skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally like where this going, though I disagree with the assertion that "it will be easier to browse".

The potential for browsing will be increased. However, the actual user experience of browsing for books on the internet still pretty much sucks. Most places take the low-hanging fruit and have pretty good searching capability. However, searching and browsing are not the same experience. Recommendations (like from Amazon) is not browsing -- it's prompting based on intentional searching.

To do online browsing well, you have to come back to what the UX for browsing in a library or a bookstore feels like. You wander around spaces, and pick out books that catch your attention. Illustrations on book covers means a lot more. And for people like me that process information kinesthetically, the spatial relationships of the books (where it is on the shelf, which shelf it is on, how many steps it takes to go down one aisle, how wide are the aisles in relation to how far I can stretch my arms, etc.) matters a lot more.

I've toyed with the notion of creating a dedicated Android app to prototype this idea. That is, creating an online browsing experience to replace my bookshelf so that I can show it off for guests. Some of the lessons that can be extracted from creating that would apply to an online browsing experience -- or a physical retail experience that includes an online component.

Looking at how Scribd redid their site to support this, I think they understand some of the issues. But in the end, it looks more like they are copying Netflix rather than really rethinking at a more fundamental level of what "browsing" means as an experience.
Show HN: Automated HTML5 Testing
My company recently launched a new QA service: Automated HTML5 Testing.

The idea is very simple: For $2k, we'll custom write an automated test for your entire application stack. You (or anyone in your company) can run the test anytime, with just the click of a button. The test can help you instantly find the big, cross browser bugs which may come up as a result of continuous integration. The test reports are easy to read - no coding required - with automatic screenshot comparisons.

We have a marketing page, and we'll be producing a short video (60 seconds or less) demoing the platform soon.

I would love your feedback on our marketing page, or what you would like to see in the video: http://html5testing.co/
The first time I saw this was on bash.org:

http://bash.org/?950581
I'm curious how long a kid could use one of these before needing to go get a new impression/print. Any dentists out there have a good estimate?

I imagine it would only last them like 6 months at best. I can't see putting a kid through dental impressions that often even if the price tag dropped.

For adults though this does sound exciting.
I like the similar argument for Alien visitors, we are approaching saturation in terms of cameras that can take videos and a highly discoverable channel for making such videos available (*tube) and so, like the neutrino detectors in mine shafts, if there is an "event" we'll catch it on camera. That gives us the ability to start computing the probabilities more accurately vis-a-vis alien visitation.
The lack of HSAs in NC is troubling - can you provide more details?
After meandering through the Euro SemWeb ecosystem in 2005 i took the idiosyncratic liberty to include everything that uses semantics (eg POS) in that bracket. But definitely get the point, ridiculously was the next choice after "here's your weekly writer app".
Is that the only benefit of the marketplace? Subsidies?

I was thinking they would have cheaper/better plans?
I think you said it quite nicely here. Why not just say the same thing in your job ad?
"Fingerprints are usernames" <-- that is an excellent insight.
I'm trying to bootstrap my own startup - Any advice?
What he is describing is basically an engineering notebook. I prefer paper, even for software, it just seems more natural to me. Plus I can easily add sketches and diagrams then.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/General_Engineering_Introductio...
you might be interested in MetaSynth (http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/index.php) & Izotope's Iris (http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/iris/) which basically offer the converse of what you're doing here. fascinating from both a technical & a sound design point of view.

the former's what Aphex Twin used to insert his face into the Windowlicker"" spectrogram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windowlicker#Background

edit: his face is actually in "[equation]"; "Windowlicker" has a spiral.
First thoughts from Chrome on Mac. Questions are stream-of-conscious rather than requiring real answers.

Looks sharp. Why is it offering me Wikipedia links in the right column? OK, at least I can make it go away.

Whoa, why does the page keep moving right-and-left every time I'm about to type. Oh, it's when I mouse over the left column. I tend to move the mouse cursor out of the way of my text area when I'm typing, and if I stow it to the left it triggers the slide-over as it passes over the left column.

Figure out that the 3-stacked-horizontal lines can close the slider. Click again to re-open --- that makes sense. But if I click to close, then move the mouse cursor off the page to the left it reopens. Repeat a few times, give up, leave it open.

Start typing. Nothing happens. Scan the screen for a typing cursor. Can't find one. Tab? Nope. Type again, don't see anything changing. OK, I guess they want me to click somewhere. Another couple dizzying screen slides, and I can type.

Ok, let's change the silly title I put in to start with. Up-arrow, up-arrow, nothing is happening. There seems to be no way to get there from here. Tab, shift-tab? Nope. Guess I've got to click. But I really appreciated that both Tab and Return took be back to the text from the title.

Type a bit, looks clean. But not sure what I'm supposed to be doing. I'll try creating a new 'note'. For the first time, open the slider on the left intentionally. Click 'new note'. Eeeeek! I'm greated with a giant multi-colored blocker in the middle of the screen. And it's wobbling a few pixels back and forth at about 2 Hz, making me nauseous.

Escape doesn't work. Back button doesn't work. Must get out of here. Click to close.

Maybe there is something I can read on the home page that would explain this better. Wait, the back button still doesn't work? Wait, they've broken reload as well? Maybe the unlabeled button on the bottom left. No --- that brings the wiggling nausea back! Fingers reflexively close the whole window with Ctrl-W.

Take deep breaths, write quick first impressions on HN.

I like the simplicity of the overall look. Design is very clean. But I wish things would't keep happening when I move the mouse, and didn't feel like I was able to test any of the features before being forced to sign up.
London (Old St Roundabout) - EDITD

http://editd.com/jobs/engineering/

Data science, devops, engineering. Hiring at least 4 engineers, and sales people in NY and London now.

We're one of the hottest startups in London (says the Guardian, top 20!). Last month, we had a new engineer join from HN, and the calibre of people coming to us from HN is just absolutely incredible.

I'm the technical cofounder, and I've never worked with a smarter group of people in one place - our team is just outstanding.

About us - we're doing the most important thing for the fashion industry possible, helping them reduce waste and make more money. Our customers are ASOS, Gap, Target, Missguided and tons of others - we're working with most of the fastest growing fashion companies in the world.
> Write less

Write more, succinctly.
Looks like it links to the second page, but pops up the printable copy that has the entire article.
Oh, you could make this run using MPI etc... no problem. But then all you are really doing is going from high density to low density ram. And that is just not as large a saving as you would think it is. Because you are expanding rapidly the number of cpu's and racks you need to compensate for the less dense RAM. A good sequencing lab does not need more RAM than that per assembly. If you have a reference even less.

Plus the science is hard enough that throwing mulitnode programming in the middle is tricky. Remember most of this code is written by a PhD student on his first real programming job. Its hard enough to go from getting it to run on something else than the PhD students laptop, never mind robustly parallelize this across nodes.
>A scientist generally starts with the conservative working assumption that proposed new ideas are not true or that hypothetical new entities do not exist, and then revises her probability estimate upwards only when the evidence forces her to do so. A pseudoscientist typically starts with the assumption that a novel proposal seems to be true, and then revises her probability downward as the evidence leaves her no choice—if she is willing to surrender the possibility to any degree at all.

That sounds more like a verificationist idea of science than a Popperian falsification process. Is verificationism coming back in vogue in the sciences? Wouldn't it be a much better criticism to say that the cryptozoologists are not scientific because they do not make falsifiable predictions?
Did anyone else feel like the description of people's appearance was judgmental? Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

Edit: After a second reading, I think I've cracked it. The author is describing Karp as currently immature, but gradually developing into CEO material. So the descriptions separate each aspect of his appearance and personality into "immature", "developing", or "CEO-like".
I'm sorry for the harsh critique. I think new radical ideas are great and people should question everything that's out there. But this way was not thought out well enough IMO.

I hope you keep it up and maybe have a follow up post where you can fix some of the flaws.

Some of your ideas are correct and noble. But always remember to take into account the real world driver and his/her behavioral flaws.

Few thoughts: Interesting would be a stochastic behavior model of drivers + driving strategies and in connection with red lights, accidents, rush hour to see what happens. Thought, that model would be quite some work in python.

Cheers
Next: cut out the dentist
Huh, that makes sense at least; I'll have to look into that.
Show HN: Media Browser for iOS - My first mobile app (free)
U.S. spy agencies face big layoffs in government shutdown
The only thing missing is : https://github.com/daviferreira/medium-editor

Good job, well done!
I'm looking for a good solution to set up recurring payments on Shopify. I've had endless trouble with Chargify (seems to be mainly that PayPal is awful for recurring and Stripe is still in beta for them), and the other recurring payments app is still in Beta. Does Balanced have any kind of solution I could use? My email is in my profile if you'd like to discuss more.
I think an interesting analogy here is the idea that there is (or was) life on Mars.

Most assumptions are that there is life on Mars and time is simply whittling away at the probability, rather than, as the article says, assumptions are made that there is no life and probabilities are increased as evidence suggests that there is.
SEEKING WORK - San Francisco, CA / Remote / Limited travel

Strategy consultant turned data scientist available for strategic data-driven projects. Experience and interest in the following high-impact areas:

* Fraud Prevention and Risk Management: Experience designing and implementing technical and policy-level systems for combating a wide range of fraud vectors -- both online and for offline, technology-enabled partners

* Pricing: Available for projects focused on novel pricing challenges and pricing/product launch strategy. Experienced with novel mechanisms such as information/prediction markets, modeling market and other social dynamics.

* Crowdsourcing/Open Innovation: Experience designing large-scale public contests, and evaluating other open innovation mechanisms. Significant experience convening thought leaders and innovators, designing collaborative workshops, etc.

Brief background:

* 4 years of experience at a top-tier management consulting firm, including 2 years of experience designing projects and managing 2-5 person project teams

* 1 year of applied technical experience in a full-time data science role. Overhauled employer's fraud prevention system, and built custom machine-learning system processing thousands of transactions per day in < 100ms. Previously had quantitative social science academic training and completed 2 major technical side projects in the fields of remote sensing (satellite imagery) and bioinformatics/genomics

* Technical skills and experience: Experienced with a Python stack for data analysis, machine learning, analytic web apps, and formal APIs. Additional experience with R and GIS applications. Experience working with a hybrid C/Cython/Python stack where speed is of the essence

Please feel free to contact me at freelancedatasf [at] gmail.com with any questions and inquiries. Happy to discuss any and all interesting projects at the intersection(s) of competitive strategy, data, and social/user dynamics.
iOS setup flow basically points the user in the direction of setting it up.
Note that when you substitute "God" for "Bigfoot" the article works quite well, suggesting that cryptozoology is more of a religion than a science.
Heck the moment Postgres supports SPARQL I might ;) also the moment I no longer need to vacuum would be a requirement. Actually postgres is the first choice, we chose Oracle when we need specific features not because we like spending money ;)
>> Having a matching fingerprint is evidence that an authorized user is authorized to use that identity.

Considering that you leave your fingerprint everywhere you touch with your bare hands, is that really true?
Better Project Planning Means Less Project Failure
This is a really important insight. The chunk of GDP that is dedicated to ferrying money from consumers to producers in the 'fashion' space is going to be hugely disrupted. The level will be no less disruptive than music or literature.

We can predict then that aggregators and re-sellers of fashionable clothes will go out of business, and discovery marketplaces like Kickstarter, Ebay, Etc, will create the channels between consumers and their products.

I would guess that small run clothing factories will be a growth industry, more so if they are highly automated.
It seems less troubling that they would go through the trouble of specially "inflating" scores and more troubling that their scaling model is apparently incapable of responding to quick changes in computational demand. If benchmarks fail to engage all 4 cores at rated speed, than does anything? Are these advertised quad-core phones really just single-core phones that have but aren't capable of using four cores?
Oh, I'm aware of his intended audience. I wrote that as a snarky way of poking a little fun at the fact that he somewhat inelegantly states a precept which -- as noted in other comments in this thread -- is kind of "Writing 101."
I'm 35, not exactly a teenager. The pilot study was published 3 years ago, comes to no firm conclusions and isn't yet backed up by a statistically significant study.

What it certainly does not say is that people who have had an owl pattern long beyond adolescence can be cured by leaving the curtains open.
People keep making this analogy but Face Unlock is not being promoted as ever being used for anything but unlocking the phone. Touch ID is the foundation of an entire mobile identity/payment scheme.
Remote working is always a trade-off sacrificing communication bandwidth for some other gain. Mitigating that cost -- because the gains to be purchased with it are often attractive -- has long been an issue in Agile circles, and its not really a "rethinking" of Agile to address that.

Sure, the Manifesto states that Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication -- that doesn't mean you can't use other forms of communication in an agile process, it means that you need to be aware of the costs and to do it only as a conscious decision weighing the communication costs against the benefits, and ideally doing what can be done to mitigate the communication costs.
tl;dr if you take the Bing challenge and make Bing your default search, try other variations on Bing as you would have on Google.

I tried the Bing challenge, and changed my default search to Bing almost a year ago. According to Google I was performing 10k - 20k searches per month, so Bing Rewards was an appealing incentive. Over a years time, those are some decent rewards.

Bing results are very good. The notable exception I've noticed is for technical, geeky searches that are probably most likely to occur with this crowd.

The biggest problem is one of "branding" and confidence. At first I found myself searching Bing, and if I didn't find the result I wanted, I'd switch to Google. The results were often very similar. But instead of returning to Bing to perform another search, I'd do it on Google. As a Google user, when I didn't find the results I wanted, I'd try a new search... I didn't try Bing. When I noticed this and changed my behavior, I became more satisfied with Bing's results.
there ll be an app for that.

edit: build an app, get your colleague, significant other etc touch it on any touchscreen phone or get on camera and create a 3d printed finger. 3d printing vs touchid...maybe
But you can change a compromised fingerprint, to a password.
You can setup multiple fingerprints (from multiple people) that can be used to open the phone.
The post's author commented: "Currently, we generate code comparable to JIT64. Sometimes we're a little better, sometimes we're a little worse. (I'll post some samples on the codegen blog as I get time) But we're just getting started, honestly. I expect that we'll be generating better quality code in almost every situation before we release a full, supported JIT (and I don't think we're that far away today)." (That said, CPU perf of the JITted code isn't everything.)
This is going right on my reading list.

And as always, it's great to see more good free technical books out there, and it's great to see a fellow HN'er succeeding. Seeing them together is just amazing.

Serious kudos!

Edit: And while this was obviously not the intent, this absolutely made me go out and buy the book. Both for the gesture of support (and the actual monetary support), but also because it's nicer to have this in .mobi format. So as often happens, karma wins.
ShowHN: GroceryHeroes - Grocery Delivery serving the Toledo, OH Area
Nate, thanks a lot for the really great feedback.

Will definitely add very brief timeout on the sidebar and investigate where the Mac/Chrome wobbling is coming from, and also add more autofocus/keyboard shortcut functions.
On the working for yourself, I get what you're/the author is saying, but since going off on my own, I do feel freer to use my time as I see fit. Of course I'm available during business hours but there's a sense of autonomy that, if I need to do something, I'll go do it and catch up later in the day or at night because everyone's aware that if I'm not working, I'm not getting paid.

Whereas, when I was a salaried employee, I always felt pressure to be in my seat and certain times, regardless of function or usefulness. It may be that my positions are a bit different now but I feel a majority of it is how salaried employees view contractors.

A point I didn't see on there and no one let me know prior to consulting was this:

No one wants to lend you money. Really. Nope, not even with that bill rate.

I'm being a bit dramatic but I've been shocked at the difficulty of acquiring financing as a consultant, it's eaten into money I spend on high rents (a note would be ~70% of my rent for a much nicer place) and on several moves. It's annoying and a very real life drain that I didn't anticipate (after some in-depth researching).
String theory to the tune of Bohemian Rapsodhy
Would love to get some feedback from you guys. This is my first app and my venture in learning iOS. It took me 2 months to learn and create this app. I would love to share my experience for anyone looking to get started on iOS development. Please note that you need the Media Browser server to try this app. Would be happy to share any information about the controls used in the app and share code samples if requested.

Github link - https://github.com/MediaBrowser/MediaBrowser.iOS

Appstore link - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/media-browser-for-ios/id7050...
Lucidchart is building world class graphical applications in the browser and on mobile devices. Lucid is startup founded by Karl Sun, a former Google exec, and Ben Dilts, our CTO. We're profitable and rapidly growing in every dimension of the business and need people to join our team. For fun we raft river rapids on company retreats, have Friday BBQs, and eat lots of pizza. Talent and ability to learn are more important than specific skills.

BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER (all experience levels)
- Lucidchart runs with various decoupled services in a Linux environment using Scala, MongoDB, AWS, and MySQL. At Lucidchart your responsibilities would include enhancing existing services, building new services, integrating with 3rd party applications and ensuring services are highly available, secure, and scalable.

Requirements:
* Talent
* BS degree

Recommended experience:
* Building large products / applications
* Scala or Java
* MySQL or other relational database
* NoSQL databases
* Cloud computing (AWS)

FRONTEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER (all experience levels)
- Lucidchart is powered by one of the largest Javascript codebases on the Internet (about 250k lines of JS), optimized so that the user experience is indistinguishable from an installed native application. Come help us show the tech world what can be done on the web.

Requirements:
* Talent
* BS degree

Recommended experience:
* Building large products / applications
* Javascript * Google Closure compiler/library
* CSS/HTML/DOM manipulation
* jQuery
* Native app development on Android and/or iOS

All applicants email resumes to jobs@lucidchart.com.
Okay, but if you steal a phone on the subway, why would you even bother unlocking it? Just sell it on ebay as a locked phone. Some bored teenagers will buy them up, unlock them, wipe them and then resell them for a few dollars more.
Please don't...my wife's a 4th year dental student :(
Case Study: Shift from Delayed Polling to Real-Time Telematics with RabbitMQ
All security is based on either something you know, something you have, something you are, or a combination of the three.

- A username is something you know.

- A password is something you know.

- A pinpad is something you have.

- A finger print is something you have.
One metric to rule them all: what is yours?
They may have said that, but Android 4.0's face unlock proved fairly easy to defeat with still photos, as many people demonstrated, e.g.:

http://www.soyacincau.com/2011/11/12/clarification-on-the-ic...
This isn't very useful, unfortunately. There aren't any requirements for this. All it says is "come up with a design!" This is about as useful as saying "Write something about any subject!"

Has there been any pre-discussion on this? Where did this come from?
Give me a real world scenario where this distinction matters and affects real outcomes. For real users, not people who are trying to protect themselves from the CIA.
Clearly.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/27/no-nsa-iph...
AI for Games, for Processing
It is going to take longer than you think. :-)
Hi Drew,

I just sent you an email. For anyone else interested in real time monitoring of servers and applications in ways that logs cannot help, please take a look at http://www.inetco.com/products-and-services/inetco-netstream...

We would love feedback to what features and capabilities will help out web app developers!
Well, that much is obvious. But if you are going to truncate, you should be consistent. Always truncate towards 0, not sometimes towards 0 and sometimes towards infinity.