skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In your blog post above, you repeatedly imply or directly state that we are its customers. I believe that's a huge error in your argument.

We are not Google's customers, we are Google's product. Google is an advertising business and we are the eyeballs it seeks. Android is merely meant as a pathway for those eyeballs. Same with Gmail, Youtube, etc.

Google giving us support is akin to a beef farm offering massages and a counseling hotline to their cattle.
I agree that some folks might need physical therapy for their backs and don't want to diminish that point you're making.

When I see someone who lives a sedentary lifestyle complain about joint pain or muscular pain I really hope that they try to incorporate some sort of fitness plan into their life and not just look into a medical expenditures.

Just to re-iterate, if you're feeling some sort of debilitating pain, by all means go see a doctor. Just don't dismiss the importance of fitness in your life.
How much outrage is there over The Playbook app, which lets men share and rate pictures of their "romantic encounters"? Seemingly less than there is over LuLu, unless I missed it.

http://theplaybookapp.com/
Instagram rumored to arrive on Windows Phone 8 as a Nokia exclusive
If you get out of shape don't be surprised when your body starts feeling like shit. Workouts can be hard for some people because its hard to quantify goals for what should be an essential part of your lifestyle. If you take a sport like archery to make exercise fun then it becomes a lot easier. But as others have said it is important to talk to a professional if you are having severe issues as a result of your current lifestyle.

My recommendations:

- Pick up heavy things, then put them back down. Repeat with good form.

- Get a good chair and a good bed. If you're going to spend your life in one or another might as well make it worthwhile

- Pay attention to your body. If something is uncomfortable it needs to get fixed. If you bend your neck to hold a phone for long conversations don't be surprised when your upper back hurts. If you have a large wallet you put in your back pocket while sitting don't be surprised when your lower back hurts.
Just because you don't NEED to be in Silicon Valley to build a successful venture backed start-up doesn't mean your odds of success are not IMPROVED by locating there.
There are a few ways that an article can appear lower than it should.

1) Flagging by people with karma over the threshold (currently set at 500).

2) For some domains, only 1/3rd of the upvotes count, e.g. Reddit, XKCD, images, tweets.

3) There is a "controversial" score which can bring down a story. Not sure how it is computed but perhaps it's based on number of comments versus number of points.

4) Voting ring detector. This can bring down a post pretty hard if it's triggered.

5) I suspect the HN supermoderators can cause a post to sink to the second page instantly.

Most of the time it's #1 that causes posts to go down.

I've usually seen it happen to posts that are anti-Apple, anti-Google or posts related to Microsoft that are not negative towards it. It's like the moderators flag posts that they don't want others to be seeing.

For example, the Surface Pro review

http://i.imgur.com/uFPTSqR.png

http://i.imgur.com/ADMcanz.png
Could you give me examples? Thanks!
App Warns Facebook Page Admins About Ongoing Flame Wars
I acknowledge that I was curt. I do, however, believe that I'm being consistent. It's news to me that it's perceived as not, so I'll take another look at it. Thank you.

And I didn't call it as a bug because it happened to me twice, it has happened to me on other platforms, and I assumed that a Google Mail interface would behave the way Google intended. I acknowledge that testing and debugging is hard, but I guess by default I had assumed Google would get it right. Your assertion is that they haven't got it right, and that this is a bug. Noted.

For reference, I work on software used in safety-critical situations, and so I know a little about getting user interfaces consistent, repeatable, and tested. I have the advantage that our system can control the hardware and environment, but I am aware of many of the issues. I'm just annoyed that hitting "TAB" caused me to send an incomplete message to an important customer, making me look stupid. I guess I'll have to treat Google's interfaces with the same paranoia as I use professionally when I write software. That's disappointing, but I guess unavoidable given their constraints.

And I'm sorry I've made you feel that you can't propose a suggestion as to what might have happened. That's really, really not intentional. But when I'm already having a bad morning, having someone say "No, that doesn't happen" when it clearly did is not a sure fire way of improving it.

So put it all down to the problems of writing software for uncontrollable environments causing different and sometimes undesirable behavior, coupled with the inability to read people accurately in a forum type of context, coupled in turn with a certain amount of stress over the whole thing.

And I apologize unreservedly for offence caused, and thank you for your comment.

Added in edit: I've upvoted you - I genuinely appreciate your comment.
Support is not a boolean atribute. There is a broad range of support intensity from user forums up to in person, on site support. Different services have different levels of appropriate support and the service provider has to decide what level makes sense - and customers have to decide what they need. (Which I admit can be hard to predict.) There was never any promise of strong individual support for this service.
>(Figures for Europe are certainly different as they offer different social services, especially for families.)

Yeah, I used statistics from my own country.

>Greater male service in the military is one component of this

Funny anecdote, here in Finland men still have conscription (e.g. forced labour for 6-12 months), but almost nobody talks about that as a gender equality issue.

>I'm one of those overeducated women with the upper hand or something like that, although due to my great success in education I'm not out-earning all that many people yet.

Education of course doesn't directly lead to higher earnings, as you need to choose the right industry and career path. Of course, I don't know anything about you in particular, but most well-off people underestimate the earnings of otherpeople. (I don't know the exact statistic, but the top 10% think that they're only slightly better off than the average or something).

Anyway, men earn more than women because they work longer hours (about 20% more in average). The other explanation is that men choose careers that have higher income (e.g. according to research for men income matters a lot more in career choise than for women).

>Remember, though, that the mythical ability to get a guy to pay for dinner and that incredible math PhD mean nothing when a guy on the street is looking me up & down & giving me a "compliment."

Err, men have to deal with crazy people on the bus too. In fact, vast majority of street violence is against men (it's around 80% in my country).
>Comedians regularly make jokes about some of the most abhorrent things that happen in the world.

Comedians who joke about raping women generally get booed and chastised and otherwise shunned. Comedians who joke about prison rape generally don't. Regardless of which you think is the appropriate response, it would be nice to see a little consistency.
A few minutes with a kettlebell every morning before my shower has done wonders for me. It is cheap, quick, effective (far more coverage than is practical with dumbbells for instance) and pretty fun.
Logn is correct, it work exactly like this. Performance Bicycle uses it, eCost.com, and Drs. Foster and Smith. I think I've seen it for flowers as well.
We've had a similar experience at https://starthq.com. One thing we noticed when writing directives is that it's often faster and easier to implement them from scratch rather than wrapping a jQuery plugin. Also, we've pushed a couple of fixes upstream and had them appear in a stable release within a few weeks due to the quick release cycle.
Actually.... I would argue that the "TechCrunch / HackerNews" mentality (as you describe it) is more common OUTSIDE of the Bay Area than it is within it.

In the Bay Area you are surrounded by real world examples of success and failure, and enough of each so that you can actually derive repeatable lessons. Outside the Bay Area there is the tendency to believe that if it's written about on one of these sites it's gospel.
> If you are gonna close a user's account, either by human or by a robot, you should notify the user before you do it, so that the user can fix the violation if there's any, or find/migrate to an alternative.

Google is not providing support to save costs. If Google implemented warning emails and some sort of compliance check or communication to indicate issues have been addressed, that would add costs as well.
"X have upper hand" implies that on average X are better off than non-X. Therefore it's not very honest to talk only about the well-off subset of X, if there's a similarly sized not-so-well-off subset of X which mirrors the successful subset.
No, I never have to be lucky at all. I literally can not put an SQL injection vulnerability into production unless I do so deliberately, my code wouldn't compile. Not everyone uses terrible rails style "lets automagically do shit behind your back so security holes are hidden from you" frameworks.
With the exception of computers, most of the economic growth of the 20th century was centered in wasteful areas: runaway suburbanization, military Keynesianism and useless wars, etc.

Funny that the kooks on the Austrian side of the debate predicted precisely that: that debt-based fiat currencies would encourage waste. I also find it very interesting that the Internet -- one of the few pieces of not-so-malinvestment that the 20th century produced -- really seems to "want" a currency like Bitcoin.
From the makers of the phenomenal Chosen jquery plugin.

http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen/

Hopefully this is indicative of the quality of this library! I'll definitely try it out this morning.
>So the game becomes not about absolute productivity, but relative productivity.

It certainly could be, but that's not what I take from the examples or experience.

I think this particularly game is more often about perception, not any actual measure or productivity. The banker quote demonstrates it even. It's about "getting respect" not necessarily getting more done.
Indeed, but they offer very low thrust. For manned space travel, you may need something that can give you a higher acceleration, even if at the expense of efficiency.

Also, fusion reactors designed for power generation have very different goals than fusion rockets. With power generation, particles leaving the reactor may be considered wasted energy. With rockets, the whole idea is to have particles leaving the reactor in a certain direction taking as much energy as possible with them. You just point the jet at the direction opposite to the one you want to go.
Time enjoyed is time not wasted.
The point is not that gold and silve were stable, but that they have been more stable and have kept more value than fiat/debt-based currencies.
it's not about having net energy gain, it's about converting electrical and nuclear energy into kinetic energy.
Brendan Eich says he has been making up for the naming of JavaScript with some more interesting names recently. Namely "Servo" and "Rust".

It all had a Metropolitan Brewing (brewery in Chicago that always uses mechanical / industrial names) Company angle to it, which I dig.
> Maybe $110 billion, $11 Billion doesn't go far in US

I've gone and rechecked, the $11 billion number from recently published estimates is for a nationwide rollout to a scale comparable to other nationwide broadband providers "passing" about 15% of homes, and is exclusive of costs of actually acquiring customers.
Likewise, I do not find much value in the visualization of the network structure, on itself. However, I really would like to see something that visualizes the geometric representation of the outputs of such Neural Network.

When I was in school, I learned that a Perceptron is an inequality represented by an hyperplane in the space of R^n (for n inputs of the cell). The numeric output of the cell can be interpreted as the size of a vector perpendicular to such hyperplane.

At the time, I tried to make the next step for a Back Propagation network. Assuming the output in each cell in a given layer is a dimension in the inputs of the next layer. Then I could project each hyperplane onto the other plane to find the non linear geometric objects that resulted. Of course in order to do that, the network structure was constrained to be 2-2-2 (so every hyperplane would map to a line in 2-D).

I lacked the math background to make it work properly at the time, but if someone is interested in picking up the ball, i think it'd be an interesting idea.
Bitcoin has not taught us that money can be produced and managed by "the free market." Bitcoin would be worthless if it could not be exchanged for fiat currencies, and there is no reason to think that will ever change.
>What can we do to help deter prisoner abuse?

#1 on the list would be to stop sending so many people to prison, one way or another. Then you can afford to spend more resources per capita to better rehabilitate/reform/etc. the smaller number of inmates that remain.
Back in the early 90's, we had a Mac only product that retailed for about $20. If a customer called in for support, in general, it meant that we made no profit on the product.

When we released a DOS / Windows 3.x version of the product at the same price, our sales shot up 10x the mac version - but the support calls we started getting usually ended up being support for DOS or Windows, not related to our product. So, effectively we were spending twice as much on support.

Of course, since we were selling so many more copies of the software, we still made money.

As a side effect, the support calls for the OS led us to develop quick scripts to get people back on their feet once we recognized the smell of their problem, which meant that they were more likely to buy our other software.

Customer loyalty is an intangible, but valuable asset, and is usually borne from direct customer interaction. When things go wrong, how is it handled?

If google did employ people to "fix the interwebz", I bet they'd find more customers for their paid services.
5 is a big part too, a moderator flag appears to instantly drop a post about 60 ranks (from first to third page). I think when you see it only get to the second page that's user flagging.
> Nonsense. Whatever the calling app does with the data will always be an additional cost over what the DB does with the data.

Way to ignore everything I said. What you said here is obviously not the case, as I explained, since for a large part, this is simply deferring work till later. Also, explain to me this:

How is the 100kb value benchmark performing 2x as many operations per second as the 100 bytes value benchmark? Do you claim this is indicative of real world performance?

And for example section 7, which does tests on the SSD. Do you really think that 30 million operations per second for 100kb values is in any relation to real world performance?

Obviously, these benchmarks are not indicative of real world performance. This database may well be very fast, but these benchmarks don't show it.
IRS claims it can read your e-mail without a warrant
Goodreads is not Zappos. They are at least an order of magnitude apart in size, if not two, and Amazon is larger now too.

Making large strategic plays makes sense when you're talking about a purchase that is a large percentage of your own company's market value. It does not make sense for a tiny buy. This would be like refinancing your mortgage to buy a Big Mac.
Facebook Home review: are people more important than apps?
Prenda Law: Paul Hansmeier Weighs In
techmeme. it's been my rss reader replacement for some time now.
I actually see this as an opportunity for Google to experiment with customer support. Seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for some basic level of support - so why not test that hypothesis ?

Setup a separate Customer Support organization for specific services. Staff with lower-skilled folks from cheaper locations (since cost seems to be such a huge concern). So a $X yearly plan entitles you to Y number of queries and gets you a response from customer support in N days.

For example a $20,000 per year engineer (very reasonable in lower cost locations) would require 2000 users paying 10 per year to breakeven.

The question is why would google even bother ?
Let's say a "friend" of mine works for a company of about 100 people. There would be clear lines of demarcation between departments, management, and responsibility but that is not what ownership wants. Instead they run a flat system where the patriarch (of the family that owns the company):

* bypasses all "managers" to assign tasks direct to the employee

* never has a meeting asking for suggested fixes, just what he thinks he should do

* will not support any directives not thought up by him

This is not standard "every office" has this paranoia. My friend has a long history of employment and they know the difference.

The problem is that they grew to care about the rest of the staff. My friend fancies himself the protector and even for a time was |---| close to heading up company operations. Nevertheless, it never happened.

My point is that the company is ripe for just such a mutiny. People are unable to do their jobs effectively and it's caused such a turtling effect that nobody wants to stick their neck out anymore.

But a mutiny wouldn't help, would it? Would it?

All my friend can see is more divisiveness separating the ownership from the employees who are already treated as a line in the expense ledger. If the owner could, he'd do everyone's job and he'd do it better than they could.

A mutiny would do nothing more than to reinforce that he thinks people have a bad attitude, as opposed to realizing one exists because of the situation.

Everyone where my friend works want to see the company continue to succeed. But what incentive is there for people to care when you are treated as if your input is meaningless?
All those employees just turned into evil drones this week because of the acquisiton?
I can't answer your actual question, but it is recommended to extend rather than embed.

See: http://www.gnu.org/ghm/2011/paris/slides/andy-wingo-guile.pd...
Neighbourhood Pool Watch - Keeping an eye on bitcoin mining
In case you're wondering, this story got no love on HN when submitted yesterday, or earlier today. This one may have more luck, and it will be interesting to see.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5517580

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5524479
Heh - I was working with a MIPS processor designer on this exact model of device in 1999 - we basically just sketched out the idea and talked about what it would take to have a fabric rack with a standard set of interconnects so that various vendors could build cards to go into it.

We discussed the challenges of various signaling that would prevent companies from being willing to participate. But this idea is really old.
You make a good point at the big importance of choosing the right tool for the job at hand, and that's the people.
Also, I think that if you want great programmers in not-so-popular languages, you'll have to pay big time for them, because usually, this people have many more years of experience.
It's worth noting that if you actually use it that way on any kind of a regular basis you'll very quickly have the ability to flag articles removed (I did, and it took less than a month and no more than a couple dozen flags)
Doesn't really matter, because all the important stuff (like online banking and virtually all government business) still relies on ActiveX controls that were developed in the IE5 days. You can upgrade everyone to IE10 but it won't help because the ActiveX controls are still there.
Helvetica Sucks
If you don't mind waiting a year.

Existing ion thrusters don't give enough thrust to get to Mars in 30 days.
I believe someone is tampering with the position of links submitted. I say so because last week or so, I submitted our startup to HN which was on the first page for most of the day and receiving some positive comments/feedback. At some point in the day, we were no where to be found (unless I utilized the search functionality), only to appear again on the first page after a while. Later on in the evening, it dissapeared again.
That's interesting. Can we have background information for these "moderators" that are given these god like abilities? We need to know who's deciding what we should be reading or not.
If you have a Google AdWords account and are spending a sizable amount of money on it you'll have a dedicated Account Executive to help you manage your relationship with Google. I once worked for a small firm that was spending about $10,000 a month with Google and we had a dedicated rep we could call any time with our problems. This was years ago though so things may have changed.

Biggest benefit we got out of it was early access to Gmail, which was a pretty cool perk at the time.
As much as archery appeals to the Renaissance Festival attending, fantasy game playing, Lord of the Rings fan boy nerd within me it probably isn't the most effective thing to do to get rid of back pain, not to mention that archery isn't a very accessible hobby for most people due to needing somewhere to shoot.

Yoga, going for a jog or swim, doing pull ups on an exercise bar, or doing pretty much any exercise which involves getting up from the computer periodically and doing something with your upper body will help with back pain, and probably be much easier and more accessible.

Archery definitely does have that fun appeal though.
Unify AB Testing, Targeting, and Predictive Analytics with Intelligent Agentss
> So I do not think Google will ever do this nationwide as it is a bad business to be in with enormous red tape, capital expenditures and geographic distribution.

Until and unless network neutrality is a secure market principle (and its not in the US now with weak regulation for fixed broadband and even weaker for mobile, and carriers fighting the FCC's authority on even those weak regulations), the revenue from Google's services face a permanent risk from carriers adopting rent-seeking policies (this is much the same kind of risk that Google faced from the potential of a mobile OS monopoly or a browser monopoly); as such, as much as being a carrier is a bad business to be in in general, its potentially an even worse business for Google not to be in.
Don't get addicted to poisonous sales
Two issues:

1)Having insights and owning bitcoins can be mutually independent variables.

In other words, it's entirely possibly you have it completely backward, and that upon arriving at a lengthy deliberation, some rational actors, are therefore choosing to take a position.

2) >"that the recent rise in Bitcoin value will continue forever."

That's a pretty decent sized strawman you've rustled up. Most people in that camp are not arguing that bitcoin will rise forever.

The discussion is about the shape of the graph. I believe both an s-curve (slow adoption, exponential growth, maturity) and [perhaps multiple] sawtooth (crash scenario) are plausible.
A free competitive analysis tool for the App Store.
The HN Rankings graph does show a slower decline, so my best guess is that it was flagging.

http://hnrankings.info/5523672/