change anything, the coolest thing he could possibly do would probably STILL be that same startup, or something equivalent.

So why go through college? He can probably learn just as much, if not more, doing what he is doing now. The only thing I see him missing out on is "the college experience", which is a lot of different things for different people.
YouTube does have a process to appeal complaints, though I've never had any success with getting them to restore a video.
Understandably for a PAAS they tell you to treat memcache as if it wasn't there and make no promises as to the quota.

The reason is that they can twiddle things around behind the scenes without anybody architecting their app around a particular memcache performance fingerprint. If you think about it, that's how you are supposed to treat something ephemeral as memcache anyway, best effort availability, not to be relied on.

I wouldn't worry about this too much. Their datastore being a sort of blackbox is more of a problem. Check out the Khan academy dev blog, this is not a bottleneck.