skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: PinPoint/Nearby friends question
Hi all,

I'm Ioulian Alexeev, a 25 year old web developer currently living in Belgium.

For the last couple of months I've been busy working on a website that lets you chat with your friends on a map: http://www.pin-point.io (It's actually still in beta, there is some stuff missing, but the core functionality works). It uses your (gps) position to pinpoint you on the map and place messages on your current location, to make it easier to keep track of your friends/collegues if you are going out or planning a trip to somewhere.

This was my sideproject for at least 6 months (learning new stuff, exploring the possibilities of web apps and current state of mobile phones/tablets), I mostly worked in the evenings on it. At the time this was a great idea, I couldn't find any app/site that allows you to do that. Now, Facebook announces "Nearby friends" and it does (almost) the same things my web-app does.

Now I know there are a lot of people here who have experience with startups or such projects. I wanted to ask what to do now, should I just abandon this project or keep working on it and add features to it so it can still be relevant and co-exist with "Nearby friends". Have people experience with such things, when a giant creates (almost) the same idea as their project. I am planning to add more features to it that Facebook won't add in "Nearby Friends" (for now), but maybe it's lost energy from now on.

Greetings from Belgium!
Ioulian
Sure, but what's notably absent is any sort of major counter-example. What civilization has build massive technology and infrastructure without government-coordinated programs? The U.S. government has had a tremendous impact on everything from aerospace to medicine to nuclear energy to computing. Where in the world does that development happen without the government? Not in China, where centralized government is transforming the country from a backwater into a world power. Not in Singapore or Taiwan, where government investment into R&D turned poor countries into rich ones. Not Great Britain, not Rome not Ancient Egypt. It was government that built the Roman road network, government that split the atom, and government that sent man to the moon.
Ask HN: Patent infringement re "Pomodoro" aka Tomato
I received an email from Apple regarding an old app I have on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id488633128?mt=8) which infringes intellectual property rights for the word "Pomodoro". The claimant (http://pomodorotechnique.com) is referring to trade marks in various classes in the European Union they have for the word Pomodoro and related terms.

Funnily enough the word Pomodoro means Tomato in Italian and there are hundreds of apps on iTunes with that word. I guess my app must of caught their eye.. maybe. I looked at their website trademark guidelines (http://pomodorotechnique.com/the-pomodoro-technique-trademark-guidelines/) and yes I see the rules around using those words.

Yet when I search online there are literally hundreds and hundreds of sites & apps using that word. The claimant supposedly can give explicit and formal permission to use the word but they do not seem to respond to my emails :(

I have removed the app from European store where the supposed trade mark violations are and have not heard since from the claimant or apple.

Any advise on what I should do next? Cheers.

I hope no other fruit or vegetable words get trademarked :O
Big shame the new $20 plan now only offers 2 cores versus 8 with the current plan. For my workloads, I don't need 2GB RAM or SSD disks, I just need the cores :(
This is a video of one of the in-game tutorials (the tutorial is rendered in-game, with the same camera perspective as a player), it does a decent job of explaining the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmRBvla8tSY
I'm currently addicted to TicTactics and know a few decent strategies, so the experience of wanting to use a non-obvious move required for planning-ahead but having all the other players do the obvious move, is very frustrating.

BUT, that's just me. Nice app anyway!
It's not remote if it's a satellite office. Hire 3-6 people, rent a space, slap a sign on the door, it's now "Dropbox Pennsylvania" or whatever.
There's a good sized grocery store on Maude and Matilda. But it's just groceries, not a grocery/coffee shop/cafe/...
ACM is not a branch of IEEE, they are distinct organizations. Even if it were, ACM Queue is a publication whose authors are not strictly ACM employees. Many are practitioners and researchers in the computing field. In this case, the author's background comes from working on FreeBSD.

Also, this complaint is a bit like the one earlier about the Wired article saying everything should be encrypted being sent over http and not https. The authors are calling for change, the publication's medium is managed by someone else. Your little gripe would be far more appropriate if it were a blog author on their own platform calling for some change but not applying it to their own platform.
I don't own dropbox.
> [...] "drug deaths" implies "illegal drugs" [...].

This probably depends on your community/social circle. Some groups heavily advocate that pharmaceuticals be limited to life saving emergencies and not ongoing usage ("pill for everything").
> He paid a steep price for the estimated $12.5 million in losses inflicted on financial institutions and the $5 million Subway spent upgrading its cyber security systems.

Seems a bit silly to say they're annoyed that they had to spend money to upgrade their broken security.
That is a totally understandable reason for why it took many hours or days to revoke keys. I'm not really faulting you for that. My issue here is different, more subtle, and nerdier.
Governments can't be faulted for not being creative because they are not human. Employees of the government are the creative ones.
Yeah, I purchased Civ V a while ago but I can't bring myself to actually play it. I think I'm too old to lose 4 hours to a game that gives me no real benefit.
That is LOL worthy.

Due-diligence is mostly a business theater hazing ritual so folks don't run off to Cuba nor cons fresh out on early release.

But yeah a few valley ceos are really good at pitching startups that they know have more fleas than teeth.
FreeBSD is a fantastic operating system and this report highlights why. Documentation is something the team takes very seriously; as important as the code itself, so if you're impressed by this high-quality report you'll be even more impressed by how easy it is to find your way around FreeBSD because of the documentation.
.bash_aliases

dl-2-mp3() {

#download and save a youtube video, and extract MP3 audio track

youtube-dl -x -k --audio-format mp3 $1

}

alias ytdl=dl-2-mp3
These cities in the UK that cost three pounds to cross half of. Are they some kind of special, tiny city? Perhaps made out of lego? An awful lot of taxis charge a couple of quid as the minimum fare just to get in it, so where you're getting these taxis I don't know.

Here's a big list. Even allowing for the inherent unreliability of the internet (and some of those prices look a bit suspicious), just which city is it that costs three pounds to cross in a taxi?

http://www.numbeo.com/taxi-fare/country_result.jsp?country=U...
This is awesome, and exactly the type of thing I've been looking for. Thanks so much for sharing! Can't wait to try this out.
Read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People using Spritz
Last month DO rebooted my droplet (I received an email notice of this), it came back with all my config files filled with just @@@@'s... They were not helpful at all, after 5 emails they offered to help migrate leftover data to a new droplet but there was nothing that wasn't in my backups, my site was down for a day.
This is hardly a West Coast attitude. It's just the typical narrow perspective on the world from people that overly rely on well tuned skills with first-order logic, and therefore use ridiculously leaky abstractions that fall down.

It's also ignorance, a lot of people don't know where ideas and implementations came from, and how various products got traction.

Combine that with politics, the most powerful tool that mankind has invented for turning off critical thought, and you get a bunch of people parroting "government bad" who are far louder.
Oil and Gas data provider in Austin now accepting Bitcoin
Was that quote from Jobs made before or after Apple's attempt to acquire Dropbox got turned down?
Seems like the correct original source would be ComputerWorld[1], referenced by both ZDNet and WindowsITPro. I can see why the interstitial and multi-page format would be a turn-off, but the the other two are pretty much exactly the same! (Props to ZDNet for getting confirmation from Microsoft, I guess...)

[1] http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9247708/Microsoft_sla...
JavaScript at PyCon?
Extraordinarily entertaining and well presented.
What about eliminating allergies, Alzheimer's, and cancer? How about increasing the intelligence of the human species?

Do we want to give our children better opportunities? Forget superficial stuff like blond hair and blue eyes, we're talking about the possibility of having guaranteed super-healthy, super-happy, super-smart children.
Adhoc functions can be written using ES6 Proxy [1].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
By the same logic, entrepreneurs and businessmen do not create either.

Both government and business merely provide incentives.
ahahahah this was good. Thanks Phantom ;)
Chromebooks Unlocked Automatically When Your Smartphone Is Near
ISC concludes BIND 10 development with Release 1.2 Project renamed 'Bundy'
> - It puts all DOM objects in the JS heap, eliminating the nightmarish cross-heap reference counting that historically plagues browser architectures (this is part of Blink's "oilpan" architecture).

Does Gecko not already do this? Certainly Presto did, and (I believe) Trident does.

But to add another bit of research into the mix, and what I think is arguably the most important point:

- Builds on all the work around HTML(5) and CSS 2.1, both of which are the best part of a decade of work, both aiming to get browsers actually implementing to specifications, and specifying behaviour in sufficient detail (with minimal undefined behaviour) that a web page cannot easily distinguish two user agents. By actually specifying the web platform as it actually exists, it suddenly makes it far more practical for new browsers to enter the market (compared with the previous hellish situation of the hardest part of developing a browser being reverse-engineering existing browsers with sufficient marketshare that web developers ensure their web pages work in them). If this is shown to be viable, suddenly we have a truly open platform!
Enticing; depth and vision. Coherence is always
tricky, but, to my mind, they pull it off.

To be quite honest: Debian/kFreeBSD is still my
version of FreeBSD, but that's just laziness.
I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments?

I am of the opinion that downvotes on previously positive-scored comments should be regarded as suspect.
dang and kogir tuned the algorithms to make some downvotes more powerful. We've been monitoring the effects of this change, and it appears to be reducing toxic comments.

That's interesting to me because I find myself downvoting much more often than I used to. But the comments I downvote are not that often toxic in the sense of being nasty. They're more often low-content or low-value comments that don't add to the conversation.

The jerks and trolls are out there but I'm not positive they're most pernicious problem.
There are dozens of companies that are working on this (I work for one) in a variety of media including bacteria, yeast, algae, switchgrass, etc. It's a very hard problem made more difficult by the drop in the cost of oil from $150 -> $75 since most of these companies were funded.

A partial list of people working on it:

* Amyris

* Solazyme

* KiOR

* Algenol

* Sapphire

* Aurora

* Synthetic Genomics

* Cellana

* PetroSun

Notably, most of the companies on that list have taken hundreds of millions of dollars from domestic and foreign oil companies hoping to create their own supply. Maybe more notably, several of the companies on the list went public, then lost 80-90% of their market cap. Most are pursuing other, higher value products as a first-order business, with promises of biofuels down the road.
Chrome Web Store – Share Enhancer for SoundCloud
Elon Musk speeding ticket – showing off Tesla to Johnny Depp
(original title too long to fit -- had to summarize)
Gabriel García Márquez, Literary Pioneer, Dies at 87
Agree with you XFCE in Xubuntu. I just can't force myself to like Unity, stock Debian is ugly, and LXDE on Lubuntu looks flat out terrible on my 1080p monitors. Just a smeary blue and silver mess.

I don't think XFCE is perfect, but it ticks the important boxes for me. So much so that I just use it out of the box now rather than rolling my own from a vanilla OpenBox install (a fun exercise, btw).
How does a product like this look in with regards to the trend of very reliable, well packaged open source projects, eg scikit learn?

In my experience, the challenge with many ML problems is not taking an algorithm off the shelf, but rather encoding features and making raw data sets useful.
Here's is why you go to Y Comb. If your parents can't understand this then ignore them. Sometimes "smart" skips a generation. The only internship worth more would be a congressional one.

"Because we fund such large numbers of startups, Y Combinator has a huge "alumni" network, and there's a strong ethos of helping out fellow YC founders. So whatever your problem, whether you need beta testers, a place to stay in another city, advice about a browser bug, or a connection to a particular company, there's a good chance someone in the network can help you."
I would guess it is precisely because BugCrowd is more expensive. They offer a managed program where BugCrowd's employees validate bug reports for participating companies. Speaking from experience, that process can become very time-consuming.
I've been looking into false sharing and other pitfalls of parallelism on multi-core systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_sharing

It seems like our multi-core hardware isn't that well thought out yet. In particular, locks can cause false sharing. Even go channels are based on locks!

I would love to see some kind of annotation in golang for padding certain structs to cache-line boundaries. This value can be read from most processors, so it could be done in a cross-platform fashion. The gringo ring-channel library has to do its own padding to avoid false sharing.

https://github.com/textnode/gringo/blob/master/gringo.go

type Gringo struct {
padding1 [8]uint64
lastCommittedIndex uint64
padding2 [8]uint64
nextFreeIndex uint64
padding3 [8]uint64
readerIndex uint64
padding4 [8]uint64
contents [queueSize]Payload
padding5 [8]uint64
}

There was a similar technique for padding Java objects, but it now turns out that the JVM is smart enough to optimize the padding out!
For those unfamiliar, Gary Bernhardt is the same guy who did the famous "Wat" talk on JavaScript:

https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat
Well this is not very promissing: http://i.imgur.com/1vCvZzI.png
Perhaps a form of the fallacy of composition?

P(X) = "X exists due to the government"

S = "Scientific developments"

Fallacious statement:

∃x ∈ S (P(x)) ⇒ ∀x ∈ S (P(x))
Speaking of OVH, their catalog on low-end dedicated servers (when available) is quite nice too http://www.kimsufi.com
This all could be accomplished with their api and your own web-server. The coding would be the hardest part though from an effort standpoint.
Ok, but what about everything else in a .vmx (memory configuration, network configuration, serial device configuration)?
I have been looking for a good open source, Picasa type photo management platform, unfortunately I haven't been about to find any good ones.
When do you get the ability to downvote?
It also appears to be a trimmed mean, removing outliers. That one amazing comment I made didn't seem to matter at all!

I agree, it would be nice to address this, although I have a feeling I really shouldn't care.
I'm surprised that you would consciously not post comments to keep your average score up. The goal here is not the score; the goal is civil and interesting discussion. Comment scores are a means to achieve that goal.

Anytime there is a proxy metric, quirky incentives will crop up. (Such as lines-of-code as a metric of productivity; time spent in office as metric of work commitment; comment average score as metric of contribution to civil and interesting discussion.) My hope would be that when possible, people would realize that the metric used is not the real goal, and make conscious choices which get us closer to the real goal, but are irrational if we only value the metric itself.

I will also point out that your username was not lost on me.
Great username/post combo there
It's always good to have a wide base of knowledge, and it's always good to avoid ivory-tower silos. But at the same time, it's economically inefficient to use a specialized developer to do tasks that could be done a lot cheaper by others. It's like using jet airplane to haul a tractor-trailer. Maybe you can do it, but eventually someone will exploit that inefficiency and out-compete you.
AngelPad Demo Day 11 New Startups
How difficult would this be to recreate? Isn't it really just a simple link shortener that uses iframes instead of redirecting directly?
(original title too long to fit -- had to summarize)
It really depends on the co-worker and the culture of the company. Sometimes I would tell co-workers, sometimes I wouldn't say anything because I was concerned they would leak that to management and I would be asked to leave before I was ready.

I have found user groups meetings a great place to network though. Everyone is helpful when someone says they are looking, even if it is that persons first time at a meeting.
ISC releases BIND 10 1.2, renames it, and turns it over to community
This is a real bug. You can see that in the code[0] this was based on that they do at least check the nonce/timestamp.

[0] https://github.com/UCIS/QuickTun/blob/master/src/proto.naclt...
That can probably be worded better. Serf operates at a node level abstraction, while Consul operates at a service level. In fact, Serf is used in Consul to power the discovery of other nodes.
> Isn't that the kind of email that anti spam laws are supposed to protect against given that I already unsubscribed?

When a correspondent disregards your wish to unsubscribe, it's only a violation of Can-Spam if that entity had no prior relationship with you. And even then a correspondent can claim not to have received your unsubscribe order.

The truth is Can-Spam offers almost no protection at all, in a practical sense. There are too many loopholes and gotchas.

The best thing you can do is what you're doing -- publicize your experience, hope that adverse publicity will change their behavior.
Thanks for that perspective, that's a good way of looking at it. It's easy to get overly dismissive and lazy and it's good to have a reality check.
Ok, that gets me the disk image :). What about configuration?
So anyone stuck using vulnerable SSL is basically using telnet; ouch! Hopefully it will be a while before this implementation makes it to the various frameworks.
It was made to the CEO of Dropbox as he was trying to acquire it.
SkyDNS is compared to Consul here: http://www.consul.io/intro/vs/skydns.html
This has always been a fascinating story - I can't believe Slate's just now discovering it. There's a much longer, more detailed account somewhere.
Are you saying the are not as pernicious because they are not as common?

I down vote the same as you, but I would hesitate to assume that the algorithms are tuned one way or the other. In reality it's probably more about velocity or even the voter.

I have noticed the absence of low value comments near the top (except in fresh threads) so to me, it's working.
Census Bureau: 94.6 Percent of U.S. Is Rural Open Space http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2003/07/01/censu...
I'm not quite sure I agree with the for loop example specifically for Racket.

See: http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/for.html

At least conceptually, for loops work very much like that in the other languages. You might be referring to Lisp in the general sense. If that's the case, remove the "Racket" parts in your comment, refer specifically to the Lisp family, and then the comment should be ok.
Scientists Spot A Planet That Looks Like 'Earth's Cousin'
I received the same email, and wondered the same. The email itself also didn't contain an unsubscribe link; wouldn't that violate CAN-SPAM, if nothing else?
>is already parallelized, and it's fast.

benchmarks?
I have noticed that some unpopular opinions get many up and down votes; how should we treat these controversial comments?

I too, tend to post comments that immediately get about 3 downvotes then many more upvotes. It seems like I frequently elicit knee-jerk reactions, but then get support from others. (Who I think of as the smarter readers.)
>"They've evaded taxes to an outrageous degree"

How did you arrive at this (normative) judgement? They are paying the minimum in taxes that they legally can, so that they can invest the money in research, buy back stocks, or hold it in reserve for some period of time; why is this bad? Do you have any evidence that the government's allocation of additional funds would be more productive than Apple's use of the money?
As well as the other replies to this, note there's no plan to implement a lot of the non-standard parts of Gecko that Firefox (and most extensions) rely upon, such as XUL and XBL. Servo is concerned with the web (at least for now) — not replicating Gecko's feature set.
Beware C Hackers
David Hasselhoff hosts F-Secures Digital Freedom Manifesto keynote
4th Anniversary of Gulf Oil Spill
Debian minimal, with NGINX or some other light HTTP is easy on even 64 megs. On 128, you can do stuff like PHP and you can run whatever efficient web stuff you like. The web is light, if you're efficient about it.

As an aside, one of my friends has a 100 meg free VPS from one of the terrible free vps providers. He has managed to squeeze a Minecraft server on, and that can hold about 2 or 3 players! (apart from the terrible network, cpu and uptime)
For my front-end dev, it's really:

(modify Stylus line,
save).repeat(500)

vs :

(modify Stylus line,
save,
focus terminal,
run make (or whatever your build tool is),
focus browser window,
ctrl-r,
focus editor window).repeat(500)

Of course, if you're not taking advantage of better tools than pure CSS, it's still:

(modify CSS line,
save,
focus browser window,
ctrl-r,
focus editor window).repeat(550)

You don't NEED livereload, it's just a lot more comfortable.
sure, if the product they made wasn't depended on by people. these kind of acquisitions seem to always leave the product customers in a lurch. and for that we don't have to congratulate them.
Because everytime you review your future calendar entries you have to read, process, and skip over all the stuff that actually is tied to the time it is written down (e.g. appointments and such). By keeping your list of next actions separate from your calendar entries you make sure that at any given time you are reviewing just what you need to.
Any chance you'll be publishing VMware boxes as well?
Fluid.js: A MVC for WebApps to more easily use CSS transitions
First Potentially Habitable Earth-Sized Planet Confirmed by Observatories
I think you just described Drop.io: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/drop-io
It would be nice to see the challenge site blog post updated so that any mistakes are corrected in-line in addition to the top blurb.
First Embryonic Stem Cells Cloned From A Man's Skin