skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey there, one of the BillForward founders here.

Our goal is to enable any company to bill how they want without hassle or constraints of building out a full subscription stack.
Billing models such as tiered/volume pricing and usage billing can get complex but we make them very simple to use. You can often implement these features in places such as Stripe et al but often the minutiae becomes complex. We built the product that can scale from a simple flat price all the way up to composite price plans with tiered/volume pricing.
you're seeing that because they wanted to show you what it looked like as an MP4. My understanding was that twitter would ship you the GIF if your browser didn't support MP4.
ime non-vm servers are an enormous win over ec2, and probably vms in general. A previous employer moved a large data processing pipeline from ec2 to softlayer; we saw costs fall from ~$100k/mo to high $40k/mo while tripling the throughput for roughly a 6x perf boost.

The one area that this announcement doesn't address, however, is contended networking. Rack local servers with a 2G (or ideally 10G) full port-to-port simultaneous switch did amazing things for our app's performance. When you're looking at whole-app performance, you're sensitive to contention on all of cpu, io, and networking. Hadoop is particularly sensitive to contended i/o, but secondarily sensitive to networking.

edit: s/big data/large data/ -- people who say bigdata are tools
Attitude As A Top Principle For A Successful Entrepreneur
Someone spends hundreds of hours of their own time working on a blog post that is amazingly informative and you aren't going to share it because they put some fun in it.
How they are different from each other? :)
Most people speak English, including bus drivers and anyone else you'll meet. I think the consensus is that swedes probably have the best English of all who don't have it as their first language.

So it isn't just realistic, it's simple. Language-wise you may find it easier than parts of the UK (I'm not even joking).

In the tech sector as well as all larger/multinational corporations English will be the primary language used.

In fact, people who come to learn Swedish are routinely disappointed when they don't get a chance to try it, as the swedes are so delighted to speak English.
If it's just cleaning up CSS you're after, I would use UnCSS. Checkout grunt-uncss task or gulp-uncss to hook it up to your build process. We don't currently document using the tooling independent of the kit, but you should be able to pluck the package.json and gulpfile.js and edit per your needs. We'll try to get this documented.
Same story. Most browsers supported H.264 first (because it was dominant before WebM was even born). Internet Explorer, Safari and MobileSafari still do not support WebM. I don't see any reasonable way to say that WebM is well-established and H.264 is not.
What? Actually, absolutely not.

If you only care about whether something succeeded use Option, if you care about the error use Either, Validation, etc.

Just pick the right Monad.
Lang.NEXT 2014 videos from Pike, Stroustrup, Alexandrescu et al.
Currying is the factory factory pattern for λ people.
If speed is your biggest concern, it is likely that you will build a system that has a lot of services which each have a shallow stack. Each service would not go very deep into the service stack before hitting the data it was looking for. PHP, for example, almost always works this way. Maybe the data would be in a cache, as suggested by other commenters here. You have more places to put caches if you think about your system as multiple services.

If you are making a big system, you probably would not want to try to put all of the components in one monolithic place. I argued that this makes testing and release more complicated (and slower). But, I suspect it also affects runtime speed by making the stack deeper. You would be doing more switching to get your requests to the right components.
You must be careful about that distinction - some projects are never "finished". Especially in the case of code, where the traditional definition means less "complete" and more "unsupported and unmaintained", i.e. analogous to "dead".
Our cultures are wonderfully different and this article shows good examples. I find it useful especially since I'm working with people from different countries on a product that is targeted globally. Isn't this the most common case now? Hope you'll like it too.
>Projects from charter, magnet, and KIPP schools, and projects from Teach for America teachers tend to be more successful regardless of gender, and happen to have more male teachers, so we filtered them out of the data to eliminate that confounding effect.

>We then controlled, one-by-one, for the other variables that were correlated with both gender and project success. For example, men are much more likely to create projects asking for new technology. But technology projects actually tend to be less successful than other projects, so we ruled that out as a driver of the gender difference.

I'm not a statistician, and don't have access to all of the raw data anyways, but: You can't filter out data which moves the mean in the direction you want and not filter out data that moves the mean in the other direction. If technology projects lower male teachers' success rates then leaving them in is just as bad as leaving charter schools in.
Twitter adds support for gif
I guess it suggests the character assassination attempts against him worked.

Plenty of people thought Assange was full of him self well-before the rape accusation (that pionar didn't even mention) or any other supposed character assassination.

It's not particularly hard to get a negative impression of him from his own writings, from his hype-man behavior for Wikileaks, his mercenary approach to selling access to media organizations, or from various first-hand accounts of people that worked with him.
You should call the CEO directly and ask him when he'd like to meet for the coffee he wanted to have. CEO's can be interesting to talk with, they have unique and fascinating perspectives.
Does anyone know what they are doing for the conversion? Any services out there do this?
Sure, the human brain is not infallible either. It's actually quite similar to how optical illusions are created: by using what we know about the visual system to create 'adversarial' inputs that create strange results.
We've been doing that at my company on our mobile applications for a few years now. There is no reason to be shoving 5-10mb GIFs down a users throat on a mobile device. Not only does are MP4s smaller (file size), frames per second will be constant on all browsers, unlike GIF (although most browsers are supporting up to 50fps these days). Although outdated, you can read more about that here. http://nullsleep.tumblr.com/post/16524517190/animated-gif-mi...

I wrote a simple js lib for detecting the duration of a GIF for each browser. It was a fun weekend project. https://github.com/rfrench/gify

If webp gains more adoption, it's another alternative now that it supports animation.
How Cities Use Design to Drive Homeless People Away
"it’s (almost too) easy to get stuck using their styles, look and feel for the lifetime of your application"

I'm a developer, and I've never used Bootstrap in my life, but my favorite aspect of Bootstrap is how it brings a sense of familiarity to the web. Why does every website need a unique look and feel? I'd rather not learn a new navigation or layout a hundred times each day. The internet is primarily about content, and Google should know that more than anyone. However, everyone tries to reinvent the wheel, and when I come across a Bootstrap site, it's somewhat comforting.

Don't get me wrong, creativity is important to some sites, and others are required to go outside of the box to reach their goals. However, they're the minority.
Ask HN: How can I get started with FPGA?
Are the affordable starter kits out there? What does the HN community recommend?

I did a little FPGA work as part of a course in college, but only used the simulators and never got to see my stuff running on an actual chip. I'd like to dive a little more on it.
Neither do I, but I read a few things by the Dali Lama which challenged my understanding of the world.
For memory, there's the "Lost in the mall" technique for implanting false memories. It exploits an effect known as memory conformity where people's memories of an event tend to converge after discussing it together.

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

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

Not sure what you mean by beliefs.

There was also an experiment on split-brain patients (the connection between the left and right hemispheres is severed) where they'd show a command like "WALK" to the patient's right hemisphere only. They'd get up and walk. But since language is often localized to the left hemisphere, if you talk to them you are talking to the left hemisphere only, which did not see the command. Instead of saying something like "I don't know", they would make up a plausible reason to get up like "I'm getting a drink".

Does that count? It exploits what we know about the visual system (half of the visual field goes to each hemisphere) and localization of a particular function (language) in a patient with a specific disability (their corpus collosum is severed, which is mostly asymptomatic) to produce a completely strange result (invention of a motive).
Yep, including the public school system of Britain, which these folks are trying to support

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-25857276
For me (Chrome, Win7), the gaps are explained by "PageSpeed Insights Reporting" and "SASS Support" wrapping down to the next row for all but a small range of horizontal viewport widths.
Haha , long time in a no english speaking environnement!
No, there are 4:4:4 and 4:2:2 modes in JPEG.

H.264 also defines such modes, but no consumer hardware decoders support them so they aren't commonly used.
In a way they're doing it better. Twitter only seems to support MP4 whereas gfycat et al will deliver WEBM or MP4 based on the user's browser.
I'm probably missing something, but why not just do...?

var jp = function(last){
return formatNames2('John', 'Paul', last);
}
Wait, how is this different from a web design/development firm? I don't consider what you're doing as a startup studio, unless you guys are building and marketing your own ventures.
You were not aware of https://deadmanssnitch.com ?
I really liked the plan names especially the top plan, NSA (Monitor Everything). Got a good laugh out of it. :)
One can see how Big Pharma will go the way of Big Music - just not in this decade.
Well, xibs solve a bit more complex issue.
> it's also a signal to me that the person is at least asserting they believe something about the opportunity, having researched me ahead of time, is worth my time, even if I don't immediately see it from the initial email.

But if they are under instructions to do so, then it's not a reliable signal of anything except that they are following instructions and those instructions are slightly more modern than. But now that I'm thinking about it more, I suppose that is a reasonable positive signal, simply because that means their recruiters must be spending a lot more time (maybe 5 minutes vs. 1 minute) per candidate. At the bare minimum, that tells you that they were willing and able to dedicate more resources to finding candidates.
Awesome idea but the price outweighs the pain factor, for me.
How to Integrate Salesforce with Your Mattermark Account
Releasing early and iterating works really well, but it's hardly the only way. Rich Hickey spent two and half years on Clojure before there was a public release[0]. Comment systems are much older today than social networks were in 2003, so I think it might make more sense to step back and plan rather than try a bunch of ideas.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clojure#History
And you can probably rack that for order $11k
If I understand correctly, the deal here is "get a higher level 'Stripe', pay an additional 1% transaction fee" (above $10K+ total transactions).
Show HN: EVI App, a trumpet-like instrument adapted for iPhone
Agreed. MP4 doesn't work on Firefox (out of the box).
One note on Verne -- a lot of early Verne translations (e.g. the ones in the public domain) have really lousy English translations. Big things, like sections being excised because they seemed anti-England, and little things like metric units not being converted to English (screwing up Verne's careful math). So while it's nice to have them free, you'd actually do yourself a favor of getting a modern translation when available, even if you have to pay for it.
Oooh yes they do. GP and I both happen to work for one. :-)
Facebook improves efficiency of app for Africa (and everyone else benefits).
I consider IdeaLab http://www.idealab.com to be the ultimate Startup Studio. Science ( http://science-inc.com ) also labels themselves a startup studio.

If your "studio" is doing design/development work for other companies, that automatically disqualifies you as a startup studio (in my book)
Commissurotomy cases conclusively demonstrate that thinking, decisions, etc. are tied to two separate physical hemispheres of the brain. Or are you suggesting this surgery divides the soul, as well?
I agree with you. It's cool, but not 7$ / month, or 20$ /month cool.
The why is simple. Bandwidth is limited on a given time scale and load is unpredictable. QoS ensures that all of your customers receive a minimum usable level of service. If a bunch of people run off to download a given torrent simultaneously, blowing well past average projected usage and you're not packet shaping, anything that relies on real time packet transfers on that network is hosed.

It's that simple. It's ensuring that a minority of customers can't fuck up the service for the majority.

Everything you've mentioned so far is a lot of statement with no backup. You want "sustained bandwidth" - this is not a thing that most ISPs sell to normal customers at rates mere mortals can afford, and for good reason.

All my packets, no matter what they are, should have equal access to another person's packets on the same network.

QoS's entire raison d'etre is ensuring this equal access by making sure sudden high load does not negatively impact the service for everyone else. Would you prefer your call quality/game/video not get shitty when the latest GoT episode comes out? Or would you prefer a complete wild-west free for all where the "bandwidth hogs" can quite literally ruin a service for everyone?

And don't say "expand capacity", either. Nobody in the world, not even Google, has the ability to deliver their max advertised bandwidth to all subscribers simultaneously.

Please, for your own sanity, learn the difference between average speed and max speed.
There are others, like Proby (which I mentioned here [1]), yet I find that having more competitors in that space would be helpful, because not everyone has exactly the same needs. Congrats for shipping!

[1] https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/writing-reliable-cron-jobs
>If you are planning to do the same, spend time listing down all your UI elements and test whether the theme supports them.

This is all too important when evaluating a prefab Bootstrap theme. In the past when I have used Wrapbootstrap themes, I've been a few days in frustrated that something isn't working. Then when I dig into the asset files I realize that the theme was poorly written and I've been spinning my wheels for nothing. It's too bad so many themes look nice but simply aren't built the right way.
Anatomy of the Microsoft-L.A. County Office 365 Deal
Well it's probably easier to program CUDA for embarassingly parallel tasks, or other tasks well-suited to CUDA, but FPGAs might make certain tasks easier because of their flexibility.
As a counter-point I will say that most of my freelancing clients are perfectly willing to pay that and more, for platforms where a cron that misbehaves has consequences.

I would suggest not to lower the prices :-)

EDIT: I prefer to pay more than $20/mo if this means that your product won't end up being stale and unmaintained.
Before you do that, check out http://aphyr.com/posts/285-call-me-maybe-riak
We gave it a shot but there were a couple things we needed that we couldn't get from DMS. Specifically, I have hourly jobs that started taking longer than an hour to run. I needed timing-based alerts for that. We also needed to be alerted in real time in a way DMS doesn't provide.
Similar story, I got hired by a game development company to make a strategy game involving an aircraft carrier, a ton of aircraft and all kinds of boats and characters. When it was done it was a mini multi-tasking operating system, it taught me more than any project that I'd done up to that point. And the fact that it all played out in real time on a screen made it very easy to see if it wasn't keeping up.

This was on an ST so definitely not a slow machine and yet there were quite a few tricks required to keep it all moving smoothly with close to 100 objects on and off screen.

Good times :)
Looking at this -- it's a Firefox regression apparently. Thanks for the heads up!
Using Git for .NET development part 4 – resolving merge conflicts
Google Code has been languishing. You guys could really do some things with it to make it a competitor with Github and Bitbucket.
> Increasing the bitrate won't solve this either, since it's a limitation of the colorspace.

You can encode at 4:4:4 if you want, although obviously you have no control over what twitter does.
Well.. What would you pay? We're looking for more conversations with potential users to help us find the right price points.
Been following this project for awhile: http://www.nidium.com/ . Hopefully they launch soon cause I am curious to try it out.
Hell, it needs a reality show. Poker proved to be popular!
Good to have the "one is always free" plan, will give it a try.
Not exactly the same, but I remember reading (likely on HN) about some ISPs serving adsense-filled pages in case the DNS lookup couldn't resolve the address.
Someone could ask the same but backward,why waste a good article with childish animated gifs.
Data Structures as Code: The Joys of Meta-Programming
Continuous delivery: killer advantage for moving fast without breaking things
> Would you not just pay the exact same fees minus the 0.2% bitstamp fee?

No, because Bitstamp accepts USD, so you don't lose anything on the conversion rate (which is a crazy hidden fee that banks never mention).

Also Bitstamp has the best EUR-USD conversion rate I've seen. My bank's conversion rate is 2.5% worse than Bitstamp's, which is a huge freaking difference.

> I assume the 3-8% you're talking about is the exchange rate

For wire transfers - yes. For other means of transfer like PayPal, WesternUnion, MoneyGram there's also a huge direct fee, and a horrible conversion rate.
I'm personally waiting for distributed Self objects. When we cut the document presentation mindset maybe ...
hehe, thanks! these were fun to come up with!
> The old version of SOA focused on defining the protocols and API's that services would use to communicate, from the top down. There was a lot of effort put into standardized object definitions and CORBA and EJB, and standardized protocols like SOAP.

I think that CORBA and EJB are sort of the institutionalization of the SOA concept, in much the way that rigid, top-down practices like Scrum are part of the institutionalization of Agile.

I don't think original SOA was any more heavyweight, top-down than original Agile; I think people tend to naturally gravitate toward centralized, top-down ways of doing things, producing a natural cycle of "back to basics", followed by centralizing, top-down approaches trying to impose more definition and manageability on the "new" approaches. (And are aided in this by tool vendors, who want people to buy exclusively into their tools rather than have heterogenous environments, for clear commercial reasons.)

There's also new techniques that develop in parallel to the cycle and stop the cycle from strictly being reinventing the wheel, usually, but the basic pattern is largely cyclical.

> Services from many different languages and platforms co-exist. That's the whole idea.

That was a widely touted feature of old SOA, and of earlier (but by now somewhat old) reactions to the way old SOA went as heavily platform dependent services became common in it.
Cool, what did you guys code this in? I'm working on a weekend project for an EventBrite competitor focused on a really niche group of users.
It seems like this is more of a workflow than just a framework. Zurb and bootstrap don't come with build tools as far as I know, whereas this includes a gulpfile and a bunch of other stuff that's very common in my workflow. This feels more yeoman-esque + generator to me.

Edit: Totally posted this before I read 'Web Starter Kit is inspired by Mobile HTML5 Boilerplate and Yeoman's generator-gulp-webapp, having taken input from contributors to both projects during development. Our FAQs attempt to answer commonly asked questions about the project.'
Foundation for Sites
I haven't used either of them. I played around with Systems C a bit when it was the rage but found that my issues weren't in optimizing some bit of C code with a better opcode rather it was assembling a system with the peripherals I wanted in the places I wanted them.

For a long time I considered soft CPUs a bad idea (the Stretch guys kept trying to sell me on them but since I wasn't really doing things like deep packet inspection I didn't have a good use case, even RAID algorithms on them were better handled by pretty generic DSP type architectures.) However in playing with the Zedboard which has a couple of Cortex A9's attached to the Xilinx fabric I find some interesting things there. If only as a new kind of 'i/o' but that is neither I/O port based nor memory map based (it expresses as memory but it feels different than the memory mapping of old like on the PDP/VAX machines and 68K systems). Could just be nostalgia though.
I'll just reply because I know Addy is crazy busy. The goal is to give developers the education and tooling they need to do well out of the box by following all of our best practices straight away. In this case it can complement bootstrap and other frameworks because we are not building out a component library.
The prices seem really reasonable and a steal if I was still in an enterprise environment. I'm not maintaining any prod servers right now, but $4.99 would be a sweet spot if I had a few hobby servers on the Internet that I was doing devops for.
Personally I thought it was hilarious:

"I lost, like 27 pound."

"Oh my god, what's your secret?"

"... I had my arms ripped off."

"Oh, right."
Literate Chains for Functional Programming
Commercial embedded Linux distro boosts virtualization
Massive WebSolr outage
Intel's Pocket Avatars chat app packs 3D avatars that mimic your face and mood
Here's the blog post, as promised: http://developer.rackspace.com/blog/how-we-run-ironic-and-yo...
Harley-Davidson announces its first electric motorcycle
It's an interesting design question to pick orderings that work best with currying.

Oddly though, when writing haskell code, I don't worry about it much. Once I find myself needing to `flip` a function before using it, I have determined experimentally that the original parameter order I picked was not the best one, and I then go change the function, and let the type checker walk me through fixing any necessary call sites (which also verifies if the new parameter order is better or not).
It got abandoned after a bit. Nobody is willing to do the work needed to "finish" it.
I would say if you're running applications in the cloud, you should ship your logs and forgo logging them on disk. Or setup an awesome ES+Logstash cluster using IO nodes :).

You should've left off the last paragraph; I assumed you knew who I was :).