skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That supports my statement. People will usually go free if given the option.

What I'm building is free, it is Apache2 licensed. The fact is that the self install userbase just isn't that monetizable. So the cost of supporting them is a net negative.

We do it but it is not our first, second or even third priority as a company.
I'm an AZ resident... and, sure, we've taken a beating in the National press as of late, much of it deserved. That said, if you like to play outside, this place is awesome: tons of amazing trails to roam, a vast array of places to explore.

More of more, PHX is becoming a fun place to live, full of culture and interesting places to eat. It ain't the coolest town in the world, but it's very affordable, extremely easy living. All the streets are straight lines, all laid on on a grid... you'll never get lost.

Beyond that, this is The West. When I lived on the East Coast, I always felt the weight of ancestral class issues brought to bear on every interaction -- especially, with the self-styled "Upper Class." Out here, it's all good... you can go anywhere in jeans, people are generally very nice, regardless of your appearance. The jerks who have come to dominate our politics are not necessarily a refection of the population.

I'm not saying we don't have our problems: it was 106 today and I'm a little tired of summer... but once you find yourself a pool and a beer and settle in, the heat ain't so bad.
This is a great first step. The next one would be taking transactions between large wallet providers and batching them up to reduce those fees as well.
Oh, the protocols are already in place; consider RFC2017.

Sending a link to something (even wrapped in a nice ui and container) has pretty different semantics from actually sending the something, though.
70% revenue growth in 1 month - startup report
Absolutely awesome product, congrats on the launch!
What startups shouldn't do is register dozens of accounts to spam their shitty site on HN, like alleywatch.
People never change. They are just becoming more so.
These all seem prime candidates for some kind of learning algorithm (at the very least a naive one). Like TCP's window size scaling, just for settings that are too complex to bother with tuning.
The Gift of Blunt Feedback
Certainly: a node + mongo stack, and the designer was built using knockout.js
Tesla profits could be challenged by Calif. credit-rule change
Thank you. I knew I had read this somewhere before, so not surprised to see that it's a repeat of his own blogging.
It's difficult -- maybe impossible -- to write with no consideration for one's audience, present or eventual. The writer's equivalent of a Zen practitioner's pursuit of "mind like water".

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."

-- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Since when is the price of a chip in any way related to the size of its die?
No light in film is natural. As no camera is like a human eye, not matter what apperture it is using.

Proper use of lightning is part of the art. The hardest part for the movie photography director.

What you are saying is that it was better for this movie, as a picture would be better for a realist painter's work.

There are millions of finely executed motion pictures with great image that gave your eyes the impression you were seeing actual candle light, without feeling it was underwater, like Kubrick did.
At the bottom:

Lessons Learned

- New buildings are a distraction.
- You should avoid them at all costs
- Building upgrades can destroy a culture

He seems to be totally against new buildings.
Not long before the NSA story broke in June I recall a few quickly forgotten stories about the IRS reading people's emails without warrants, and monitoring transactions and social media to find people cheating on their taxes.
All of this stuff is spot on. I especially like the bit about lack of commitment. Lack of commitment can even be expressed through things like someone addicted to gaming or watching to much TV. A friend of mine called those activities "Time-Stealers."

I also tried to co-found a company with someone that had all of the boxes checked. At first I was part of the vision, but as the project grew I was slowly removed from the project. Afterwards, I felt like I was trying to force the co-founder issue because "PG said you need a co-founder." After that experience, my formula is: bad cofounder < solo founder < good cofounder.
I went to a bar for one of my last days at a company. I felt like I really got to know my co-workers even better. I wish we would've done that on the first day.
They're doing the exact opposite. They chose an underspecified "winner". The public vetting period for what actually becomes SHA-3 will now be a mere 90 days.
This is a statement that either:

1) Tor is technically sound and NSA had to move now to undermine it before it get the size it need to be unstopable.

2) NSA is just rushing to give some arrests to other agencies so they will join their side on the closed door meetings.
I agree that for someone who already has the skills to reason with regexes this has little to offer. But I'm not ready to count the idea out yet -- it's easy to underestimate the length to which people will go to avoid being forced to learn a new way to think. Easy string matching without regexes would have been extremely appealing to my just-starting-programming self.
In general you don't want to screw around with kernel settings. You're just as likely to break something as you are to improve anything. You need to know what you are doing when you venture into this territory, and if you don't, there's not enough info in this post to really guide you.
Yes, you assume correctly -- it would be competitive-browser suicide to turn on by default. Thinking either that we would do such a thing, or that I'd pander with such a non-starter (or pander at all, at my age and lack of political ambition) is just dumb.

What would be smart, which we are looking at: adopting, supporting, and bundling Tor (opt-in). As I tweeted.
Looks like cl-ppcre.
Maybe Steve just went home.
Well it would if owners set up their readme / contrib pages with a good overview of

- "getting started as a developer"

- "this is how this works"

- "new developers should start reading here, browse here, and ignore this until later"

style info. I think this is what the AP was bringing up. And it is what was being discussed in the blog post. Lowering the barrier to entry.
Most of the case studies around A/B testing is very misleading. The value you get from testing color schemes is likely to be insignificant - unless you have a really horrible color scheme as one of the options or you have traffic comparable to Googles and Facebooks of the world.

A/B testing is overrated, imho. We have blogged about it here -> http://blog.nudgespot.com/2013/06/time-to-rethink-ab-testing.... Customers are lot more intelligent about their purchase decisions than what these blogs like us to believe.

That does not mean you shouldn't test. You definitely need to test and learn from your customers. There are other better ways of doing it, than just A/B testing as is often advocated.
Great points. Somedays I do tend to wonder what makes founders stick through rough times and as you rightly pointed out having been through life experiences where they stick it out is a definite advantage. You tend to see through the period instead of knee jerk reactions.

I come from a family where both my grand parents & uncles used to run a small restaurant as a family business, starting all the way from the bottom. And they used to do it together for 35+ years through various family situations, sticking together. I just can't complain having seen what they went through and accomplished.

For a lot of people out there that is just life. Only in software startup world we plan for compatibility in lots of different ways. Example, there are lot of people who want to know the plan for an 'exit' even before starting up. Not wrong. Just different.
> While offices for everyone sound good on paper, moving everyone out of cubicles destroyed a culture of tight-knit interaction and communication.

Please, no, do not fall for this misconception. I've worked in several "tight-knit" environments. Invariably, everyone starts wearing headphones to tune out the distraction and also starts communicating via IRC/messaging so as not to cause distraction. Completely negating any potential for the mythical spontaneous communication.
How useful is Azure storage's strong consistency property?
As an application developer, does it make sense to go for Azure just for its strong consistency semantics? Or is AWS S3 good enough, for lets say, writing a filesystem on top of it?
I score Apple and Microsoft pretty low on these two measures also. Support MS are OK to good, but listening to bug reports seems to be hard to do at scale. Can anyone provide any examples of people doing it really well?
Auto Sharing Your Jekyll Blog with IFTTT and RSS
It is from a Steve Yegge article accusing Bezos of treating his staff like assembly line machines.
considering they have a market cap of 137 billion, those are really tiny profits. Obviously the strategy at Amazon is to grow revenues and invest in the business, but that doesn't mean the parent is wrong. Amazon has essentially had no profit to speak of compared with their market cap over their entire company life. People investing in them have done so under the hope/expectation that once they reach their goal of ??? (world domination maybe?) the profits will be really big. That or they are just hoping a greater fool will buy their shares higher at some point in the future.
On the other hand:

- Tesla recently halved the deposit required to order a Model S, an indicator of weakening demand.

- Tesla is raking in up to $35K in profits per car by selling ZEV credits earned through a CARB loophole which may soon close (http://www.plugincars.com/will-likely-loss-zev-credits-hurt-...), reducing ZEV profits considerably.

- Tesla has repeatedly promised to increase its gross margin, but has so far failed to do so.

- While Nissan has invested in their own battery manufacturing plants (in Japan, US, and UK), Tesla buys their batteries from Panasonic. While they design and assemble their own battery packs, they haven't made raw battery manufacture their core competency, which could hurt their ability to compete on cost, or to innovate in lithium ion battery technology.

- The BMW i3 will soon be entering production.

- Tesla recently closed another round of funding, the cash for which will be used to bring new models to market, meaning they're about to take hit to earnings for R&D. This is fine, but the stock may collapse in the short term.
Haha, true. But I still think the result was telling, especially that a "loner" beat the group score.
I don't know how you'd prove this, but is it not true that for any real numbers, if 2 <= x < y, then y^x < x^y?

Again, I don't know how exactly to prove this, so I could be wrong. But this seems like the most intuitive way to solve something like this: e < pi, so pi^e < e^pi.
Proof That Snapchat Doesn't Delete Your Photos
Thanks, sending you an email and updated my profile to include email.
I sat there point by point with articles on why this would lead to lower wages, startup or body shop or google, and you come back with 4 lines. I'm not going to defend my points again until I see some actual evidence to refute my position.

Can you give me the citation where "there are companies like Google which don't hire foreign workers for the sake of underpaying them"

Can you show me just one article where the H1b's are above a prevailing wage? Or that is the actualy truth?
Well, we wanted privatized services, right?
Audio: Random act of kindness in Atlanta Airport. More hackers should do this.
CompJournoStick 1.0.0 Released
Thank you! I'm really glad you found it useful. Good luck with your tests :)
Very true!

But to be honest, I'm thankful most of my English professors did not care for The Elements of Style, never recommended it, and instead recommended other style guides which were better suited to me and our times. :)

I loved Charlotte's Web, though. I first read it when I was 8, I believe, and it had quite an impact on me.

Thematically, quite different, but Dylan Thomas had the same, I like to call it deceptive 'straightforwardness' and 'simplicity'. Plus, his sincerity was refreshing. He stripped away all the pretentiousness that many symbolists/surrealists can be interpreted as having. When I read him I don't sense that same frivolous nature some academics have, including some stuff by EB White.
If he's finished Michael Hartl's tutorial, I think he's already past One Month Rails (It references Michael Hartl as a "what's next" item).

That said, potentially seeing a different application (A Pinterest clone) might help understand the differences and therefore the foundations of an application.
To lump a legitimate social insurance program like the Heritage Foundation's Romneycare (which many "conservatives" have taken to calling Obamacare) in with the excesses of civil forfeiture, PRISM, and the TSA is illegitimate.

See, for refutation, Andrew Sullivan's "Since When Was Free-Loading A Conservative Value?"

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/08/05/since-when-was-fre...
Scala Tour - Learn Scala in Your Browser
> more than a third

That would be pretty trivial at the current state. Maybe that why they acted now?
Medium and Being Your Own Platform
My family actually runs a small oil-producing olive grove in Tasmania, Australia.

Our olives are hand-picked and cold pressed within 24 hours of picking. We produce about 200-250L of oil per year so it is a boutique operation.

We are currently bottling our 2013 oil and have a few bottles in excess of our pre-orders. If anyone on HN is interested in a bottle of gold medal standard Tasmanian oil, please message me for the details.
Actually, the Courersa class is closer to another course taught by Ng: CS229A - Applied Machine Learning. CS229 is far more theoretical.
What [8] shows is that nsa.gov resolves to 65.196.127.226. 65.196.127.226 is part of the range 65.192.0.0/11 assigned to AS (autonomous system) 701, which is "UUnet Technologies, Inc". From Wikipedia, "Today, UUNET is an internal brand of Verizon Business".

Both 65.196.127.226 (the server that hosts nsa.gov) and 65.222.202.53 fall in the same /11 block (i.e. a block of 2,097,152 addresses) assigned to UUnet / Verizon Business.

However, that is a huge block of IP addresses, and numerous other servers are also hosted by Verizon Business on that block - http://route.robtex.com/65.192.0.0-11.html will give you a list.

It is entirely possible that the Verizon Business is providing services to some US government agency to run 65.222.202.53, but the fact that NSA also uses Verizon Business to host its website is hardly conclusive proof of anything.
Their red wine vinegars are worth a try too. (Honestly, it's the only non-mass-market red wine vinegar I've tried, but I'm really happy with it.)
I've posted about this many times, but it's worth noting that the Machine Learning course on Coursera is CS229A(plied), which is different from CS229 the one most Stanford students take. The Coursera one is more useful if you want to apply machine learning; the Stanford one linked by the poster is more useful if you want to enter the field. The Coursera one glosses over a lot of the mathematics behind the algorithms; the Stanford one delves into the mathematics supporting the algorithms.

Here are the complete corse materials (including video lectures!) for CS229, courtesy of Stanford Engineering Everywhere: http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a...
Ask HN: What do you wish you'd known?
http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
This is a smart move from him!
Given the base rate of failure for all startups, simply not failing places you in a high percentile for overall success.
R9 Irvine - Synced Personal Assistant
I Can't Believe How Human This Wall-E Robot Seems
Show HN: Tamber | Always Have An Awesome Concert To Go See
I think that if Bitcoin is going to succeed it will be because of bank-like institutions using Bitcoin as the underlying protocol that the average consumer doesn't interact with -- but could if they want to, so this is a fantastic first step. At present money in the bank is not "money" "in" the "bank", it's an entry in a database that is reconciled every so often, Bitcoin should be used in a similar way for it to be compatible with current consumer behaviours -- expectations of protections against fraud (chargebacks), human error etc.
Apt, considering what happened to Rosebud.
Well... sure. That's Portland vs. Flagstaff, a small town up in the mountains.

Check this out: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=cost+of+living+portland...

(I've lived in Portland and while there are many things I missed about it, the ability to afford a house here is a big deal for folks like me.)
OK, now I reread and I see the claim is that Yegge is drunk. Makes more sense now.
Dropbox: Sweating the Details
Woody Allen and the Art of Value Productivity
IMHO, WindowMaker only shares the enthusiasm of NeXTStep, and is not a project depending upon GNUStep. Actually WindowMaker was implemented in C, rather than ObjC, if my memory is accurate.
can someone help me roll back my Mercedes mileage before my lease ends :--)
Can you adjust the sync rate depending on the time of day where your users live? There are probably certain times of the day when people update their tasks less frequently.
From the article:

> Weymouth said the decision to sell The Post sprang from annual budget discussions she had with Graham late last year. “We talked about whether [The Washington Post Co.] was the right place to house The Post,” she said. “If journalism is the mission, given the pressures to cut costs and make profits, maybe [a publicly traded company] is not the best place for The Post.”

Does this mean that the future of much of journalism is in the non-profit sector (think NPR)?
Comcast Wants to Monitor and Convert Pirating Subscribers
Railscasts is fantastic. That's what I am using to learn Devise and other devious gems.
didn't this car hacker know to change the title of his "microsoft word" document before converting to PDF.
Pebble watch dock
Presumably to prevent someone form buying 50K $10 adapters and then selling them for $15 each.
Culture war plus culture of entertainment.

I note the above digression in this thread -- which incidentally is higher upvoted than the present thread -- wherein people marvel at how similar the recent abuses are to the plot of the TV show "The Wire".

Tune in next week! Until then, tune out.
i'd like to see those who always say "not gonna happen". bet they still say it doesn't exist.
looks like you americans are fucked. literally.
have a hard time to hope that this makes you take your country back...
Presenting XKeyscore: What the N.S.A. Is Still Hiding
At the same time, the default settings have been tweaked by domain experts over decades to be reasonably good for the general case. Not everyone might be interested in shoving a a complex, un-tested, un-debugged learning algorithm into their kernel. Still, interesting proposal . . .
I'm surprised that nobody (not even the article) has mentioned the militarization of police as a symbiotic factor. Surely the desire for SWAT units (and all the fancy toys that go along with them) fuels this practice -- and in return, the practice fuels the growth of police militarization.
Again though, the defendant's own lawyer is able to instruct his or her client on the actual potential sentence that the defendant is likely to face. It is not a number that can be calculated a priori as it depends highly on the charges for which a conviction is actually obtained, what types of evidence survive (or don't survive) the trial process, and way more factors than can be encompassed in a straight scalar value.

That imprecision in sentencing certainly annoys the technical minded, but it is a feature compared to what happened before, where you sentence depended much more on the judge you were assigned and how the judge felt that day, than on what you were actually convicted of.

Certainly most defendants do plea bargain, but you have provided no explanation why the reason plea bargains occur is related to the maximum sentence quoted for a press release. It is, I would say, just as likely that the reason people take the plea is that even the realistic sentence under the Federal sentencing guidelines, as explained by the defense counsel, is still harsh enough that the plea bargain represents a better deal than playing the acquittal lottery.

Obviously the prosecutor will point out that the maximum theoretical sentence is something completely different, that's their job in the adversarial legal system. If it helps in securing a conviction it's mission accomplished. Likewise it is the job of the defense to explain that the likely sentence is something way different, that a given plea bargain is a joke, that evidence can be thrown out in court, and that entire cases can be thrown out on technicalities.

I'm not sure why you would feel better if defendants went through a kangaroo court where justice is dispensed within days and the convicted are forgotten just as quickly, but I certainly don't see how that would lead to any decrease in wrongful convictions.

Someday we'll give up on this war on drugs, and that will help with the backlog, but even then plea bargains will be more beneficial than harmful to defendants.