skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Okay. Thats a valid point.

But I got ~40 customers without any kind of marketing and effort. All most all of them own video related websites.

Zencoder / bitsontherun have their own branding on user's videos. Even in the paid plans (which is extremely expensive) they show branded messages when some error occurs. Moreover you need to "upload" the videos somehow to initiate the process.

AWS elastic transcoder is of-course a good option, but again tat needs uploading and immense amount of code & development time. Not to mention, the developer should have enough experience to touch the AWS api/SDKs in the first place.

Transcode.io product takes care of your videos completely. From transcoding to hosting in a CDN. And you are free to theme your own video element. This absolutely needs no integration with api or sdk or anything.

Its like scaling and cropping images - just put the video path, and the rest will be taken care by the tool.
Can't believe you put Scott in the same bucket as Anders and Mark. There are many more insightful and innovative people (including other Technical Fellows) at MS Research and MS itself that are worth following. Scott Hanselman's role is generally evangelizing existing technologies.
So what? If your company ever used Openfire/Spark or any sorts of private IM services they're able to view private messages. Some of you act like this is some mind blowing travesty. You should expect the possibility of your company monitoring their services and communications.
I don't get the point of HipChat. It's a closed, proprietary Jabber server, with closed-source clients, intentionally no OTR support but the explicit ability to spy one-on-one conversations instead.

And people used to pay for that?
> Why is the piece talking about averages, when wealth is distributed as a power curve?

80,000 Hours is explicitly focused on maximizing social good, often by advising people on what career will maximize their "earning to give" potential. That is, earning a lot of money to donate to an effective charity (e.g. high rated charities on GiveWell).

Because of this, their analyses tend to look different than it would if it was optimizing towards a risk-adverse individual maximizing personal utility.

The justification for looking at expected value (averages) is expanded on here: http://80000hours.org/blog/12-salary-or-startup-how-do-goode...
I know it sounds ridiculous but for me the one thing HipChat's got over Slack is the ability to have custom emoticons https://blog.hipchat.com/2012/05/21/custom-emoticons-everywh.... Admittedly we use it mainly for banter and fun but its a sticky feature currently keeping me migrating over to Slack...
The blog could use a link back to http://vesperapp.co
You can connect to it using an IRC client, but you lose the ability to view history or make edits to posts
> how is this better than using the emulator then?

Well, the emulator is not quite as comfortable for testing, say, calls, or SMS, or gyroscope, etc.

> also, how is this any different than the last 4 times this was done?

I am not aware of 4 times. However, it is true that Preview/Early Access Developer Phones have been released in the past. This one is not a Preview. IIUC, this one is considered stable.
At least you have Pro/E and Spotfire to keep you entertained :)
Interesting how they are deprecating one tech (NPAPI) in the name of open web, while at the same time they are pushing NaCl.
Thanks for the reply and yes, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that there was some kind of marketing trick going on.

I just think the response here (treating this device as if it were a high-end consumer device) is somewhat understandable as well. For instance there was a thread here recently, "Best Firefox phone to get?" in which the top comment suggests waiting for the Flame:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655450

So there seems to be an unfulfilled want, even though I totally understand that fulfilling it is not what this device is supposed to be for.
Yeah, NPAPI was too open for them to keep permitting the use of. Better to move everything to in-browser DRM (they almost gleefully recommend EME for video) and everything else to NaCl which only works in Chrome.

sigh
The deduction is $0.56/mile, for a $56 deduction (not a tax) for every 100 miles driven. The deduction is in lieu of the separate deductions for gas, wear and tear, insurance, etc., so the driver must choose either to take the mileage deduction or to separately deduct their driving-income expenses.

It's not clear why UberX drivers are being hit with a deduction by Uber on their 1099s, since they--not Uber--are the ones that get the deduction. It sounds like the writer is simply confused about what is actually happening. Based on the magic math of the rest of the article, I'm guessing that the writer doesn't know what they're talking about.
I'm curious -- what is your use case is for writing and deleting?
There's a difference between "like" and "accept the risk of".

I would never have used airbnb or Uber (and the like) if I hadn't heard good things about the services from my friends. Plus, these services offer me something that "legit" ones don't. Sometimes I can't get a cab, or get refused service. Sometimes it's cheaper to rent a whole house rather than enough hotel rooms for a large family...

Look, there's times when I was in a black (or yellow) taxi and didn't feel safe. Just because regulations are in place, that doesn't mean the public is always safe. Regulators aren't always watching, nor are they always straight.
It's not ridiculous. People like eye candy! And even pay for it (stickers and other ridiculous things)!
MS Excel also defaults to using /r as the newline char on the OSX version (despite /r being obsolete in OSX since v10.1). It's true that CSV parsers have been around in various forms for a long time but 'complete' implementations in JavaScript haven't been available until recently.
Lovely quote in a New York Times article about Coursesmart: “It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent” - of course, it always starts with a good intent !
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/09/technology/coursesmart-e-t...
This is true, if you actually care. Many people don't want to have to know the inner guts of how every tool they use works and just want to get their work done. It's unfortunate that git seems to (almost) require it (most likely because of its inconsistent UI (which has gotten better)).
I believe that the best source of information for this is IRC, server irc.mozilla.org, channel B2G.
Is Python Becoming the King of the Data Science Forest?
Garret from HipChat here. The previous discussion on this topic made a lot of assumptions about this change, so I'd like to quote some additional detail from our help doc (http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/358098) before the same happens here;

In order for an organization to access 1-1 chats occurring
after May 27, 2014 or later, the organization will need to
make a request by emailing support@hipchat.com. As stated
in the HipChat-specific terms, the requesting entity must
have consent from their affected users in order to obtain
access to those users' 1-1 chat history. The typical way
that an entity would have the right to access employee
communications is through the entity's employee policy.
It is standard practice among businesses to state in their
policies that the employer has the right to access
communications occurring on workplace systems. You should
speak with your employer if you have questions about their
specific data access policies.
So if something is providing a service to society by using resources that would otherwise be unused, but government can't tax the service, then it's "bad for the economy" ...
@alexcroox can't reply directly for some reason, hopefully you'll see this.

It's possible, see https://slack.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connec... for more details. You'll lose the history though. We've been using native clients more or less, all are working fine.
For the curious, this appears to be the Julia-lang homepage: http://julialang.org/
See also: http://facebook.github.io/origami/ - Another QC-based UI/UX toolchain
Any thoughts/justifications for pricing? The only thing holding us back is that Slack costs 4x as much ($8 instead of $2). While this isn't a big spend at the end of the day, we're sort of anchored at $2. There's nothing terribly wrong with hipchat, seems to address all our (simple) chat needs, and switching to slack doesn't seem to give us 4x as much value.

So far the best reasoning I have is that we're a mostly-dev team, and that there's something for non-devs that is appealing in Slack, but surely it's not a prettier interface? I'm genuinely curious, as I'd like to justify switching to the prettier product. :)
Google isn't competing.
Unfortunately, yes:

http://reproducibility.cs.arizona.edu/
Slack lets you add custom emoji too: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504
And this is good because?

I don't get the point of this, you get pretty much the same thing by doing nothing. Fix the menu to the top of the page, when you scroll down it goes away, scroll back up and there it is. Almost no one is going to care that they'll need to scroll back to the top, I'm sure of it.
This is possible in slack: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/437028458627989504
This is like arguing with a religious fanatic, to be honest. I don't think you'll ever get it.
You can setup custom emojis in Slack!
What exactly do you mean by 'spy'?

Edit: Looks like OP was referring to this: https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/04/25/hey-were-changing-our-te...
This phone is designed to be a superset of the hardware of other FirefoxOS phones. In theory, any hardware feature on another phone will also be found on this phone. Additionally, this phone has features like the ability to artificially limit the amount of ram it has, to test other device profiles.
on the iPhone you can just double tap the top of the screen to scroll to the top quickly.
> They do get to choose whether to sign up to a volunteer military that's engaged in an existing war.

There's been 2 very short "wars" and then 2 very long counter-insurgency campaigns.

E.g. with Iraq: Even if you just flat-out assume that the U.S. invasion was completely unjustified, a soldier signing up to join could still have a positive role to play in helping the new government, and the Iraqi people, establish the basic trappings of security needed for any modern society to function. After all, the reason that the UN (and all its associated aid agencies) pulled out in 2003 was because of the security failure that led to their special rapporteur being murdered in a bombing.

I mean, we've experimentally verified after the U.S. left that the mere military presence alone wasn't what was causing bombing attacks, as Iraq still has to fight through those even today.

Would it have been better not to be going to Iraq in the first place? Absolutely, but the soldiers joining in 2004 didn't get to decide on the 2003 invasion, only on whether they can help on America's behalf to help the Iraqis with the damage inflicted.
It's very hard to affect demographics to produce more babies after demographic transition is complete. Or are you talking about investing in education?
I haven't used Slack, but I've used all sorts of xmpp/jabber servers such as Openfire, generic jabberd, etc. Hipchat blows those away. I can quickly see what links and files I've posted or have been posted to me. I can open unlimited rooms, invite members to them and if I have a new employee start all I need to do is make them an account and they have everyones contact information. We previously used g-chat which was an absolute pain. Half of the employees I have on gchat I have their personal emails.

And it was about $3/mo per user. Not bad at all.
that's assuming I want to do navigation just because I started to scrollup, which is a flawed assumption.
> overly patriotic horn tooting

The word you are looking for is "chauvinist".
I was very pleasantly surprised today to read that frameworks like Unity3D have already deprecated their NaCl and Flash support.
> I know that and I run my own sync-1.1 server instance. Now they force me to use more of their unique software (I'll have to run fxa-auth and fxa-content too, and edit some obscure variables in about:config) or I won't be able to sync new devices. The fear is, eventually, they may introduce more, and I'll have no choice but to give up and rely on their servers.

Desktop-side, we are trying to make things easier. If you wish to help, you'll be quite welcome.
yeah. at first i kinda had a knee jerk reaction to mpt accept the "misogyny" script, because feminists do this about everything, but after reading about him calling women a virus and wanting to exterminate all of them, I have to agree.
Slack has IRC gateway, so you can use irssi for company chat.

It might not be a big deal for you, but when we were briefly using Slack at previous company, I loved that I could just add it as another network to irssi.
Keep in mind, however, that medicine has been in this position for ~4000 years. Or at least, I did classical studies, and doctors did very well for themselves in the ancient Greek city states, in the Roman Empire (East and West), in the middle ages, in the Renaissance, in the Industrial age, and today.

It will be 1950+ years before IT gets a track record half as good in the best possible case.
QuickCoin.co Launches Service To Send + Receive Bitcoin via Facebook
I find it strange that Wired would spend several paragraphs describing standard software licensing practices as a "fraud".
We pay for HipChat because it makes team communication easy and painless on every device our employees own.
I wonder if this has at least a little bit to do with the recent post about HackerChat [1], since even though it wasn't by the people at Slack themselves, but by someone else (Gianluca and Steven), it's pretty much a very good way to get the word out about Slack. I actually couldn't think of a better way than what HackerChat did to show to developers, entrepreneurs and people that would need such tool "Here's how it works!". I don't think any landing page can do that.

I think it's what some smaller businesses might do, or some people applying for a job: look what the startup/client does or needs, make something that's relevant to demo your skills/features and show it to them.

[1]: http://hackerchat.co/
NodeSource: Offering Professional Node.js Services
This individual's worldview seems to be predicated on the assumption that they have a right to live downtown in the city of their choosing.
Ask HN: tech scene in Belize?
My wife and I are considering living in the sub-tropics for several years, and we happen to like Belize a lot.

Does anyone know what the tech scene is like there? Except for time in silicon valley working at Google last year, I have lived and worked remotely in the mountains of Central Arizona for 15 years. I don't need technical peers in Belize but it would be more fun.
Isn't NaCl open source? What's the problem?
Take it the other way around: if you think a 50 kg human is just as much "a human" as a 250 kg one and extrapolate from there to counting "living things", it is 3E12 bacteria vs one human. Makes the 'human' part negligible.

But of course, a drop of water on your skin would be over 1E20 molecules of H2O, so it would be dead things:living things > 1E7 (give or take a few orders of magnitude)
I hope so, then I will just have a reason to do it - running lisp code in production would be a rare badge.
> Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change.

Indeed. Here's a great quote from 2005: "databases are rocks, spreadsheets are water": http://www.propylon.com/news/ctoarticles/051115_master_foo.h...
I'm looking through their bug reports and developer message boards all of the time... and I've never seen anyone abbreviate it as anything other than "FF".
Oh cool, thanks I missed that update
Saying Excel doesn't have any hidden state is stretching things a bit--your formulas don't show up until you are directly on them, so mistakes (formula results that got turned into static data, for example) are hidden until you put your cursor directly onto them.
Why yes, we're not stuck with 80x25 green on black terminals.

Why even mention it? By the way that nested hierarchical tree is also written in text (HTML and CSS). So is the hyperlink. URLs? Text.

Check any modern IDE and you'll see similar visualizations over text based source code. I can explore my project in a tree-based outline in my IDE. I can open my classes as an UML diagram.

Turns out we're already in the future. Celebrate?
> both pale in comparison to the simplicity, flexibility and client-options of IRC

I can definitely agree on the flexibility part, but simplicity? No way. HipChat is easy enough for our completely non-technical users to be quite comfortable with immediately. The setup process is entering a username and a password. Ditto for the mobile apps.

I love IRC, but it's a very different thing.
No import. No export. Not for you.

Yet.
Not everyone needs open-source tweakable tools, and siloing private conversations into an OTR capable client isn't that weird. Hipchat worked great when I convinced TC to switch to it back in the day - I've had less luck with NBC, which still uses Campfire. Not everything needs to cross every t and dot every i — if it works for the people who use it and people are comfortable with it, what's the problem?
It is pretty dumb that C# still hasn't shipped a proper REPL or script runtime though.

Workin' on it.
Per-capita GDP does not matter in the power contest. There are countries that have GDP/capita twice the size of US's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28nom...
Finally, thankfully.

Just last week i've had to physically remove some about 8 extension directories from chrome's extension dir on a laptop I got my hands on, that were according to the extensions page installed by 'domain administrator'. It was a fuckin' ad-injecting thing that injected banner ads into every site it rendered.

Now can they also please add some sort of protection for these spyware thing that change add parameters to your browser's shortcut on your desktop?
no it can't, not enough women :(

https://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e9...
Jerzy Tyszkiewicz:
Spreadsheet As a Relational Database Engine,
in Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data:195-206, Indianapolis, 2010.

http://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~jty/SIGMOD/SIGMOD.html

And of course, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/306397:

"Microsoft SQL Server supports connections to other OLE DB data sources on a persistent or an ad hoc basis. The persistent connection is known as a linked server; an ad hoc connection that is made for the sake of a single query is known as a distributed query.

Microsoft Excel workbooks are one type of OLE DB data source that you can query through SQL Server in this manner. This article describes the syntax that is necessary to configure an Excel data source as a linked server, as well as the syntax that is necessary to use a distributed query that queries an Excel data source."

[the first is theoretical computer science and not even intended to be practical; the second is ugly, but, at times, highly practical]
ROOM 23 ROCKS Los Angeles Kid Punk Band.
Hipchat runs smoother than XChat for you? That's a first.

Hipchat isn't bad but I vastly prefer IRC, particularly with a good IRC bot.
How can they do this for IR? Wouldn't the actual hardware make a difference in power usage?
Yes. The integrations. https://slack.com/integrations

This isn't the usual "host your own server" integration. All Slack asks for are credentials for services you use and it seamlessly integrates into an assigned chat room (channel). My CEO did it for the startup I work at and in ten minutes from signup we had: Github, Trello, New Relic, Twitter, and Stripe all integrated.
"Hey bob, here is a link to a folder on my machine - can you upload that those [random file types] you want me to look at?"

or

"non-tech wife needs to get this file to our home machine, she can use my link to /home/put/ to send this to my home machine from her work"
I disagree. We tried Slack on our 26-person team and left it after a week. It had a few fans, but most people found the interface to be more complex and noisy than HipChat. Lots of red icons and blue banners that could not be disabled. No ability to see at a glance who is in a room without clicking the list and scrolling through it. The integrations were nice and the search was amazing, but those things were less important to us than the frictionless communication tools, which HipChat has nailed. Additionally, Slack lacks a distinction between @all and @here, which is frustrating when you want to announce something in a room without emailing everyone present.
Do any of y'all have an opinion on which of the tools mentioned here is the most robust to junky input?
Then it sounds like better preservation would be expected. The article says it lasts two weeks at 10°C. I have no idea how exceptional that is as I've never knowingly stored lettuce at 10°C, but it probably doesn't last as long as lettuce as refrigerator temperatures.
For as long as I remember IDEs have had said drag-and-drop interfaces, usually centered around the coding of GUIs, and no one has said that just because an IDE has a visual form editor it's not programming.

You're the one making up the distinction and arguing against it.

The primary reason that not everything has turned into a drag-and-drop interface is that it's highly inefficient. It remains a fact that compared to manually hunting for class Socket in tab bars and scrollable lists, just so I can drag it and drop it somewhere, it's far easier to just use your keyboard and type "new Socket" in your code, especially with autocompletion at your service.
Something being open source doesn't really have much relation to a technology being open. In this case in particular, it's replacing one open-source API that is easily re-implementable, and has been reimplemented by many parties, by another one that is realistically only available by importing the majority of Chrome into your project.
Just because something is open source, it does not mean it will be supported by others. Browsers (and web in general) is very complex beast. It's not enough to open source something and proclaim it good for all. Other browsers need to support the same technology in order to gain big number of developers.

NaCl was not (afaik) adopted by any other browser vendor. Therefor it's not open web.
They are definitely feeling pressure as users are demanding and expecting more from their communication tools. Slack's done a good job at bringing more to the table, but we're really just at the start of a renaissance in business communication.

If you think about "chat" in generations, you started with IRC, AIM (which is still used in many companies) and then came HipChat. Not much development there for a couple years so Slack put some lipstick on the last generation of chat product. There's a whole new class of communication platforms being developed now that are taking things even further, by enabling true cross-company communication (meaning both internal & external), things like customer support integrated with internal team communication, etc.