skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great news. Shopify is the one piece of ecommerce software we use that isn't completely maddening. (Having a fantastic API is a large reason why.)

I was struck by this comment, though:

"Using Shopify and Shopify POS together reveals our true
ambition: To be the first company in the world that fuses
all the distinct parts that are needed to run a complete
modern commerce business - all in one amazing product."

If anyone thinks they can run a complete business using only Shopify, they're sorely mistaken. It's only a shopping cart. If you want to actually ship items, you need to use one of their third-party apps or roll your own. Those apps are the reason that ecommerce with Shopify is still frustratingly difficult -- unnecessarily so.
The position of a camera inside a room is neither an invention nor patentable

Well it is de-facto patentable, in that this patent was granted.
Information overload is depressing. No, I mean it can cause depression. Mild perhaps as opposed to clinical, but you're more stressed when overloaded. My first thoughts on reading the title, however, went here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9pD_UK6vGU

"Life is easier and the world is a much happier place when you're dumb."
660GB was just a small benchmark. The real thing uses more than a petabyte of raw data.

Pandas uses NumPy internally. You could use Deliroll as a replacement for NumPy in Pandas to get a nice interactive environment for amounts of data that can't be easily handled with plain NumPy.
I thought I'd heard that line before...
I'm curious, what do you think needs tightening up?
I think the key term there is "vision" vs "what we believe we are right now"
Great answer! I thought exactly what you describe; a lot of depends on lexical knowledge about the specific language...
I was using Anki to learn key combinations of my IDE, editor, and terminal commands, but I did not thought about to learn a language with it! I will definitely do it!
Happier at the moment but possibly a lot madder when you find out how terrible the future might become.
Ask HN: making a living by playing poker online?
Anybody doing this? If you've got decent self control and math skills - can it be a good way to make some extra money? Or do you feel you need like 10 years of experience and full time dedication?

Got interested in it after reading a (probably pretty exaggerated) story on the life of http://instagram.com/danbilzerian

BTW what online sites would you recommend for it?
If your goal is to destroy all telecommunications companies, then you'd have to out raise them by at least 50%.

If your goal is for their lobbying expenses to rise to the point that there are meetings called and they have to decide whether to invest more than they really want in Washington, you can get away with spending 10 or 15% of what they do.

This especially true if articles written about your position sell easily to newspaper readers.
I think anybody can, but the question is only in how much time?
I think you've misread what I wrote.
Bitstrips $3M Series A From Horizons
Challenge your own preconceptions: Take the 'ignorance' test
New Tools to Take Your Games to the Next Level
I made the decision to quit news broadcasts (TV and radio) some time ago and I don't consider myself any less informed.

Scientific research publications, local papers, special-interest blogs and good old fashioned conversation are more than enough to get the useful information.

It's extraordinarily rare that the TV/radio news ever contains any information that's directly useful to my life and I have better things to do than pan for gold whilst being subjected to varying degrees of propaganda.
I do not believe that news itself is bad for you. Reading about horrors and then doing nothing to follow-up is bad for you. But these days I do not have to do that. I am not helpless. I can see the Philippines being destroyed and donate money, donate time, talk to people I know who are from there or who are there now. This is true of any event. We are ruined by inaction, not by information.

I can consume any and all news and have it be beneficial to me. Not because I now know facts, but because I can understand each of the stories as a glimpse into the lives and processes of other people in all disciplines and all walks of life. In doing so I can create equality where, in my own mind at the least, it may not have already existed.
I think you're right, except for the last line "unnecessarily so." I haven't seen any ecommerce builder do a better of this- I still think Shopify is leading the way on this (which means that it may just be a really tough problem).
Julian Assange and Eric Schmidt talking about Bitcoin
>If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures.

That pressuposes that the "good guys" would be the victims here. How about the opposite?

What about regular "democratic" superpowers doing it to poorer countries they want to control, as they have done similar things all along the colonial and post-colonial era?

The way dictatorships in Latin America and Middle East got weapons, supplies and a helping hand from the US for example against their people or neighborhooding countries.
Fleksy Launches Its First SDK Partners On iOS
How Square Register’s UI Guilts You Into Leaving Tips
As an Ottawan living in the Bay Area, and a very happy customer, I couldn't feel more proud. Tobi, Harley, Mark, and everyone else, keep being awesome!
This is interesting. My current project is a fraud detection system. We currently leverage Cascading/Hadoop. But I wanted to make sure the system is not Hadoop-centric. So I made a point of having the system be language agnostic. It looks like there might be a fit for this tool.

I passed the slides along to my team to see what they think. If they just impress upon the team that we need to store something other than just 0x0A delimited text files, I'll consider it a win.
Show HN - Relatable.io, turn spreadsheets into customizable apps
Hi HN,

We've been working on a product idea and would like your feedback.

The product site and app can be found at: www.relatable.io

The target consumer is small businesses that run their companies out of spreadsheets. Our web app turns those tables into simple grids and forms with validation. Users can then create new tables in the product and relate data to other tables. This is all done by users and doesn't require custom app development.

We'd like to add a bunch more features, but would like to know what more people think. If you have any issues in the app and would like 1 on 1 support please email me: support@relatable.io
This White House petition on Internet privacy now requires a response
"Any locked (or lock-free) pointer queue with the right ownership semantics will give you what ZMQ does within a threaded program."

OK, now I think you're trolling, perhaps by cutting and pasting from random technical manuals. What you said there makes no sense at all. Could you paste some example code please?

"A coroutine library will get you even more flexibility if you just want to setup pipelines."

Now I know you're trolling. Coroutines are completely useless for real concurrency like decoding audio and video in the background simultaneously - because only one coroutine can be executing at the same time.

"If you want greater scalability, there are lots of non-blocking I/O event libraries (libuv/libevent/boost asio). None of these solutions involve moving to a message passing model."

What if I don't really care about I/O? What if I have a small program that needs to use multiple threads on multiple cores to efficiently search a large problem space while doing video decoding in the background and having a responsive UI? I must just link to Boost? Er, no thanks.

"I'm not discrediting that operating between threads is a handy addition to ZMQ, but using it for communication between threads seems like a lot of work (moving to that message passing model) if you never intend to leave one process."

Compared to getting synchronization right, optimizing critical sections, debugging random failures under load, it's trivial.

"I do happen to like messaging, but when your data becomes complex it's a right dog...you're now in the world of protocol design."

I'm going to assume that you're still in school or not actually a programmer. ZeroMQ is used by AT&T, Cisco, EA, Los Alamos Labs, NASA, Weta Digital, Zynga, Spotify, Samsung Electronics, Microsoft, and CERN (I grabbed this list from its front page). CERN just published a report in which it evaluated ZeroMQ for a custom middleware solutions running 4000 server processes communicating with 80 000 devices for a total of 2 000 000 I/O points that could be queried. It aced the requirements. Erlang has used message passing for decades in the telecoms industry which has enormously complex data and unique realtime, distributed requirements.

Protocol design is easy. Main thread creates child. Child loads video and reports its ready. Main thread sends START. Child thread receives START and starts. Child thread reports DONE when done. Was that so hard?
I built a private app for fulfillment using their API and EasyPost. That was just a day project thanks to two very simple-to-use APIs.

Shopify's missing a lot more than that for retail. I wouldn't use their current POS app for running more than a flea market table or street vendor. It's just too basic even for the smallest store.

You can't handle hundreds of SKUs by paging through product thumbnails at checkout; you need barcode scanning, and from experience, iPads and bluetooth scanners are a real pain to work with. Shopify also has no real inventory management (figuring out what to reorder, entering in the new orders as they get delivered, tracking cost of goods sold and spoilage, printing price tags and barcodes, etc). The couple of reports they've built are inadequate for proper accounting.

I hope they get there eventually, but the number and complexity of features they need for a small shop to run their POS on Shopify means they're at least a few years out.
The Story Behind *That* Selfie
Gabriel Knight *not* releasing on Linux
> Google News and try to train it

Does this work? Does it work better than looking through TrueTrueReddit and hubski?
Just When are Ruby going to get something similar....
> working on one's own source is so much better that I would use a fully FOSS solution and self host it if I ever needed to do an e-commerce site again

Except now instead of focusing on the other aspects of your business you need to focus on the infrastructure as well. What if your products get super popular? Not you'll need to work on scaling out your store which will cost a boatload in equipment and specialization.
Unless the judges presiding over the inevitable lawsuits are complete fools, I don't see this patent ever holding up.

Maybe not, but are the organizations that Yogaglo will file suit against able to afford a defense? That's why this strikes me as particularly slimy.
Bookmarking made Easy...
Strictly speaking it's not "the newspaper" saying this, but an op-ed contributor:

> This is an edited extract from an essay first published at dobelli.com. The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions by Rolf Dobelli is published by Sceptre, £9.99. Buy it for £7.99 at guardianbookshop.co.uk

Newspapers don't necessarily agree with the views they publish – though presumably they found this an interesting piece regardless.
"Almost" means that the "30%" could easily have been 70% or even 80% were the thing any more potent.
The Front-end of Middle-earth
Thanks for this. I had read Derek's post and was uncomfortable with it, and you have articulated the downsides well.

I think blog post appeals to a part of us which wants to be very trusting and open. I actually had a flashing thought of open sourcing our code (which we have been growing for years) but better sense prevailed soon. Of course there are things which we won't want the competitors to know etc.

Although as other commenters have said and I agree, that Derek probably didn't want it to be a blanket prescription. But still it had a pop feel good sense to it. And well thought out 'reality check' kind of response was needed.
Comparing a cryptocurrency to the network stack doesn't make any sense. You are cherry picking out of one layer of the network stack to make a weak ad hominem argument to support a bandwagon effect bias. Regardless, your argument is flawed by the fact TCP and UDP traffic are about equal on the Internet. That's two protocols at your chosen network layer, each doing what they are good at.

Note: SHA-256 and scrypt are the building blocks of most cryptocurrencies. SHA-256 is to UDP as scrypt is to TCP? Dunno.
Interesting. I assumed that there is a linear relationship between the level of technical skills and employability.
Would you say that if somebody has a lot of technical skills but lack of the others like communication skills would find a job harder than somebody with less programming knowledge but more of these 'other' skills?
The biggest problem with news is that it's about newness and rarity. Whereas what we actually need to know is mostly not new. Eg, "man eaten by alligator" is a billion times less important than "decades of data say you will likely get heart disease."

Another serious problem with news is its schedule. A daily paper must publish something every day, even if nothing important has happened. An hourly newscast is worse.

My ideal internet news source would publish infrequently and be filtered to the specific reader. The second part is very hard. It would look something like this:

Not News
- A car accident across town
- A single crime in another state
- Celebrities
- Scandals
- Daily stock market fluctuations

News
- A trend of car accidents at an intersection near me
- Crime in my neighborhood or a trend of crime in my city
- Economic trends and their underlying causes
Except for, you know, the people MAKING stuff.
Google Shopping: Upload Your Content Without Watermarks or Be Banned
Shorting Bitcoins would be a terrible idea. I hate Bitcoin, and expect it to eventually crash, but if you nakedly short something and it goes up in the meantime (which BTC could) you can get whacked with margin calls and lose money even if you're right. That happened to a lot of people who shorted the Nasdaq (at, say, 3000) and tech stocks in the '90s. They were right, but they still lost their shirts.
I didn't use HIPE. It was providing no performance improvement for this use case.
How do you feel about translating? I have some capacities free and help you conquer Germany, Austria and Switzerland...
Marissa Mayer's Next Big Acquisition Could Be Imgur, the Photo Site Reddit Loves
There must be some kind of product already existing where corporate laptops are wiped to a clean install of the OS, (ready to be taken through customs) with VPN software to safely download a package of needed data and setup information. And then to wipe that before return travel.
Although unrelated, this reminds me of the field of Computational semiotics and Semiotic engineering, in that it's an alternate way to understand computing.

Instead of thinking of software as instructions to a computer, it treats programs as a thing that a human creates, and where other humans have to make sense of when they're using it. Female researcher C. S. de Souza has applied semiotics to Human-Computer Interaction,[1] and considers end-user applications as a "message" or "deputee" from the developer to the users. In this light, the designers weave a product based on their understanding about the needs of their users, embedding into it the messages that users should be able to grap, and would be useful for them.

Following the thread about Urbit, I've found some programming languages created after alternate models of computation. Stack-based languages,[2] SK calculus,[3] the B,C,K,W system...[4] are all quite different from mainstram programming languages. They all look too mathematical; but if functional programming can be though of as syntactic sugar over the lambda calculus, and object orientation is modeled after Aristotelian categories, maybe a new kind of programming language could be created as a pretty face around these concepts, that makes them more intuitive and easier to apply; and maybe that language could use a different set of overarching concepts. (I hear that reactive programming and agent systems are getting quite popular, based on the success of Erlang for robust systems and its applicability to multiple processors).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_engineering

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-oriented_programming_lan...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B,C,K,W_system
Client work doesn't always pan out this way though. They could see an unsuccessful business as an unsuccessful piece of technology. One that you the developer built. Of course large companies and established businesses don't deal like this but the rare individual whose got a lot of cash to throw around will bring the blame back on you.

I'd say tell them exactly what OP has written here. If they press on about it and you haven't got the bandwidth to educate them then perhaps connect them with a mentor or two. If the client wants to pay OP to help him make a successful business then I'd say that's a win.
Bots now 'account for 61% of net traffic'
How Steve Jobs Got the Liver He Needed in Memphis
Open Source Personal Finance Manager
"When a bubble crashes, it's pretty much done for."

I don't remember the dot com crash being quite as dramatic as that - the NASDAQ peaked in March 2000 dropped down in May and regained about 50% of the losses by July before dropping and climbing to the July level again in October before really dropping.

Edit: Graphs of Bitcoin/USD remind me of the description of start-up business plans from Cryptonomicon "conveniently summarized by graphs that all seem to be exponential curves screaming heavenward". :-)
I think they've at least seen them survive in space. I recall reading stories of microbes surviving near absolute zero. Bacteria and spores could survive a lot, but I would think they would have to be inside a mighty big rock to survive the heat.
Win 80+ premium WordPress themes.
ECJ Advocate-General: EU's Data Retention Directive is unlawful
And then there is NASA (apparently) using Sanskrit for AI: http://www.vedicsciences.net/articles/sanskrit-nasa.html*

This is a hoax. The article reproduced there does exist though: it was published in an artificial intelligence journal in 1985 and made no reference to NASA, except for the fact that the author worked at the NASA Ames Research Center. You can find it there: http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/46...

A quick search on internet for "sanskrit nasa" shows that all occurences are either copies, extracts or translations of this article taken out of its context. The belief that NASA has used sanskrit seems to come from this internet echo chamber.

I could find no reference about it on any NASA website, nor any other articles written by this Rick Briggs. I was able to find only one other article on sanskrit and AI, quoting the one by Briggs, dated to 1987: http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/~srihari/papers/KRIS87.pdf
I would have read this article, but according to the title... I probably shouldn't.
The author lost me with his unabashed bias in speaking of other executives:

In the case of someone like Mayer or Steve Jobs—who was accused of many of the same flaws—those strengths and weaknesses make for far better results than the executive alternative, whether it’s a corporate hatchet woman like HP’s Carly Fiorina, an overpaid functionary like Citi’s Vikram Pandit, or an unrepentant economy wrecker like Lehman’s Dick Fuld, not to mention undistinguished wheel tillers like Apple’s John Sculley and his current reincarnation, Tim Cook. Whatever Mayer does with Yahoo, she at least has a fighting chance to revive the company, something that could never have been said of her predecessors.

He could easily make the same point without adding the unnecessary negative adjectives: "Overpaid", "Unrepentant", "Undistinguished". For the record, I think Tim Cook is a very distinguished wheel tiller (if by wheel tiller you mean operationals/supply chain expert) and Vikram Pandit earned $1 in total compensation in 2009-2010, only getting paid starting in 2011 when Citi had already been profitable for a year. Before anyone argues the merits of Tim or Vikram, let me emphasize that my point is not on their merits as CEOs but on the way they were described to make a point for Marissa Mayer.
That rhetoric is lame. You can argue better than that.
Haha. Good save. :)
Revisiting Abraham Flexner’s dream of the useful pursuit of useless knowledge.
I thought this has become standard procedure for high-profile hacker types. It comes down to uneducated LEOs (all over the world) that think hacking/computing is the modern-day equivalent of sorcery or magic, and thus the person of interest has nearly unlimited powers if you let them near a device, another person that has access to a device, or even other inmates that have access to people that have access to devices. I think once Mitnick was put in solitary, it just became the way things are done now.
True, except that currently there is no way to silence Trello or scope notifications to one board. If I am there, I will get distracted.
Man what about the TL-WR841N it's only 19$ on amazon right now??
Funny, I think news tends to make one dumber. For instance, you get exaggerated ideas about the dangers of muggings, lightning strikes, serial killers, etc, and get distracted from things that are actually likely to harm you.
SlowPal is now SprintPal. Index, search and graph your PayPal transactions.
I wonder if any European venture caps will make a similar investment in Bitstamp. Bitstamp is not only the most mature European exchange, but unlike Coinbase (which can only transfer money to and from American bank accounts) people can use Bitstamp worldwide.
Show HN: Codebrag v1.0 released - Code reviews made fun
No, sorry. Don't water the term down. A troll is a company that exists only to sue. If they're shipping product they're not a troll.
Miss. First of all, citing Google as an example in product management is a mistake. Google has, overall, pretty bad product management. Its strength is hard engineering. Being a PM at Google is like having Risk Management at LTCM or Amaranth (hedge funds that blew up) on your resume.

Second, in many tech companies, PMs outrank engineers and the commoditization of tech talent hasn't really gone away. It's just that the titular concept of the "executive" is out of style among the rising generation. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

A good engineer can PM his own work, and doesn't need someone else to tell him what color to paint the bike shed.
I change cable news by not watching it. When nobody watches their propaganda tabloid trash anymore they will cease to exist and something better will replace them.
So these values really are growing several percent per week. That's amazing.

It might be good to put the period on the page somewhere.
Advice from my 30 Years of Air Travel
Slam Shell
TSA Breast Milk Screening Video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh1h5Mvc3MM

TSA response: http://blog.tsa.gov/2010/12/tsa-response-to-tsa-breast-milk....

She got an apology letter, at least.
Google Voice XMPP Shutdown
how do you even know they do it all behind closed doors. with a one size fits all non negotiable contract.
This amazing, now I just have to find my moms old Mac...its probably hidden somewhere in her basement!
A critique of Common Core math standards