skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Chinese ones were made first. I had a lot of fun bonding with a guy riding one of these in 西宁. I found it to be a fair amount easier than the author described it. After 5 minutes or so a few friends and I managed to balance and move a little bit.

edit: now that I think about it, I had a sorta riding strap I could pull on that would help me balance at first. That probably helped way more than training wheels.
I think EBay will be death by a thousand cuts... niche sites offering similar functionality (national/international auctions, community trust rating), but targeted a particular interest.

My example here is Reverb.com, an online auction site for musical instruments and gear (particularly rock instruments, not classical). Reverb.com provides a gorgeous, Etsy-like interface, terrific targeted marketing, etc. It's backed by a major used instrument vendor (Chicago Music Exchange), and is quickly gaining momentum. Once sellers can have the same chance of sale and the same kinds of prices that EBay fetches, and buyers have enough selection to make the site really sticky (it's practically designed for window-shopping), some people will simply stop using EBay altogether in favor of Reverb.

Etsy is another case in point. They've been around for a while, but they offer a far superior customer and vendor experience within their fairly narrow niche of handmade crafts. I'm sure we'll also see custom car seller sites (most of the old ones are as antiquated and ugly as EBay), toy collector sites, all the things EBay covers in its one-size-fits-all approach.

EBay is lousy for window-shopping, but that's what collectors and nerds want to do. That's where the disruption will happen.
Yeah, it's a very well-written article, but here is where I disagree with the analysis.

> The problem, though, is that Surface’s sales numbers show that device quality is not the primary sales driver for Microsoft customers.

Here's the thing: I really want a surface pro. It looks like an amazing piece of hardware, and the keyboard is so essential to what I want to do with it. The only problem, is I don't/can't/won't use windows! I simply require a terminal and a *NIX environment. If there was a really nicely executed linux distro that integrated perfectly with Surface, I'd be all over it for sure. But of course (and understandably), MS is simply not interested in catering to this solution.
Not forgotten, indeed we can say that the idea of BPF and proving that is secure is related to what Google did with NaCl. More food for thought http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/2012resolve-cheri.pdf
SExViaHEx Lite: Dry run for Hardware Exploitation Class, Portland, OR
What I think about is, what am I putting down the drain and ultimately into the river/water-table? I want it to be as biodegradable and non-poisonous as possible. Liquid soap made of plant oils (such as Dr Bronners) seems like a good solution.
What does a startup VP of Engineering do all day?
I don't think this is contrary to the article. The problem is not that nobody will buy the Surface Pro, or that it's not a great device - it's that not enough will buy it to justify an entire hardware business.

Perhaps we'll be proven wrong, but I think the article is correct in assuming that the device won't win over large corporate purchases and isn't a challenge to Apple's hold on consumers. It still screams 'niche'.
Only thing I've seen on CoveredCA is the folks that cannot find doctors after buying the insurance. I get the feeling the tech might be good enough that the social issues are taking center stage.
I'm not saying they like the bill. They have very little incentive to support it and all else equal change is risk. Releasing a statement to that effect doesn't cost them anything. But somebody leaned pretty hard on somebody yesterday to stop something everybody else thought was happening, and I don't think the smart money is on DuPont or Ford being that somebody.
Do companies really try to create a feeling of need in people who don't even know what it is?

Certainly there's a ton of advertising out there that rests on "feeling of need", but it's always for stuff that everybody knows about. That subtle Rolex ad doesn't need to tell you "this device tells you what time it is wherever you go" because everybody already knows what a wristwatch is. Coca-Cola ads can focus on cute animated polar bears instead of "this is a carbonated sweet drink" because everybody knows their product. (Even then, they almost always show people actually drinking the stuff.)

If you have a new product, one that you're saying is different from anything else out there, surely you need to tell people what it is if you want them to think they need it.
the 300 dollar ashtray was built for naval use, that if it slammed against something it broke in to several dull pieces instead of tiny shards that went everywhere.
California opens driverless car competition with testing regulations
>its a easy fix.

Famous last words. The day when it's not an easy fix, you're stuck with bad code live in production affecting all users until someone can fix the bug. Worse, the only way to verify that the fix works is to check your assumptions against the live system aka a nightmare. Of course, none of this matters if your site is a personal blog or something that doesn't affect anybody's business, but nothing really matters in that case.
In that case, a Youtube issue, go to https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us, click "Current Site Issues", and follow the instructions.
> "Fun with no limits" is a stick and a paper hat.

This is what I came to say. This thing has a limit, and that is that you are tethered to the thing. And as an electronic thing, it is relatively fragile. You can't take it into the sandbox or a snow fort, and you can't get it wet or muddy. It looks a sit-at-a-desk toy, and that's just not a natural state for kids.

When I was a kid (and now that I watch my kids play), we were all over the place (backyard, woods, indoors, basement) and playing with all kinds of non-toys (sticks, rocks, couch-cushion-forts, and on rare & precious occasions a huge cardboard box or section of discarded pegboard) and putting toys together in unexpected ways (matchbox + lego; scraps of lumber + any toy => catapult; does every kid use their bike training wheels to prop up the bike in order to make rooster tails in puddles?).

For $60, I can buy a giant pile of stuff from the hardware store that we can use to make all kinds of "burglar alarms" (rube goldberg machines to ring a bell -- a favorite rainy day activity) that will involve a whole bunch more learning than anything like osmo can provide.

I'm somewhat biased towards being anti-technology, but it's really a bias against technology for technology's sake. This thing may be fun, and if that's what you want, go for it, but I can't really see that it's solving any particular problem per se.
I'm just worried that the pen (N-Trig this time instead of industry standard Wacom) won't be good enough for serious art creation. If the reviews are good, I'll buy it, but many illustrators are apprehensive and angry that Microsoft seems to have released a generally improved product but which may nonetheless be markedly worse than the Surface 2 for drawing.
I am curious to know though as to if you did end up comparing the Xbox One with a PS4 before buying it and if yes what factors influenced your decision ?

PS I want to upgrade too from my old Xbox 360
These vehicles offer great promise, such as freeing the driver’s attention for productivity or leisure, better safety and less congestion. It will be a while, though, before we see these vehicles on the road. Autonomous vehicles will move the Zip Car car-as-a-service concept forward when deployed, because a subscribers would simply summon cars using an app.
Do things that have never been done.

-- Russell Kirsch,
inventor of the computer.

The stories related from when this was submitted two years ago are similarly excellent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4342790

There have been other submissions, although none have any discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4460745

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4363317

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785009

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4359776

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4341217

There are others, but they've been deleted, although one can still find some of them with this search:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=unexpected+kicking#!/story/forever...
Sure, if most of your users are part of the <0.01% of the world who has a bitcoin wallet.

For the rest of us, this could be pretty interesting.
If you buy, you can do whatever the heck you want to with the house or your yard. That's true freedom and to some people - myself included - worth every penny.
Maybe the problem is just that what it does is so far removed from the superlative language used to describe the product as a whole? The introduction leaves me with the impression that it must be more than a silly augmented reality puzzle game.

I still don't understand the mirror. iPads have a camera in the back already....
Who gives a fuck what you think?
Hey Don!

I was about to post a link to your new gig when I spotted that you had beaten me to it!
I've recently been solicited by a couple of recruiters, on behalf of contractors who've got some of that work. One of them in particular amused me by trying to hard-sell a six-month contract job with a firm which organized a "career fair" an hour south of here on two days' notice. When I showed disinterest, he "sweetened the pot" with an offer of a $25 gift card. That was when I told him not to bother contacting me again. (It's not even so much that he tried to bribe me, as that he tried to bribe me so low. I mean, really -- $25? What kind of naïf does this jackass usually deal with?)

If that's the at all representative of recruitment efforts around healthcare.gov, then I'm not sure exactly what it says about the quality of the staff working on the project, but I can't imagine it saying anything good; the best of them are probably quite bright, painfully inexperienced, and not yet equipped to understand how awful this project is going to look good on their résumés -- and I'd tend to suspect that the best of them are a small fraction of the whole. Between that, and the inevitable bloat and quality issues of any federal technology project with this many fingers in the pie, I'm really not surprised the whole thing has turned out to be such a rolling catastrophe.
Of course it runs NetBSD...

http://www.hiptop3.com/archives/sidekick-lx-2009-blade-will-...
I read that Square Cash uses a credit card refund protocol to send money to debit cards so quickly. Is this the same mechanism?
Destroying souls.
Ask HN: Why doesn't ESPN ditch cable?
What keeps ESPN and the like from offering live coverage via subscription-based internet streaming?

I hear it over and over again from cable subscribers that sport channels are the only thing stopping them from ditching cable.

Who's holding the cards here? Would there be any economic advantage for ESPN et al. to making the switch? Is the change probable, or are there too many incentives in maintaining the status quo?
It looks like the purpose of the article is to explain why it's not a big deal that the company's database solution doesn't support auto-incrementing primary keys.
This table of contents is beginning to seem very familiar (I've done Google's internal machine-learning course and looked at several other courses/tutorials on the net), but what I'm wondering is: how do you do the more basic operations of feature and parameter selection? When I've tried using machine learning in my daily work, I usually top out at "not quite good enough", largely because the features I end up choosing have a lot of noise in their data. Meanwhile, more experienced experts (those who have been doing this for 10+ years) produce much better results in much shorter time periods because they use totally off-the-wall features that I would never have considered. When they've presented at these classes, they've said that feature selection is really the vast majority of the work in practical machine learning. How do you develop an intuition about which features will be useful? Are there any resources that are more like "A practitioner's guide to machine learning", talking about the stuff that's useful in practice and not just in theory?
Lavabit Update
This is basically a giant fuck you to the whole Comcast/Time-Warner/net neutrality issue.
For comparison sake, I learned to ride a unicycle (level 2 ish) with about 8hrs of concerted practice spread over a couple weeks. A lot of the problems you encounter in the video (difficulty mounting, speed control, not falling on your face) are exactly the challenges with learning to ride a real unicycle.

I highly recommend trying it out sometime - it's a surprising amount of fun once you get the hang of it.

EDIT: Unicycling levels - I'm probably about a level 3 (on a good day). Neat sport with interesting progression - perfect for programmers that like to level up and get good at things (and stay active!):

http://www.unicyclist.org/cont/levels.cfm
Well $910m is not a small fortune too to say the least. So , I am afraid to say it's not a small trivial amount too.

And I don't think Surface is a toy project. A $B business can't be a toy project even how cash rich you are.
Given that Stripe charges the same fee as an ACH transfer, it sounds like Visa/MC has given them some sort of API to convert a debit card number to ABA routing/account numbers.
Having lived in Kenya for the past year and a half, I can say that this is definitely a problem. Addressing isn't just an issue for people but also for efficient delivery systems. FedEx drivers get a route sheet when they get in the truck in the morning. This is generated by computer algorithm to be super efficient (i.e. fewer left turns across traffic than right turns with traffic).

This simply isn't possible without low-level addressing. I hope OkHi can get this solved.
The Trouble With IBM
It might be worth waiting until the Surface Pro 3 has actually been released (20 June) before declaring that it isn't selling.

The pen is it's unique selling point and niche (there's quite a few hybrid tablet/laptops, but not with pen input), and given that Pro 2 (with a less helpful aspect ratio for that) tended to be "out of stock" much of the time, it seems to be in reasonable demand.
> instead of one lobbyist being able to wine & dine 535 members of Congress, they would only be able to wine & dine one member, or perhaps 2-3 in a densely-packed municipality.

It wouldn't really affect the ability of rich lobbying organizations to reach all members of Congress, though it might somewhat increase how rich such orgnizations would have to be to even modestly effective, though, really, the effective lobbying organizations are already often the ones that lobby at all of the national, state, and local levels and are connected to grassroots (or at least astroturf) organizations that have broad geographic reach, so, really, it probably doesn't change that much at all.

Unless you eliminate the national capital district entirely and put the entire central administration on a constant cross-country tour (remember that Congress isn't the whole of the government), it probably also creates an imbalance in influence through access with those members physically located close to the capital having more influence. Face-to-face meetings still matter for influence (after all, that's what you are trying to leverage by removing a concentration of lobbying targets), but that also applies to face-to-face meetings between legislators and, e.g., executive branch officials, and legislators exert influence as well as being targets of it.
Did you learn that from The West Wing?
This is only an anecdote, but I am a German contractor and when I work long hours, I usually send my emails and push my code on the next morning - still being at work after 20:00 would seem unprofessional and awkward :)
Solowheel used to fight crime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgMweTcrIYs
The most interesting quote for me:

A federal judge agreed, ruling in October that with the “overall inferiority of its proposal,” IBM “lacked any chance of winning” the contract. The corporate cliché of the 1970s and ’80s, that no one ever got fired for buying IBM, had never seemed less true
Surely you jest! The previous version was four years ago (in 2010) and was implemented in Flash. Screenshot:

https://twitter.com/driven_by_data/status/469498632027537408
Microsoft is not a zero-fat product generating machine like Apple. They're almost a university that happens to produce a few products on the side. Somehow, they're still profitable. They're not as profitable as Apple, but must every company stockpile cash like Apple does before they can be considered successful?

This article argues that MS should kill the Surface because it hasn't been a runaway success. By this logic, the Xbox should go too (the article says as much) and hey, even though he didn't mention it, why not the whole mobile end of the business too? Hey, Windows 8 is a total failure (the article says as much), so why is that sacred cow not on the block too? Microsoft is failing at everything and they should just quit. That leaves... what? Corporate? Embedded servers?

Seriously, this argument is a hot mess. Microsoft obviously has to make smart business choices about what things they can afford to pursue, but a lack of immediate success is not adequate grounds to sever themselves from their aspirations. MS wants to get into the hardware market because it's made Apple gigabuckets of cash. The surface, although not the most commercially hot commodity out there, is a good piece of kit and has some dedicated fans. It's fundamentally different from anything else on the market right now. i.e. It's a tablet that's actually good for more than mere consumption. To date, price has probably been the biggest thing holding it back. Well, prices have a funny way of coming down over time. The Surface's day may yet come.
They definitely stink. Its quite easy to figure out who owns one by the wet dog smell. Its no different than a smoker imo.
> And the idea is that they'd be using e-mail, videoconference, Google Moderator, or some other electronic means to communicate with their fellow reps.

If those were as effective means of full-spectrum communication as face-to-face meetings, then moving them out of the capital to their districts wouldn't effect lobbyists ability to influence them -- lobbyists can use technology to communicate with members, too.
Secret is now available for Android
I work with a client that is using yogas.
They are a great alternative to convertible (2-axis hinge) laptops and tablets (iPad & Android) - plus MacBook Airs.
I've not worked with Surface, but think I would likely prefer the Yoga's laptop keyboard to the Surface's cover keyboard.
"Surface is the tablet equivalent of the HTC One: it is high end hardware in a market where Apple has already taken the high end. Both Surface and One are thus stuck in the middle, appealing to no one."

He lost me at that sentence. You have to be a complete lunatic to make such a statement.
It makes me sad to read this stuff, but a genuine question for other male readers. Have you heard of, or come into contact with any of this abhorrent behavior that's mentioned? I have never seen it anywhere I worked, or heard of that sort of thing through word of mouth, but obviously that's a terrible sample set.

My experiences related to women in tech:

* Everywhere I've worked, it's been a boys club, but we'd LOVE to hire more women. Frankly, hiring is hard in general. When women have come in to interview, I can't speak for others - but I know in the back of my head, my biggest concern is, "Make sure you interview with the same standards as anyone else, but make sure you don't have some subconscious bias because she's a she."

* There are probably good female engineers, and not so good ones. One of the few "not so good ones" I know of (doesn't mean she'll never improve, just at the time) had to be super carefully managed out over a long time. There was no unceremonious firing, that's for sure.

* Is there even a "women in tech" problem? Or is it just "women in the workforce, no matter the industry"? The kinds of ridiculous behavior women are describing in these articles sound to me like they could happen in finance, sales, marketing, HR, or anywhere.

* On any of the open source mailing lists I'm on, I've never seen anything remotely close to, "Your pull request sucks you whre, try again". Are these just the mythical basement dwelling trolls of Slashdot lore reaching out privately via email?

Most of the engineers I know in tech are decent, upstanding guys. If anything, I feel like if any of us was pulled aside by a female co-worker and she described shenanigans of the sort I read about in these articles, we'd probably jump to their defense in a heart beat, almost maybe too easily.

What have the rest of you experienced?

*

Edit: I left the above (my OP) in tact. After re-reading it, and some responses, it's become clear to me that it gives off an air of, "I don't believe these reports", and that's not really what I intended.

I suppose my main point was that no, I haven't experienced it, and I think that's exactly what these women are saying - Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it's not there. So really, despite getting some up votes, I think I missed the boat.

I was curious if others on my (the male) side have in fact seen it, but what does that tell us? Probably not much.
Of course it always depends on how you use it. If you mostly use it on your lap and type things into keyboard a more laptop device is better. My usage is in average per day:

- 8 hours productive use on my desk with 3 monitors (form factor here is irrelevant, I just need a decent intel machine here)

- 2-3 hours mostly consuming use on bed and sofa (no need for keyboard here)

You could say that I just should use 2 devices but why should I when I can have it in one device?
Another big point about the Surface Pro 3 vs other products is that you can use it for notes and drawings. There will always be compromises in 2in1 devices. For me the SP3 is the best 2in1 till now.
That was a good video you made about ETL.
Killing Surface may not be a good idea. Microsoft can not afford losing the tablet market, and I think this time this giant software company have to rely on itself.

On the other hand, I have to admit that the new Surface 3 makes me a little disappoint because Microsoft insist that a tablet not only should be used on work but also should even take the place of notebook.

hmmm.... It's always hard to say what things will be like in the future, but I think I will prefer a notebook for work.
Windows 8 is a huge step forward in my opinion. It's faster and more stable than 7, the touch drivers work great (I use desktop apps all the time on my Surface Pro and Dell Venue Pro 8) and it's paved the way for running Windows on non-Intel chips as well as for converging the desktop and mobile which is something that I want.

Right now I don't care about the Metro interface at all - 99% of the time, I only see it when I use the Start screen, which is fantastic and works much, much better than the old Start menu despite the loss of recent-document jump lists per app. But, I can see a huge potential in Metro.
Unfortunately, the motto: "if you build it, they will come" mentality loved by engineers/developers, who love creating and hate selling, is not a thing.
There is an excellent TED talk by Derek Sivers on this issue and he uses Tokyo as an example, as it confused the early google maps engineers.

http://sivers.org/jaddr
Unless you have a massive amount of features already, can't you just try throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks? And even then you could run PCA on your features to reduce dimensionality.