skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Build outside-in to validate the business model, so Javascript / HTML5 / CSS would be the first consideration. Node.js is popular for backend because code can usually be ported between the browser-side and server-side, so it's faster to develop and requires less of a learning curve. If it's a mobile app, iOS and Android knowledge. (Focus on one platform at a time, and getting that good enough than doing many.)

Also be aware that double-ended marketplaces are (catch-22's)^2. Scaling this model burns tons of cash before reaching profitability. Please don't put more in than a set amount, say 20k USD and 3 years before trying something else. First-time founders can end up spending between nothing and several million of their own cash before learning whether a business is viable or not... spent cash, blood, sweat and tears don't count for much.

Good luck and remember during the valley/s of despair that it'll work out ok.
Where can I find the song that was used in this?? I love it!!
It's not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme requires some element of fraud, yet here you have Twitter's earnings statement and balance sheet right out in the open. There are reasonable people who think investing in a company presently running at a loss but with a potential for generating huge profits is a reasonable thing to do.

Just poking at your numbers a bit, of that 600M in R&D, 379M was from stock based compensation that hit them in the 4th quarter because of the IPO (they had to expense the RSUs at that point). Don't you think it's a little strange that $400M of the $600M in R&D costs were accrued in the 4th quarter?

I'm not advocating buying Twitter stock. Just trying to counter some of the overzealous cynicism in this thread.
I am glad to hear that you are using Perl at Semantics3. I like what you guys are doing :)
Interesting, would not have guessed a company like comcast would go down this mesh networking route. Bad news for competitors in the area, but good news for subscribers, at least in urban areas.
That's an extremist view.

Doing requires critical mass. One person picketing outside the NSA HQ won't do jack shit. In order to achieve critical mass, enough people need to be aware a problem exists in the first place.

This issue needs to be battled legally, politically, socially (protest), and privately (apps that encrypt everything). Because the NSA spying is so pervasive and the general populace is so apathetic, we need to push on all fronts to make any difference at all.

Something that battles on the political front ("call your reps") is far from useless. It both makes people aware of the issue (or reminds them that, hey, it's still going on) and puts political pressure on reps to fix it (or at least support it less).

I appreciate your point of view, but you can't "do" alone. You need others to stand with you, and that's where "talking" comes in.
Well, it is a self selected label so I'm having a bit of a problem with the "weak correlation". I would be curious how that isn't valid given the self selected part?

If someone was really going for the throat they would bring up the history and origin of the group a person self identified with. That leads to some scary thoughts with a lot of "we changed" yelling.
Blockchain’s Response to Apple
Then do everyone a favor and namespace your apis so it's obvious they are not standards compliant and can be cleanly used at the same time as other browser implementations until the standard is ready.
Transaction volume is a poor way to measure the problem. I might use my card 1,000 times before getting hacked and having to replace my card. It's not a .01% loss it 100% as far as the consumer is concerned.
I was curious about a ship designed to clean up the wreckage after a tsunami or the pacific garbage.
Deploy Instances Of APIs At Heroku Or PaaS Of Your Choice
No. We are too greedy on the whole to avoid slowly destroying it.

And even when we can leave this planet, we should still endeavour to keep Earth as well as we can.
Also see http://ispspeedindex.netflix.com/
I will give you 90% equity of my startup [AMA]
This is the big problem for me. Even a "hit" crowd funded project is a pretty tiny slice of a real grant, and still takes time and energy.

It is on the other hand great to let a PhD student get some funding for their work, pay for a field visit, etc. Crowd funding is a supplement to internal grants and pilot grants at this point, not the NIH/NSF lifeblood of most labs.
This lack of consideration by many websites for my slight visual impairment is a pet peeve of mine, so I was deliberately stereotyping the developers. I'm sure the reality is much more nuanced. E.g.

a) the web layout software they're using doesn't work well with larger fonts. Nobody can realistically design today's websites by manually writing all the HTML, so when the tools have limitations, then the website has limitations.

or b) the designer has a lot on his plate. He needs to do ten things, and nine of them should have been finished last week. He's only got enough time to get things 95% right, not enough time to worry about every single border case.

or c) as mentioned in other comments, the designer is being rigidly constrained by management expectations of minute details of site appearance. Those constraints at default font size are incompatible with perfect rendering at larger font sizes.

I'm sorry if you were offended by my colorful choice of words. One of the nice things about Hacker News is it's generally a high-content low-noise place where people don't flame or troll.
Your comment actually demonstrates why P/E is at times kind of a dodgy metric. Do you know what will happen the minute any company (not just Twitter) which aspires to go from unprofitable to profitable changes from not having any earnings to having earnings? HUGE P/E. It's like that when you barely have any earnings, but that is not necessarily a an indication of profound overpricing.
nope, I still don't get it.

> Docker is an open-source engine that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.

Like an internet browser for executables ? I don't understand how can this be useful...
I am glad to hear that. If I understand your product I'm a prime target: once or twice a year I plan travel where my flexibility in terms of airport, days, etc. is far too complicated for even the ITA matrix (the best flight search I know of). And I'm also about to plan international travel for an anniversary, and would love to get some help and a deal on that.

But I'm terribly confused what category I fit into. For the first case, am I multicity or within North America? For the second, am I a group, ultimate Euro trip, super cheap business, ...?
Information is Beautiful – Million Lines of Code
Maybe this is the answer to Fermi's Paradox.
Wintery weather leads to arrest of 1977 escapee
On some level, everyone on Twitter is promoting themselves, and grooming their followers to a particular image or persona.
>On creation, attachments go into a special _attachments attribute of the document. They are encoded in a JSON structure that holds the name, the content_type and the base64 encoded data of an attachment. A document can have any number of attachments.

attachments are by default stored inline in the document itself
I don't disagree. The problem is that the incapable and highly capable (who both fail in typical, micromanaged, closed-allocation type environments) get lumped together and there are fewer of the latter. The profiling (see: job-hopper stigma) really hurts those of us who've had a lot of failures or mistakes but have good reasons.

If you really need A+ players (not just the A- and B+ players who become executives) this costs you. But VC-istan is just another version of the corporate ladder and most of these VC-funded startups don't need outlier excellence, so a person like me might not be worth the trouble.

VC culture is about commoditizing founders and companies (and especially engineers) and it has worked at creating a world in which A+ players (the people who originally built SV because they didn't fit anywhere else) aren't really needed.
From our PCI implementation documentation I don't see any requirement of AV on every operating system.

Asking doesn't necessarily facilitate the need to do that thing necessarily.
I would be pretty interested in this as well. I imagine that they only have a loose idea at this point, if at all. If the list of "coming soon languages" is any indication of priority, c and c++ are at the bottom of the pack.
Private property in a case like this can also, and perhaps to a higher degree, create an incentive to put the squeeze on it, pump it dry, cash out, and start a business somewhere else in 5 years.

Imagining that self-interest alone creates outcomes that are morally right, or that make sense long term, is a terribly common fallacy.
No, thanks, I prefer to drink water. Sounds like you bought too much Kool-Aid. You must be tired of drinking it. I recommend that you return it to the store.

Office 365 (not 360) already generates over a billion dollars in annual revenues -- and that includes the desktop versions of Office. Even the consumer version of Office 365 Office has already sold about 2 million subscriptions.

And there are 50 million users of the Office web apps. If you don't know any of them, then perhaps you should think about whether your own experiences are skewed, and unrepresentative of what's actually happening out in the marketplace.
Some fraction of people won't cancel. They wager that those people can cover the costs of those who do cancel.

At least that's the intuitive logic.
Great post! It's lengthy but I had a great time reading! Thanks for sharing!
I've said this before, but if Twitter added a tier of paid accounts that offered analytics, scheduling and other features, I'd upgrade. Maybe there would be enough revenue to keep the servers running.
One of the bigger obstacles to me, besides the current level of crowd funding being at the "student project" or "preliminary data" level, and thus still needing to heavily compete for grants is institutional level resistance.

Every grants office I've talked to has essentially responded with "Wait, what?", and the amounts are small enough that it's often not worth the administrative hassle.
The Industrial Internet of Things – The opportunity no one's talking about.
"Twitter investors disappointed by reality that growth cannot be infinite"
How so? If I embed a piece of malware in a website that launches an .exe on your computer without you knowing it, that certainly constitutes access "beyond what was authorized." If that piece of malware mines bitcoins and uses my power supply to do it, the lack of authorization is extremely relevant. I agree that "written" authorization might be overkill, but the general idea of access without permission comes across clearly.

Of course, I don't think Tidbit was actually being spread as malware -- but it's easy to imagine a similar system that does.
Because they have different classification systems/schemes?

Are you really asking me this?
> On a tangential point, earth-life has survived five mass-extinction events, and a future one is almost certain.

We are actually right in the middle of it.
How Farouk al Kasim Saved Norway From Its Oil
Show HN: What would I tweet? (Markov tweet generator)
Just because something is hard doesn't mean it's broken. Nobody would say that say, advanced mathematics is broken because the layman doesn't get it.

My bullshit detector notes that he talks very generally about "knowledge workers leveraging machines". The problem with the phrase "knowledge worker" is it often means "person who sends lots of emails". You don't need to be a programmer to send lots of emails.

Real "knowledge workers", like, the kind of people that actually are working to extend human knowledge and need computers to do it, largely do know how to program to some degree (IE, scientists and mathematicians and so on). A lot of it isn't "professional" grade, but it works well enough for them and it keeps getting better.

Also a tangent: but I'm sick of the whole "coding is literacy" nonsense. Not everyone needs to code. Literacy unlocks centuries worth of knowledge in any domain you want, from contemporary thinkers to people who are long dead. Coding lets you tell a computer how to do specialized things. It's not even remotely comparable.
> The reason Google is moving forward quickly with Shadow DOM implementation is that this polyfill is dog slow.

I'm not sure what you mean by "moving forward quickly". They've been hammering on this in the public eye for over three years. How many more years of salary should they pay before they get it out the door? At some point, you just have to ship.
"hi relevant standards authority, you're not working fast enough for our liking, so we're doing what we wan't and if you don't like it, too bad"
if this was anyone but google, there'd be a shitstorm...
This is an open source project BTW: https://github.com/karan/What-Would-I-Tweet

Built using a Python/Flask API backend, and angularjs frontend.
Resident Evil, Onimusha Composer Admits He's a Fraud
Volatility is typically much higher in after hours sessions because there isn't nearly as much liquidity in the market. Tomorrow's opening price will probably be more informative. Also good to keep in mind that even if it is 20% down from today's close that would still leave it up about 17% from it's first trading day in November and up 100% from the IPO price ($26).
"like introducing invasive plants with known anti-parasitic properties to foraging ranges"

Completely off-topic now, but what about suffering of parasites themselves in presence of those plants? Why do people care about cute animals and not about and often at the expense of less cute ones? (that's a rhetorical question, because they are cute duh)

We can't make things better for some living organisms without destroying others. Since there is no objective way to weight outcome of an intervention, we can't "maximize global animal welfare". Most of the time it will benefit one fluffy thing at the expense of another, usually less fluffy.

Undoing results of our own actions is a defensible thing though. As is maximizing some kind of utility to us, for example working to increase or maintain biodiversity to avoid being next extinct species on the list. But biodiversity just means shitty life for more kinds of animals as far as maximizing animal welfare goes.
> If it wasn't for nationalism everyone would hug and be friends?

Did I ever say that? If I did, please point out where.

Absence of one type of divide doesn't imply that there wouldn't be others. But the less the better.
If you need your unit tests 'show' that 4 billion floats are giving the desired answer, creating some formal proof instead doesn't seem far fetched either. I guess it all depends what you are writing things for; personally I would like to see the radiation equipment in hospitals to have formally verified software on board. The fact that 'this is not feasible' which is management speak for 'this is too expensive' remains to be kind of a depressing truth for me when we're talking lives.

For non life threatening stuff the crap people deliver now is ok-ish as no-one seems to want to pay (or ask) for anything better. I'm just wondering how you validate something is non life threatening; a bug in some financial handling code could be life threatening if someone loses all because of it and kills himself?

As I reached the ripe old age of almost 40, I get requests to review code quite a lot and it makes me want to take up gardening instead. It pays a lot less but at least I can kick my alprazolam habit.
Wow, thanks for pointing this out! Usually I get a bunch of responses and was surprised this time when I didn't get a single email (minus the spam emails from people trying to get me to use their company for recruiting)
<script type="text/javascript">
var x = 1 + 2;
</script>

Is this "beyond what is authorized"? What was authorized to begin with?
Wikipedia says they have 2,000 employees last year, without meaning to sound rude what exactly do they need all those employees for?
I never said that was the case - I just thought I recognized the name before & it was from her sister. I didn't mean to imply anything about her not getting the job because of merit. Sorry if that didn't come across.
How many of those shortest paths algorithms can you run right now?

It doesn't have to be better at producing good algorithms. It just has to be better at making those algorithms implementations easy to use.

But I still don't think the business model is viable.
I don't agree, you should just know what they are. Defaults are helpful.
Hi Jacob,

I sympathize with the hesitation that you must feel regarding a request to analyze a feature on a short timeframe, it is however the case that MSFT has in the recent past (Pointer Events, which are GREAT) used its prerogative to ship features ahead of standardization. That contrasts with the current scenario in which agreement by the WG on the names of the APIs _would in fact change our course_.

I noted the timeline as I understand it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7187024

The web platform is behind. It's regrettable that we are, but that's the current situation. If you'd like to help, I encourage you to help weigh alternative in the www-style thread.

Engagement on the content and not the process would go a long way at this moment.
I thought I answered this in my original post.

Website accessibility for visually impaired people might be considered to be on a "spectrum". E.g. if totally blind people are a "10" in terms of problems, and perfect vision is "0", then I'm perhaps a "1". And yet things are already annoying for me. So what about those people who develop age related macular degeneration? This is not an uncommon problem for older people, e.g. it's something my own mother had.

Eventually those people will move from "1" to "2" to "3" to "4" etc. in terms of impairment. But if websites already start to break at "1", then what hope do people with real problems have?
ObamaCare's New Theory of Employment
The author is frustrated by a real and frustrating problem, but he's missing why things are this way.

The "triumvirate of HTML/CSS/Javascript" isn't just a technology. It's a social consensus. It's not actually "designed" in a meaningful sense -- it's evolved.

And things pretty much need to be this way, unless you want to be an island. Even if you have the ambition and the resources to throw it all away and "do it right" from scratch, by the time you finish the world will have moved on and your perfect gem will be obsolete. Real technology is always iterative.

The same constraints apply to programming languages in general, because they truly are languages that human beings use for thinking. Languages and their associated cultures can only evolve so fast. It's not really a technical issue, it's a social issue.

The author's assertion that our "arcane" interfaces persist out of a kind of perverse pride just doesn't ring true to my experience. Programmers cry tears of joy when they get to throw away something old and arcane because they don't need it anymore. And his assumption that visual programming will necessarily be better than textual programming is completely unproven.

Anyone who could actually make programming easy would reap vast wealth. The incentive is there. If it's really a no-brainer to build visual programming tools, well, where are they? There must be something harder about it than you think if we're still waiting.
Woolly mammoth diet mystery solved by DNA analysis
Ask HN: What is the smallest possible language?
I've been thinking about languages recently, and I'm wondering what the most simple Turing complete language needs. By this I mean flow control (if/else) and recursion or loops (or the beloved Y combinator). What would be a list of these features?
Yes I have watched Bret Victor's talk. Narrow minded or not, Brooks's predictions held true for more than a decade after the time of writing. I'd like to read your counter-arguments.

I'd say architecture and advances in neuroscience are tangential here. I think the core of the problem is still somewhere else.

* sidenote: Lisp machines weren't at least completely _ignored_ by academia.
WebGL is less used than Canvas for the most part, because 3D and linear algebra are much more difficult to work with for most people than 2D. Also, people work with raw canvas image arrays much more rarely than they do the high level functions (stroke/fill/etc)

OpenGL was still a better API than a raw framebuffer even when it was just a fixed function pipeline. Minecraft for example is implemented purely with fixed-function stuff, no shaders. It isn't going to work if done via JS rasterization.

Yes, there are people on the edge cases doing procedural music, but that is a rare use case compared to the more general case of people writing games and needing audio with attenuation, 3D positional HRTF, doppler effects, etc. That's the sweet spot that the majority of developers need. Today's 3D hardware includes features like geometry shaders/tessellation, but most games don't use them.

OpenSL/AL would work a lot better if it had "audio shaders". Yes. But if your argument is that you want to write a custom DSP, then you don't want Data Audio API, what you want is some form of OpenAL++ that exposes an architecture neutral shader language for audio DSPs, that actually compiles your shader and uploads it to the DSP. Or, you want OpenCL plus a pathway to schedule running the shaders and copying the data to the HW that does not involve the browser event loop.

That said, if there was a compelling need for the stuff you're asking for, it would have been done years ago. None of the professional apps, nor game developers, have been begging for Microsoft Direct Sound, Apple, or Khronos to make audio shaders. There was a company not to long ago, Aureal 3D, which tried to be the "3dfx of audio", but failed, but it turns out, most people just need a set of basic sound primitives they can change together.

I have real sympathy for your use case. For years, I dreamed of sounds being generated in games ala PhysX, really simulating sound waves in the environment, and calculating true binaural audio, the way Oculus Rift wants to deliver video to your senses, taking into account head position. To literally duplicate the quality of binaural audio recordings programmatically.

But we're not there, the industry seems to have let us down, there is no SGI, nor 3dfx, nor Nvidia/AMD "of audio" to lead the way, and we certainly aren't going to get there by dumping a frame buffer from JS.

Right now, the target for all this stuff, Web GL, Web Audio, et al, it exposing APIs to bring high performance, low latency games to the web. I just don't see doing attenuation or HRTF in JS as compatible with that.
Syrian Hackers Hijack Facebook.Com Domain
Dead Cats
Technology and techniques likely improving would surely be a factor? Fish finders, trawl eyes, larger craft (super trawlers, etc). The net on a supertrawler is now 500+ metres long which is obscene.
The scary thing about the consumerization of APIs and fleet accessibility is how black-hat hackable critical infrastructure can become. Folks really need to heavily unit test their kit as it leaves the "factory" and have a way to check it in the field. Otherwise, it's a hackers paradise in addition to a developer interop one.
All three are complimentary. At Shopify we use all three for slightly different things.

* Splunk searches the log files and sends alerts
* NewRelic is our always running systems profiler and our primary source for spotting performance regressions and digging into the issues
* Datadog creates the dashboards and anomaly tracking, sometimes for business metrics as well. It's also a great tool to coordinate fixing incidents when they arise.

Our Ops area has a massive wall of 55" screens showing all this telemetry to anyone passing by. It's wild.