skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might be surprised to learn this but third class mail (junk mail) generates more revenue than first class mail. Not only that but first class mail is decreasing revenues each year.

That being said, the problem is that third class mail is a lot more revenue than most people realize. For example $5/mth is not enough to cover the loss revenues. In fact I would suspect that $20-$50/mth is not enough. Think how much mail you get on a daily basis, multiplied by x amount times 30 days. You're probably looking at closer to $100/mth...
Photoshop may not have been for that use, but it is now and the audience has grown wildly beyond just photographers.
The Most Boring Ad Ever Made?
Yes, but you're not the average internet user. Most people who use the internet use it to consume, not to produce.
I think you've inverted the meaning of that sentence. The intent was to point out that it's odd that amateurs can fly but commercial operators cannot, not that the 400 foot rule does not address specific safety concerns.

I agree that drones should be regulated, having built (and crashed) a lot of them over the last four years. However, the current regulatory environment is effectively "it's OK if you're an individual and you abide by these vague guidelines for R/C planes that have been widely flaunted since their introduction 20+ years ago, but if you take a single dollar for it, we're after you."

That doesn't really make sense - drones don't get more dangerous the second someone takes money to fly them. Most commercial drone uses I've seen are for media (TV, realty/house videos, YouTube, advertisements, etc.) and tend to be conducted more cautiously and by more experienced operators than the random techies with flyaway-prone DJI gear who have popped up over the last year or so.
"Essentially you can see this (our tape) as a replacement for [your] tape".
Honest question, does PLATO or any other intranet count for 'first online' anything in the terms of this discussion?
Why does anyone care about this?

Both of these companies have access to your data if you use their service.

Let me repeat that.

If you use Facebook, Facebook can use and do whatever with your data.

If you use Google's services, Google can use and do whatever with your data.

If you don't want them to use your data don't use their service.

This is getting redundant people.
I think his point is comparing how easy / intuitive each interface is to learn. Besides, UI is supposed to be an aid not a puzzle.
Not even close. Even the EFF archives and acknowledges a lot of these cases.

Not every link is weighted equally. Let's talk about:

* Partnering with data brokers

* Deliberately changing users privacy settings

* Beacon (remember that?)

* Shadow profiles

* Everyone searchable via Graph

* Charges from the FTC

* "Deleted" information not actually deleted

* Like buttons on websites tracking you

* User profile data (photos and names) being used in advertisements

...it goes on and on.

You're employed by Google who also deals primary in the data of users. Are any of these issues relevant or important to you?
? I don't know anything about you or your question.
I posted it on Quora, as I mentioned in another comment.
Is "next" supposed to be "made" in your first sentence?
There is literally only one intentional privacy issue in that list from the last year, out of ten or fifteen posts. There were several exploited vulns, and a compliance issue (prism), but the only privacy violation facebook intentionally made during that period, at least according to this list, is removing the ability to hide from name searches.
Show HN: Postman – A command-line utility for batch-sending email
Hipchat downgrading free tier?
Seeing a new message in our hipchat account tonight: "You've reached the end of your viewable chat history. Switch to <a href="https://www.hipchat.com/upgrade">HipChat Plus</a> for unlimited access."

And the /upgrade page refers to "Unlimited file retention" and "Unlimited chat history" as perks for upgrading. Looks like there are now some pretty compelling reasons to upgrade, even for those of us with less than 5 users.
Arya Valentino on Google Glass
Experience of an 11 year old with Google Glass.
I would definietly recommend game jams / weekend hackathons as a way to try out game development. I always found the goal of finishing something small very quickly to be great for motivation.

Our team was very fortunate to have someone with some 3D art experience, even though his primary background and education is in programming. I sometimes joke about the "programmer art" of our game. Here is an imgur album that looks at the art a bit, and gives a glimpse of how it has evolved.

http://imgur.com/a/sYhk5
Speaking in terms of UNIX-style operating systems...

No serious filesystem will return a zeroed out chunk. Apart from that, it obviously depends on where the read error hit - it might cause just one block in the file to return EIO from read(); it might cause a large part of a file to return EIO from read(); it might make the entire file inaccessible (EIO from open()); it might make entire parts of the directory tree inaccessible (EIO from open() or readdir()) or it might make the entire filesystem fail to mount.

Files that are mmap()ed rather than read() will SIGBUS the process on an IO error - this includes executables and libraries.

I think I see what you're driving at, though - application code isn't designed with the idea that EIO might be maliciously-induced, so you could do things like induce a database to rollback to an earlier point in time by corrupting its journal, or make a badly-designed firewall fail-open when its configuration files fail to load?
Rob Ford takes leave as new and recent drug video emerges
Wow, that's a really detailed and thoughtful analysis of your interview experience. It also successful as a promotional piece for your project -- I'd be more likely to use the tool based on this.

In general, the advice is "listen to the no, but not the why", but I think that doesn't apply with YC -- the reason YC gave is probably an accurate reflection of what YC believes based on what you said in your interview (and application, and whatever other information they had).
A Google employee has recently posted this: https://plus.google.com/+BrianWhite1/posts/T56nDLcMHVk
When you want companies to change their behavior, it's not fair to forever judge them by the same set if historical facts.

Zuckerberg used to say "real name for eveything." Later he said he could see good reasons to remain anonymous online sometimes. And this "anonymous login" feature sounds great.

Meanwhile Google is forcing everyone into creating Google Plus pages, real name usage on YouTube, lining all services into one, etc.

Look at the arc of their actions--the trend. I think Arrington got this one right. Facebook is improving their treatment of privacy as Google is getting worse.
that's what I thought also, can either of the founders talk about what makes it different?
Someone posted a demo video of a modal text editor with multiple cursors to HN a year or so ago and I've been trying to track it down. Any idea what that might have been?
"hello world" contains Lovecraft quotes
It seems that the latest Canary has toggled the flag back off for now. If you're curious to try the feature so you can provide feedback on its future, go to chrome://flags and turn on "Enable origin chip in Omnibox".
OpenSSH No Longer Has To Depend On OpenSSL
I've helped a bunch of people prepare for YC interviews and the biggest problem by an order of magnitude is not being able to concisely explain what you actually do. That may sound crazy, but I've yet to review an application that clearly and simply states what the company is building, why it's important, and how they're going to get adoption. It seems these guys had the same issue, since Guy mentioned that they spent the first 5 minutes explaining what they do.

This is a symptom of a more general problem: people severely underestimate how difficult it is to convey an idea to another human being such that they actually understand it. Being able to do so is no small task, and I wish more people would recognize the value of this skill.
And the issues you don't consider issues somehow make all the "genuine" issues irrelevant? You know, Facebook's entire history of not giving a shit about privacy. Not only stepping up to the "creepy line" (like your employer, Google), but blazing past it in complete disregard.

The game is: see how much you can get away with and deal with the consequences later through PR or other distractions. "Move fast and break things."
> Since my large monitor & keyboard are nailed to my desk, having a box under it to drive it is not a burden in any way - and those boxes are cheap.

That makes sense and I'm in a similar situation right now. However, going forward, monitors and desktop computers will become increasingly redundant with the smart tvs and phones that most consumers will already own.
Too late. Users don't trust facebook no matter what scopes you [don't] ask for and tell people "we never post on your wall".
How is multiple dispatch different from function overloading, as found in C++/Pascal? Is it the same thing?
But what exactly has happened to Mark Zuckerberg's opinion on privacy since the early days of Facebook for example is still an important question, especially if trust is to be regained.
> “it was found that all communication is performed in clear text without any encryption nor security mechanism. Sensor identification information (sensorid), commands, etc. could be observed being transmitted in clear text.”

> Because the sensors’ firmware is also not digitally signed and access to them is not restricted to authorized parties, an attacker can alter the firmware or modify the configuration of the sensors.

Who deploys systems out into the wild these days without even giving a moment of consideration to security? This seems like "amateur hour" systems design. Did not a single engineer step up and say "Hey, uh, guys, do we want to at least take basic steps to obfuscate this stuff?"

Sounds like negligence. Not surprising their vice president of engineering has "nothing more to add to the matter."
I think that falls in a "it's not illegal if you don't get caught" scenario -- that is, unless you make an incomplete Faraday cage, the FCC would have no real means to catch you doing that. Also, since you wouldn't be jamming anyone else's signals, nobody would report you.

You'll find out real quick if you screwed up your Faraday cage design, though.
there are audited returns for NNT's hedge fund floating around on the web. while his options strategies will make money in the worst year, they bleed money in all other years. Unfortunately for him, average returns count, and the fund was shut down.

When i first started out learning about finance - say, 14 years ago - i was really taken by NNT. he seemed like an unheralded genius. Now that i've read a lot and understand enough about what he was doing, he seems like a bitter person who dispenses questionable advice in a nasty fashion. NNT appeals to financial "outsiders" because it gives a sense of power to think they know something about the flaws of the insiders.

I would say just about everyone would be better off reading the collected letters of warren buffett, and forget you ever heard of NNT. and if you want an interesting unorthodox quant, read eric falkenstein.
You are never truly anonymous until you boot Tails and use Tor over a public wifi connection.

This is a big win for users who don't want to share their personal data with a random app developer. Facebook still sees your activity, but they already saw your activity.
Thank you for adding this comment. I find it very valuable, and quite interesting, especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do."

I wonder if you could expand on that? I also wonder if you've observed whether or not people want to be "concise" with their goals. In my experience, success has been built around doing certain little things really well. For example, my business is successful because I'm really good at building a certain type of landing page. Yes, there is a lot that surrounds it, but it's basically just this one thing that makes it work.

The issue of scope is something that everybody confronts when running a business. Any additional insight you could add would be appreciated.

Thank you for your comment.

Warmly,

Jacob
It's important to realise to whom you will be anonymous using that feature.

You'd be anonymous to client sites, but Facebook will still know exactly which apps you've signed up for.

eg Facebook knows that you use Grindr even if you signed in 'anonymously'
I agree and disagree. Coroutines can be thought of as a degenerate case of continuations (sometimes called "single-shot continuations"). I contend that understanding continuations is at least as hard as understanding coroutines, but that if you understand one concept the other follows easily. So for people already comfortable with continuations, I agree, otherwise I disagree (in fact, I had a hard time grokking continuations until I thought of them as generalized coroutines).
I agree with this somewhat.. but it leans just on the edge of encouraging bad code.

For junior coders, this stuff is certainly the case. But you get into a serious enterprise who has enough money riding on the output and you can bet you're going to see better stuff.

You're not paid to write code, you're paid to solve problems. I get that. But the same hacky nasty "sales director wants... " type sloppy stuff only works in some situations but when you get to the higher levels it will likely get you fired.
I got one, too, and I've been reading up on various modulation schemes (signal processing isn't exactly my strong side) to figure out how to decode 978MHz UAT transmissions. Does anyone know a good resource for learning communication stuff for people literate in math and physics but ignorant about communications techniques in general?
Interviewed at PARC a while back. They have it.
This is off-topic, so I'll demote it to the bottom in a little while, but since I've spent the last month telling people what isn't appropriate on HN, I want to point out something that is.

Did you drop a negative somewhere, or add an extra? I have trouble following your sentence. My best guess at an interpretation is that you've spent a lot of time telling people "no, this is actually on-topic" and now you want to point out something that truly is off-topic?

If so, why do you feel this is off-topic? Like yesterday's article on parapsychology (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7666575), this article offers useful insight into the ways in which the ideals of the "scientific method" differ from the realities of published science. I think a lot of people here find this of interest, and I don't think this particular slope is that slippery.
Completely understand your thought process. Simple is most often better, but at the same time too simple will leave users scratching their heads.

I don't know about others, but if you could figure out a way to tag specific posts as well as users, to me that would be a valuable tool for searching for past posts or things that have fallen from the first couple pages.
In the US, these are certainly real. Apparently, some did use strobe lights to signal the traffic lights.

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

I vaguely have memories of the state legislator having to pass new laws after the devices were installed because it was not technically illegal to have the emitter in your vehicle.
Yea, I could probably list a few hundred examples and you could probably shoot each and every one of them down on an individual level. Great. The larger point is that in the aggregate, there are enough individual situations that would be disrupted by jammers in the theatre that it would outweigh the nexus between the number of times someone is going to be inconvenienced by a conversation during a movie and the number of times someone is actually rude enough to pick up the phone during a movie. At the end of the day, it's a cost-benefit analysis.

If a movie theatre did in fact install jammers each parent concerned about their kid (yea, it's probably not a true emergency, but subjective perception matters) or each doctor (I'm thinking more about delivering babies, which can mean being on call for weeks at a time, than an ER doctor) might choose to skip the movie. The end result is that that the theatre will likely take a hit on their profits. That's not a compelling reason to invest in installing a jammer.

The whole "we survived just fine without constant connectivity" argument is flawed. Yea, we did a lot of things without modern technology. We got along fine without movies, driving to the movies, mobile phones, the Internet, or arguing on the Internet about the need for mobile phone access during a movie.
While all this sounds cool it is a tiny bit frustrating that do not have an ISO to boot. I found at least one other person looking at it, but I could not figure out why that was not an option.

It almost sounded like this is an OS but not one you install? Or somehow the OS is only in memory? Like tinycore maybe?
> "especially the idea of "not being able to concisely explain what you actually do."

> I wonder if you could expand on that?"

This is really selling. And it's something that comes in handy in business in every situation. If you can't concisely explain what your product can do for someone (either in person or in print) through marketing or salesmanship you won't make the sale unless you have some overwhelming advantage in some other area that holds people's interest (or little competition or maybe a super low price).

Obviously in a HN comment there is no way to get into explaining how to be a good sales person in a few sentences. And while I could suggest books [1] the truth is you either have to have some experience and/or you have to be a "born" salesman. Or both.

Edit: [1] I don't mean "I" could suggest specific books. Because I've never read books on sales. But I have closed large and small deals, against formidable opponents (right out of college, an example is trained IBM sales people) and I never read a single book on sales. But I do know there are books that can be purchased on selling and sales obviously.
Somehow, back before cell phones were invented, we all miraculously managed to live our lives without having constant access to a telephone. If you needed to call someone, you stepped away from whatever you were doing and called them. If Aunt Mabel had a heart attack, you'd find out about it, just not 500ms after it happened. If someone wasn't happy with how you filled out your TPS report at work, you'd go into the office in the morning and fix it.
in Japan ... you'd be hard pressed to find any young person (maybe not teenager, but at least university students) who does NOT have a laptop

My experience is the complete opposite. My wife's family has one computer in the entire extended family, everyone else uses their phone exclusively and I rarely see people using laptops in cafes, etc. My wife has multiple relatives that she can't even email without using a japanese prepaid phone because Docomo encourages invalid email username construction.
> it's not fair to forever judge them by the same set if historical facts

Disagree. The spots on the leopard don't simply change and there's no such thing as "anonymous" to Facebook. That's antithesis to their business. This is purely a PR play.

By the way, we learned from the AOL data breach in 2006 that "anonymous" doesn't actually exist on the internet[1]. So let's not pretend Facebook is trying to do us all a great favor.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html?page... "A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749"
I really want to get into Julia. As I have been using an increasing amount of numerical code NumPy, SciPy and even my own Cython code has started to fail me performance-wise. The Julia community is really friendly and I tried rolled out a few implementations of the inner-most loop of a Recursive Neural Net in a variety of languages.

https://github.com/ninjin/ppod/tree/master/hck/rnn_perf

Disappointingly enough I was unable to push the performance of Julia beyond that of pure (and ugly) Matlab. I tried asking over at #julia, but it seems that my implementation should be reasonably canonical. This is really a pity for me since I would love to remain highly productive in terms of code and use something scripting-esque rather than have to re-consider going back to C. I have also had a look at Nimrod, but the scientific library support appears somewhat lacking at the moment.
But... if they became standard, no one would ever be able to use their phones near roads. Which would cause people to stop trying in the first place.
Awesome! I definitely will, thanks for the heads up!
The random risks of randomised trials
Name collision with http://www.getpostman.com/
>Native apps, meanwhile, have been fairly dismal in terms of linkability, creating silos of content that have no sensical URL.

It's a really excellent point.

Conversely, you could argue that URLs are valuable to search engines as an indicator of relevance, organization and what can be crawled.

Apps don't merely siloize their content—they break the most powerful way in recent history to decide if it's valuable.
Dispatch is the process of selecting and executing the matching overload. Multiple-dispatch refers to the ability to select the best overload based on more than just the first argument. C++ can do arity and type-based multiple-dispatch, but only statically. Julia supports dynamic multiple dispatch, where as C++'s virtual methods are only single-dispatch dynamically.
Amazing work! Congratulations on the release.

Any insights during the development? What worked? What didn't? How big was your team? How did you split the work? How long did it take from inception to release? Would love to hear your thoughts.
Why starting a startup is hard
Eliot lived in Northern Virginia, had the user name ELIOT@AI (an MIT AI lab tourist account), and I think his dad worked for the FBI.
There is nothing "object oriented" about the example, except for the fact that the code is in a class.

The "proper object oriented way" would be the State design pattern, using separate classes for each state and replacing the if/else with a virtual call, which I agree would be even more obfuscation of the control flow:

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

No, I don't think the answer is to make yet another library, if it isn't one that encodes the state graph as a table.
> I like testing those things on which my model depends. It gives me much more confidence. Why wouldn't I want to test them?

Those things all need to be tested, but if a single unit test fails, it's nice to know that it failed because the code was wrong, not because the database connection happened to die just then. If I have one test for the logic, and another that verifies that the database can be connected to, and a third that verifies the schema is right, then the specific combination of failing tests tells me a lot more about what's wrong and if my code even needs to be changed.