skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Huh, so I guess you guys just use tabs rather than spaces to get things to align properly?
I'm sure StackMob is a great product and time saver, but the title is incredibly misleading. I guess everyone does it these days to get the page hits.

"I timed it and it took about 16 hours over the course of three days to get this app up and running."

Lol. That's hardly one day then and as people have said it's not close to being a clone.
Microsoft always does well when it is killing some competition. Ever since Borland and Watcom died, Microsoft has been stagnant in development.

They really need to fix that. It's not enough to just chant "Developers!" while running around a stage. You actually have to help them.
> They'd argue that each of the new, small functions is proven to be correct

Yes, and when breaking up a large function, a very important thing is that you are giving a name to various steps as well as hiding details. Large undifferentiated functions just read like one damn detail after another. Picking good names greatly helps the readability.
It is salary and stock options, that is all.
Well, it is definitely something but it being the "Breakthrough of the Decade" seems pretty unlikely to me (given my available evidence).

I do not know well other examples beyond case of Automatic Speech Recognition, but since this case caused a lot of noise, I bet it is responsible for a reasonable chunk of the Deep learning "buzz". Here is my take about this.

If you look at papers from Microsoft like Seide et al 2011 and similar papers the reported improvement against state of the art (up to 30%) is really impressive and seems solid. Now, the technique is more or less using a very big multi-layer perceptron (MLP), a technique already established two decades ago (or more). There is some fancy stuff like the deep belief network based initialization, but it does not make big differences. The core of the recipe itself is not very new. What has changed is the scale of data we have available and the size of the models that we can handle.

With this I am not implying that this is not a very interesting discovery. But it is important to bear in mind that the change in the amount of data could also make other 20 year old techniques interesting again. On the other hand, neural networks had a bad name in the last years for understandable reasons. They are a blackbox, or at least less transparent than the statistical methods. This makes them prone to cause the "black box delusion" effect. You hear a new algorithm is in town, it has fancy stuff like remotely resembling human thinking architectures or cool math but you can not completely grasp it guts, then "voila!" suddenly you are overestimating its relevance and scope of applicably. MLPs were hailed as "the" tool for machine learning already once, I think for these same reasons. For me the right position here is a prudent skepticism.

On the other hand, this should also push people to try new/old radical stuff since the rules of the game seem to be changing, it is not a moment to be conservative in ML research :).
PaaS Under the Hood, Episode 1: Kernel Namespaces
The Shapes Of Our Sounds
I'm not missing Scheme-like recursion from Python that much since Guido borrowed features from Icon and other languages that helps me do much of the crap that used require nasty loops. (Love me some iterators!)
I registered and listened for maybe 9 minutes - and nothing interesting, just talk about the talk. How I hate webcasts!
The bids aren't binding. You still interview and both parties have to say yes. The auction is simply for what your starting salary would be if the interview goes well.
I will say I am happy with the game. I don't think it's delivered on the experience that was being sold, but I'd argue that the potential is there.

The angry mob on reddit fueled by RPS and other places hungry for pageviews has literally killed the last remaining desire I had to read reddit. Some people just don't seem to be grounded in reality and act surprised about things that were known months ago.

The game is fun, it's broken in spots and the launch was poorly done but I'm hopeful they'll fix it. You are 100% right about people ranting about it yet still buying it but we have to keep in mind that even "communities" as big as reddit are only a fraction of the people who actually buy games.
Gopher had links. At its core, gopher was links. It was a hierarchical menu system of proto-URLs (host port and path).

The primary benefits of www over gopher at the time were that the web supported text input (you had to use wais just to search gopher and you couldn't build say, a forum) and html which allowed embedded images and formatting.
Its more than just base and stock - employers can also offer a bonus (sign-on, relocation, or end of year guarantee) and it does describe the benefits (vacation, health, etc) for each employer. The offer is as complex as the employer needs it to be in order to attract talent.
Please do so and write up a post about doing it with a link here on HN. It would give your comment more credibility.
The painful thing is the "lower interchange fees for debit cards" thing essentially killed free checking and savings accounts for most low-income people (other than at credit unions). Those people don't have $2500 balances, or direct deposit, or linked mortgages, so they end up paying $5-25/mo in fees.
Google Reader’s demise is awful for Iranians, who use it to avoid censorship
Show HN: classicalrad.io
I think the point you're missing is that an oral contract is legally binding. So even handshake deals are legally binding. The only thing preventing a startup from suing a VC that reneges is 1) the startup/founder's reputation and 2) the difficulty of proving your case. The legal system only prefers written contracts because it's easier to prove in court.
Wow, that is weird. Why the hell would you translate your brand? Visiting the site from Germany is an instant redirect to https://en.erwaehnung.de/ (erwähnung being german for mention).
The negative blowback didn't hurt this Simcity launch (yet anyway) for a few reasons. First, so many people had pre-ordered it. Second it was massively hyped up by so many of the gaming sites that bow to the big publishers. Third, it's the next version of the game that will take the big hit from this reputation damage (and EA's brand in general).

By the time it was revealed to be a crappy game, inertia had carried the sales a very far distance.

I've seen this concept play out with eg NBA Live. EA produced a few decent versions of it in the early 2000's, and then produced a few really bad versions of it in a row. The first bad version sold fine, then the next releases sold less and less and the reviews were harsher and harsher.

EA had an opportunity to widen its Simcity base, that's a cost you don't see right now. More people than ever before have powerful desktop PC's. Today I can get a great PC for $600 to $800. Ten years ago, that money didn't go nearly as far (and these are less valuable dollars to boot). EA just burned a lot of casual gamers.
Totally unrelated to the topic at hand, but what is PG's obsession with tiny fonts? this article is set in 8.5pt font - can anybody read that? at 10pt HN itself is almost as bad.
I think you could chose a better analogy.

In any production code I would rather prefer performance than debugging. Isn't that the point why C/C++ programmers have debug and release configurations? to turn off debugging features on a production code?
Valuation.
lol been thinking that the whole time.
Is this largely an illustration of the value of domain knowledge? And I mean as an industry insider, not just a consumer. You don't even know what you don't know when you enter a new world.

I bet having someone on the team that had spent a couple years in the fine wine industry would have made a huge difference, though perhaps that difference would have been to discourage the entire endeavor.
You can't compare that. You can't compare a person spending on themself versus a person donating to a cause.

Or else you'll make a suggestion that we all move to slums because it's not fair that we get to live in an actual house when not everyone can afford that.
On their website it says "No obligation to accept the highest offer — or any offer at all"
But it's not true.

As someone said in the comments below Guido's post, providing meaningful stack traces in presence of TCO is possible, it just requires a little more bookkeeping on language part.
Even more important, especially for men, is to have any woman you are dating express feelings for you via email or text (pictures not necessary). This goes quadruply true if you are dating them at the office.

Electronic records are the only way to avoid he said/she said. (Word is this is how Ellen Pao's case against Kleiner is going to unravel).
That makes it sound like a. you can never get an accurate stack trace, and 2. the stack traces you do get that are "inaccurate" are worthless.

I can't speak to every optimizing interpreter or compiler, but in the few that I've used, TCO doesn't do anything to code that doesn't have tail calls, so lots of the code has "accurate" stack traces.

And when it does perturb the stack trace, it does so in a very obvious way, it abbreviates the tail calls. Such stack traces no longer have a 1:1 mapping with the function "calls," but are still quite informative for debugging purposes. Not as informative as they would be if you turn TCO off just to debug that code, but informative enough that I rarely had to turn it off.
It's just a landing page. Signed up to be notified. What feedback can I give you?
I was suggesting that there was probably more going on that wasn't divulged in the piece, but the phrasing of "i shut this down because I didn't believe it in" does come across as somewhat selfish. There were/are other people involved - perhaps they were consulted, but the post doesn't mention that they were consulted. Letting the rest of the team go on with someone else at the helm, perhaps with the funders selecting someone new to run things, would have been an option any more. But "I don't believe in this anymore" = shutting down something which some other people may have put their lives in - comes across as selfish.

Again... there's probably more going on that wasn't posted - I was reacting to what was posted, and trying to suggest there may be better ways to phrase what was said.
My concern is centered around the "What ifs" that happen in the future.

What if my site starts to take off? What if it doesn't, but is a lifestyle business? Then he decides he wants back in!

I don't want him to come in later and demand anything from me, since he's abandoned me and prior to that at least 90% of his initial promises went unfulfilled.
Unless I'm explicitly buying something with cash, I'm almost always in the state of no cash, but with my phone.
Rewrite Your Tech Resume Part 3
it's not about "highest bidder" - it's about efficiency and transparency.. in two weeks, developers have 5-20 detailed offers to pick from, and can then choose where to interview based on what companies look interesting, with all things considered. we're considering new names right now that make this clearer :)
"As soon as the lecture ended I ran to the Scheme lab. Hewlett Packard had donated several dozen HP 9836 Chipmunks to MIT. Each one was equiped with a blindingly fast 8-MHz 68000 processor."

That brought back a lot of memories ;) We had similar machines (I'm sure they were newer as this was 1983 and my class was circa 1990) at the U of Mn where we did Motorola 68000 assembly and Scheme :) They were HP of some kind and I remember them!
That's an amusing idea. It would be fine with me if that variant evolved. But it would have seemed frivolous if we'd proposed that.
Great point. It's also quite possible that without the middle tier, a lot of those buyers would have just bought the cheapest option, simply because they have an aversion to buying the Most Expensive Thing (for whatever reason). Assuming all the middle-tier buyers would have otherwise bought the cheapest option, that means an extra ~$3,000 in Brennan's case, just since launching.
What's the value you're providing to people by reselling for more? There has to be some value, else why would they pay you more.
All I want is an equivalent "Next unread item" bookmarklet, anyone know of a service that has that?
Well, you know the old saying: "It's not the size of your font, but the quality of your content..."
I tend to trust almost all techies by default, but their government, not so much. The same thing applies to the US, though, although at least in the US there's enough precedent from pre-2001 or pre-1990s to restrain the government slightly. Russia and China don't have the extended period of relative legal sanity the US had from ~1781 to sometime in the 1900s, or common law tradition from England from 1300 onward.
There's a similar trick built into fiddler, too, although that's Windows only. Does anyone know of a cross-platform equivalent for Firefox?
It turns out there exist people in this demographic who don't know how to open a PDF file. Strange but true.
Oral contracts are legally binding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_contract
Ask HN: How to do this effect using jQuery?
Hello !

I Saw this effect (https://en.mention.net/#testimonials) and i really want to do something like it.

What is the best way to do this using jQuery ? I can not think of an efficient way.
This seems like a reasonably good explanation:

http://www.askthevc.com/wp/archives/2011/09/convertible-debt...
Numerous Reasons:

o Everyone has a mobile device at all times, trying to remember to carry cash and/pens is an extra step. Cash, in the valley, is not as ubiquitous as a phone. In fact, it's not as ubiquitous as a smart phone.

o Texting is instantaneous. In fact, when we're sitting at a table having a conversation, it's not unusual for some people to be texting each other instead of talking to avoid creating a break in the conversation / side conversation.

o Central, Secure, two-party tracking with SMS/WhatsApp/iMessage. Nice Audit trail as well, and you have it all handy on your phone to keep track of things. Nobody wants to deal with more little pieces of paper.
At least for us, almost all of our "handshake" confirmations for funding came over email after we had met with the investor in person or the phone.
What bizarre, emotionally-stunted, inner life must one possess to want to eradicate one of life's most reliable pleasures.

I as deep a distrust of people that don't love food as I do of people that don't love music.
Why does the VMware Fusion provider cost $30 more than VMware Fusion itself? I'm not against commercial software, but the price is off-putting, particularly for personal use.
This is a fun demo of functional programming, but Lisp isn't so special anymore. In Python:

>>> def deriv(f):
... dx = 0.0001
... def fp(x):
... return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx
... return fp
...
>>> cube = lambda x: x**3
>>> deriv(cube)(2.0)
12.000600010022566
One of these days someone is going to make a parody "X for Y" site that randomly generates similar such things.

* AirBnB for oil tankers
* Dropbox for cars
* Uber for soft drinks
* Exec for music
* Github for food
* Twitter for fashion
I think that the examples the author highlights are not examples of that illusion. Instead, I think they are straightforward examples of how someone without the means to afford more expensive luxuries (such as a laptop with a working battery, or the wealth to pay retail prices for car parts) can end-up with more "stuff" to reduce risks (their laptop running of our juice while they are on the road, or not being able to use their car due to a lack of parts).
Gates tends to attack symptoms not the root cause. Handing out net's is more or less the same as handing out food which has many well known downsides. He would have done more long term good donating 1 billion to deal with corruption and setup garment factory's in Africa than everything else he has done in Africa.

Again, I don't care what he does with his own money but as soon as the Government subsidies charities efficiency is something to consider. Panama had a huge problem with the disease and it was delt with they now have 36 cases per 100,000 people vs 75,386 in Guinea. http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_mal_cas_per_100-malari... And the simple truth is net's don't get you to 36 from 75,386.
This is disgusting, and this man-boy is obviously mentally unstable.
It has to be confirmed, so wait till it gets retweeted/liked a few times, and not on an orphaned platform.
Think "Market Capitalization" not "top" or "limit"
Speaking of comparing mention.net with Google Alerts. The socialmention.net is a better (free) alternative.
At the risk of sounding contrarian, yeah I would be very, very skeptical of taking money from someone who is ready to invest after first meeting me a few hours ago. You're likely stuck with this person for the lifetime of your young company.
I saw this on reddit a couple days ago and when I saw that some of the documents were PDFs, I was sure that there was going to be some exploit in them. But I guess it might be (reasonably) legit.
I believe the talk about the talk only covers 3 min 20 s.
Hi,
I am a black woman and the founder of Airfordable (fly.airfordable.co)based in DC. There has been an increasing number of black woman founders in the startup space. They are very much vocal about it. I guess because I seek out to find them and associate myself with the programs they organize. For example, www.DigitalUndivided.com/ @DigUnDiv brings together 100 black women founders in tech startups every fall in NYC for workshops, pitch competitions etc. They also host events during the year in cities like Mountain View, Detriot, NYC, chicago ATL etc. They are very active on twitter as well. There's also www.Blerdology.co/ @blerdology (a movement of Black Nerds) that hosts hackathons to target black techies among other programs. I actually won first place and best startup idea at their very first hackathon in ATL that landed an investor meeting. Both groups had events at SXSWi last week. So, Im Not sure why there are claims that there are not much coverage. Either way, folks like DigUndiv and Blerdology are changing this! Check them out.
So if you're adding tests to an existing repo do you have to copy the whole repo first instead of doing a pull request?
It never fails to amaze how so many tech folk are such pedants. For all of you who are whining about this not being a real clone for any number of reasons you are well and truly stuck in the trees. You've failed to notice that this is a demo of the StackMob API which is more than a common Hello World, Blog engine or ToDo list. There is a lot of great stuff here and the OP makes a great case for StackMob. Grow up.
I thought the same! Seems the problem would be credibility though - I imagine nobody with an oil tanker is going to rely on a new startup to supply their docking with the costs involved in a belly full of oil!

Maybe you could start off small and make an AirBnB for fishing boats or something. I'm sure most fishermen would be pretty happy if they could get a small berth a bit out of town at half the price? I'm no fisherman though.
This might sound like a nitpick, but I think it's important, the parent's step-father most likely spent his money on what were advertised as cures and treatments that guaranteed to solve his baldness problems. I doubt he put that money directly into baldness research, but instead spent it on what was supposed to be a viable product.

I think it's an unfair distinction. Would I spend money on a solution that directly affects me or would I invest in a possible treatment that doesn't affect me? That belief that the first choice is available and implemented heavily skews the balance.
Last Call for Darpa Cyber Fast Track Program
"Marketplaces need a big disconnect between buyers and sellers".

This is an interesting statement. I'm not sure I quite understand it though. Can you elaborate further?

It seems to me that you are saying that if buyer and seller know each other then they would eschew the market for a more intimate trading arrangement.
I am a mention user for more than 4 months and it is far better than Google Alerts for me.

I received only 23 notifications with Google Alerts while I have received more than 1 thousand via Mention (tweets, blog posts, Hacker News comments, Reddit comments, ...). About 10% was false positive due to our Google Adwords campaign on the display network (some webpage with our ads was detected by mention).

At the end it is not perfect but it is the best tool that I have tried.
An optimized tail-recursive call is just a loop. As far as I know, there are no stack traces for loops in imperative languages.
Even once all the online/etc. issues are resolved, it's just not a very good game. I'm not angry enough to push Amazon for a refund, but it's not something I'd ever pay full price for. It's actually inferior to CitiesXL Platinum (although broken in different ways; between the two, you could have one decent game).

Civ V wasn't great, either, but Civ V:G+K turned it into a decent and worthy successor. Maybe the same thing will happen with SimCity 5.
"Someone didn't do their homework."
Wow, at first I was thinking that this was their first shutdown that really affected me, but looking at your list there's many other services that I really enjoyed and utilized very frequently.

* Code Search -- how did I forget this awesome tool? What an invaluable, educational, and fun tool that was.

* Google Video -- somewhat redundant with YouTube, but I always felt Video had a place in that it seemed to be much more liberal than YT and also allowed larger uploads.

* Google Desktop -- ok, this one did hurt. My primary use for it was to search my Outlook mail at work (f'g Outlook search is the worst I've ever seen in any product). Now I'm back to never being able to find an email...

* Google Notebook -- a very awesome online clipbook / personal wiki. I still miss it.

* GOOG-411 -- I still miss this service too. Going online is just too slow and tedious, not to mention impossible and/or illegal when you're driving (whereas hitting a speeddial for GOOG-411 was quick and easy). And no, the "voice search" on my phone is not the same, not even close.

* Google Health -- this was a very neat service that I think was ahead of its time, and I didn't use it much (as I didn't have many health issues at the time), but as I age, I'm wishing more & more I had a centralized location to store my medical history on my terms.

* Google Dictionary -- another tool I used on a daily basis. At least there's an official extension[1] that I can use in its place that is functionally equivalent (for my uses); just turn off the pop-ups and invoke it manually from the button.

Pretty scary how many of my tools and services that I came to rely on were shuttered; however, I think the powering down of Reader will impact me the most.

1. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...