skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://domains.google.com/about/features.html

Integration with Google cloud resources (a la AWS Route 53), 10 million lookups/year free, pricing appears off the bat to be $12/year, free private registration.

And support! "With Google Domains, you get phone and email support (M-F, 9am to 9pm EST)."
I'm sure the intention of this scheme is to make you think twice before driving into the city. If you had arrived on foot, you wouldn't have cared how expensive the parking was.
Static checking of units in Servo
Just because you don't need to count calories to maintain your weight doesn't mean it isn't a useful tool for many people.

The idea that the precise quantification of food that leads to poor diets/eating habits is rather obsurd given that most diets unfortuantely don't actually do that. Most diets are composed of ridiculous rules like "Don't eat any carbs!" or "Eat only cabbage!" Tracking what you are eating and not going over a calorie limit is one of the most reliable ways to lose weight if you actually do it. Most people, "dieters" included, have absolutely no clue how many calories they eat every day.

I guarantee that anyone who wants to lose weight can do so if they eat fewer calories than they use in a day. Losing weight is that simple. It's not necessarily easy, but it is extremely simple.
That's interesting. Can you tell us why your company opted in?
Local SEO Education a la Moz
The youtube'd example on the homepage is not a very strong one because the mentor's accent is very hard to understand and I would say it destroys the reputability of the entire platform.

http://youtu.be/vw5_YyM4hn8?t=3m40s
Consider a sport Chess--, which is very similar to chess, except that before making each move, the player rolls a 100-sided die, and if it comes up 100 they instantly win. If Magnus Carlsen plays Chess-- against me, and is one move away from checkmate when I throw the 100, did the best player win?
I would recommend pointing them to this resource as well (19 pages and counting): http://wtfjs.com
This is a really neat article, and I look forward to reading the book. The field of accounting really is a marvelous and, in current times, under-appreciated bedrock of civilization. In the course of certain matters, I have had the opportunity to work with forensic accountants, which is a field I did not know even existed. Basically, when $100 million disappears from a ledger, forensic accountants dive in and figure out what happened. It is incredible the kind of narrative, capturing a panoply of human behavior, that can emerge from digging through some spreadsheets and associated e-mail chains.

To analogize, imagine spelunking through git commits on a 10 MLOC project trying to figure out: "is someone trying to insert a backdoor? is someone just incompetent? is this just the predictable result of a death march?"
The author took many, many hits and still kept on going. I have an immense amount of respect for her and hope that she will embark on a new venture soon where she can apply everything that she learned.
Write Better Tests in 5 Steps
there are some great frameworks that do do one language everywhere (my top choices would be om and hoplon from the clojurescript camp, and opa from the custom language camp). there is something to be said for being able to seamlessly pass data around between the frontend and backend, and letting the language and framework handle the low-level details for you.
Self driving cars have to deal with a human centric analog world. Why not add a layer of information to help them ? smart paint to help align, smart milestones and road signs broadcasting local driving constraints. Your car will read these and plan accordingly, instead of relying on heavy computer vision to be interpreted ?
There is no reason they cannot perform maintenance for US zones and EU zones at different times and avoid M-F mid-day for everyone. So it's probably "just easier" for Heroku this way.
That is a really good and emotional post mortem. I think we need more of these. Great lessons are learnt from failures.
Epoch (UNIX, or POSIX) time is how computers keep track of time internally. Programmers like it because it easy to do math on and requires no formatting.
Makes zero sense to do an 2 hour update on a Monday at 10 AM PDT.

Horrible horrible timing. I'll likely be getting blamed for this since I recommended Heroku.
In Boston, an artificial scarcity of housing is the unfortunate result of laws that effectively limit new development. You either can't build new, can't build too high, or have to meet a neighborhood's aesthetic to get approval. The result is higher prices, more sprawl, and a generally depressing force on the kinds of great things that come from sufficient population density.
I would love to have this go to court. If I have just parked my car and am standing there and someone says "Hey, here is $10 if you move your car and let me part there." I would be tempted to take it. This is what the App automates. So how do you get from incentivizing someone to move their car, to a 'lease of public parking spots' ? That is the legal theory I'd love to hear presented by the City Attorney.
Are Hollow Icons Really Harder to Recognize Than Solid Icons? A Research Study
Thanks! Transparent moderation is always great, but I feel that de-baiting links is really important and generally underappreciated... Keep up the good work!
Gotta hand it to OP. Sounds like she gave it her all as a very young founder. I suspect after re-grouping she could have a bright future.

The one thing that made no sense to me was why they didn't stay in Australia and go after local market. Does the concept not work there?
I really appreciated this article. I'm on year 5 of my "startup" which has struggled and kicked and clawed and just barely hit profitability at the end of last year. I have to admit that it feels totally uncool that we have hung on all this time instead of just quitting after spending somebody's millions of dollars in 6 months. (We never had millions to spend, but anyway). There are so many times when you feel like things are just not going to work. Working hard and persevering are ideas that don't always jive with the "fail fast" strategy.

Even after all this time and things beginning to look positive, I still worry constantly that we will backslide or somebody will come along and take our marketshare or any number of other things. I wish that 99dresses had a different outcome, but still it is an encouraging story. No doubt with this kind of attitude and experience Miss Durkin is going to find success. I think it is extremely important to know that not every venture has to take off within six months to be successful. It's a long haul for most of us.
I cringe when I hear people say they love programming so much they'd do it for free. It may be true but don't say it out loud!
I don't mind someone else finding that out. Its them taking risk on behalf of 100 other entrepreneurs who'll follow them.
Thank you for having an open mind with regard to a sport you are a fan of, many fans can't do this. I am as much a soccer fan as the next avg American is.

I think I agree with the article, not because I read the article, but because I arrived at the same conclusion myself.

Basketball and soccer are very similar sports, to the extent that we can say that they are mathematically "the same" sport in the same sense that all op amp circuits are the same, simply with differing amounts of time delayed positive and negative feedback.

I think what the author is trying to prove is what I came up with intuitively: imagine soccer without goalkeepers, or soccer with a larger net; that game would be very similar to current soccer (in terms of gameplay), but it would have much higher scores. Along with the higher scores would come, in my belief, a greater sense on the part of the fan that "the best team won". There would still be excitement, there would still be upsets, but the upsets would be based more on a cinderella team summoning their (admirable cheerable) "will to win" (or the champions failing due to hubris, cf tortoise and hare) and less due to statistical noise.

The sense I get watching soccer is, this is a good game with skill and athleticism, but something could be done to ensure that the best team wins more often; not that the outcomes would be more predictable, but that the outcomes would be more satisfying. And also, with fewer tie breakers.
Does this argument apply to development tools in the browser, or do you think this is likely in the near future? As in, does it currently negatively affect performance or significantly impact the size of the browser (honest question)?
Feels like Merb all over again!

Data Mapper, significantly less code, humble core-contributor.

Great work!
Of course it's OK to run a service in the US that might be illegal abroad. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, etc. have all been banned, blocked, and threatened by various foreign governments, even in nominally democratic countries.

US-based Internet companies have flourished due to the relatively hands-off regulations concerning websites. To suddenly apply every foreign law that's ever been written would be a significant chilling effect on business.
The article manages to be factually correct while still missing the point entirely, because he conflates uncertainty (randomness) with pointlessness, and the ability to describe something probabilistically with reducibility to mere randomness.

When two chess grand-masters meet, the odds of the outcome may be sufficiently close to 50/50 that you could obtain a similar statistical distribution of wins/losses with a coin flip. But I think almost everyone would agree that the content of a chess match is profoundly more interesting than a coin toss.

Soccer, although I'm not a fan personally, is exactly the same. Sure, you can say "there's a X% chance that a goal shot will go in", and that's true as far as it goes. But for each particular shot, for each particular block, it was interesting because of specific human interactions. The stats were never intended to tell the whole story.

Similarly, regarding his conclusion - Sure, I think almost any fan would agree that the proxy of "winning a game" is a poor indicator for the overall skill level of a team, particularly in close matches. But that's not what matters - what matters to players and to fans is who played better, who was 2 inches more accurate on that day, at that time.
By that logic, chess is a Poisson process, too.

However, I think there isn't really any logic here. A claim that something is a Poisson process should be followed by some statistical test. I wouldn't know which one, because we do not know the various probabilities and because they change over time (for example, P(Spain:whoever) seems to have dropped quite a bit recently, and nobody knows when that happened and by how much), it will be estimate them.

But a statistical test still is needed to make any kind of claim of something being a Poisson process. I guess that, if you posed a model for way in which such probabilities change, you might be able to use some ELO-like system to estimate those probabilities and, from it, do some test for Poisson distribution. I fear such a model might have so many degrees of freedom that it is too weak to prove anything. At the very least, it would be hard math to wring anything out of such a model.
This is awesome! Thanks for the recommendation!
"Files uploaded to Dropbox via the desktop application or mobile apps have no file size limit."
There is a fatal virus in the US that claims 3,000 people every month. And it's a nasty one. It's the #1 cause of death for teenagers. That virus is called a car accident, and the fact we're complacent with that is what scares me.

We understand the delicate balance you describe and it's our top priority to make sure our product actually does improve drivers' safety. That's why we're using independent third party testing by the same companies who test products for the major automakers, even though there is no law or regulation requiring us to do so.
I was definitely curious about that too - inquiring minds want to know!
I am still downloading the library, just to take a quick look at it, however 254MB seems a bit oversized...
I like her so much! This amount of perseverance and strength is so overwhelmingly commendable and inspiring.

I wish Nikki all the best in the future!
Hormone-disrupting activity of fracking chemicals worse than initially found
Then don't. It's really pretty easy to get in to contract programming (making assumptions here). Especially if you default to long-term contracts. It's basically like a job but you get to pick how many hours you put in.
and speed of site will never be an issue (host wise)... and indexing out the gate. wish i would have waited to buy that domain i just had to have saturday night :/
A lot of people don't care about the content of games, just their result.
Goodbye Heroku
the price seems to inc DNS and subdomains if you get all that for 12$/yr that would be pretty neat
I lost about 10 pounds with FitBit then gained it back after taking a startup job. (I blame free lunches and not the device.)

I echo others' comments that better calorie tracking would be great. The biggest problem with their dashboard is duplication: it's overwhelming to have 30 different brands of croutons to choose from when logging your lunch. I think a curated list would be better than an expansive user-generated list.
Thanks for the de-demotivation.
Mercedes-Benz has a very nice product, but it's not hands-free. There's a huge difference.
The project I believe `hawkharris is talking about: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/massoudhassani/mine-kaf...
wow, first Google's phone support
I wonder how they will staff the support. Contractors or employees? Has Google bought a domain company recently?

This looks like a sensational service.

Curious the sign up for an invitation only asked if you've bought a domain before.
There is a wisdom here, lieing in the English name: accounting, to hold accountable, to reckon up the debts and mete out justly and rightly.

It's something worth pondering and considering it as a righteous practice.
Accounting has always struck me as a field that is un-appreciated by the masses, but valued quite highly by those somewhat more in the know. For instance, a background in accounting is highly valued in investment banking.
With an increase of client-side apps combined with server api's this is less the case, though, isn't it?

I can imagine quite a few 'web apps' that won't try to actively obfuscate how their client app operates. In those cases having browser-based development tools makes it much easier to tinker with and inspect the app...
I really liked Merb, and stuck by it for some time. Rails 3 was supposed to be Merb 2. It wasn't really, but Merb was still lost to the "merge".
My first thought is that it potentially could have a warning system stating whether the system guaged its ability to drive as "safe", "be careful", or "hey I can't do this, you should drive." A noise or color system could be used to alert the driver. Perhaps on a freeway with little traffic that the Cruise has seen plenty of times, it could be fully safe. But on some backroad that it hasn't seen before, or during bad weather conditions, it would go into fully manual mode.
They were obviously discriminating against you. Equal pay for equal work, right?
Working on the balance thing and addressing the core issues, will try and focus on it more. You are right, quitting will not solve all of my problems, just one (that probably seems worse due to other things). Probably will stick with it for a bit longer. Thankee
google has attempted domain names previously, and it has previously sucked, very badly,
1. you could never get to a customer support, no phone number, and emails were all auto responses sending you to faq
2. there was no dedicated dashboard for domain management, billing etc

this is a revamp and product consolidation and it is super late to the game, hopefully the transition for current users will be easy
Hamlet Implementation
"No additional cost for private registration" is badly required in the industry, and glad to see Google take the lead.

Also, there should be an option to 301 redirect your blogspot blog to a domain held by Google. Lots of bloggers have outgrown their .blogspot.com blogs.
> Putting an IDE inside the browser, having no other dependencies between viewing web-pages and making web-pages is an incredible first step.

I... um, it's a first step we took 17 years ago, didn't we? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer
Your drone arrived Russian pizzeria launches unmanned delivery
We use our own actuators to control your steering wheel, gas pedal, and brake pedal. It's designed to work on any car, regardless of whether it has any drive-by-wire capabilities.
Hey Andrew, I actually glossed over that out of respect for the 2 guys. My purpose was not to bitch about them, and many people who will read this post in my network will know who I'm talking about. There were mistakes made on both sides, but in the end I bent over backwards to accomodate them and as soon as YC was over and they could say they were YC founders they bailed. I'm not saying its entirely their fault - I should have picked up on the warning signs but I was off fundraising for 2 months and didn't notice. But I did consider them my friends, and they didn't care what position I was left in if they were to leave. Anyway, I'm sure we both learned a lot from the experience.
"Free market is not an answer to everything."

The problem here is one of rationing. There are a limited number of spots; who gets them?

In the current situation, the spaces are free/subsidized, but you pay instead by driving in circles. That's a big waste of time and adds to traffic congestion. Maybe that's more "fair" in some sense, but that doesn't make it good.

The app in question does either nothing or very little to help ration. It allows people who really need to park, and have the money to pay for it, to be more certain that they will get a space, which I guess is something. But it creates so many bad incentives that it's making the problem worse, not better.

The city is in a better position to create market incentives, because they can charge for the entire duration that you're in the space, not just the moment you happen to park. That means people would have no reason to camp out in a space waiting for the price to go up, which means more spaces will be available for useful purposes. It saves time and congestion, but perhaps loses out on some definitions of "fairness".

Any other ideas?
Curated Tech Reads Delivered To Your Inbox
> even though there is no law or regulation requiring us to do so.

Are you honestly saying there's no laws around safety requirements in vehicles?

Also, there's the fear of lawsuits.
The Glass Explorer program had (has) phone support.
That wasn't a mandate. It was my proposal so I know. I suggested that we target "about the size of an MP3" because that was the most common unit of download that a lot of people understood in the early 2000s and downloading software was something people weren't terribly comfortable with. I did some quick estimates and came up with 4MB as the goal based on the size of popular MP3s. By the time we shipped Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, we managed to get the download to about 4.7MB.

That was 2004 though. Today the Web is a lot more capable because browsers are a lot more capable. Also, typical download bandwidth for consumers is a lot more capable than it was in 2004.

Most of the growth in Firefox download size since then is a result of Gecko/Web platform feature growth, not the GUI features that users interact with.

That web platform capability isn't free. It takes code to make JS dozens of times faster than it was in 2004. It takes code to add HTML5 and CSS 3 features, WebGL, WebRTC, and all of the other great stuff the Web platform includes today. That code makes the download larger.

That being said, I'd love to see another round of evaluation to see what can be trimmed or slimmed. I don't consider that the same priority it was in 2004 though.
Looking for a parking spot is already a form of predatory behaviour in many places. Encouraging people to put a dollar value on a public space can't help.

Where do we go from here? An app to sell your spot in the grocery store checkout line?
I'd be interested in that too. I am a research scientist, and the experience of trying to get some decent innovative science done appears to be similar in terms of emotional stress as running a start-up. Will it work? What do I need, who will give it to me, etc, etc.

One thing I have learnt, though, is the people are harder than science; if you don't have your working relationships aligned all hell can be created.
Nope. I can do this with Word, python -m SimpleHTTPServer, and a web browser to write code, test code and see code in live action.

Wait, what is Word being used for, in this process?
Vienna is a Ruby web front-end framework that looks promising. https://github.com/opal/vienna
Can't say I agree with that. Soccer has a state too, just because they don't pause the game after every completed pass for a few adverts, a timeout, and 12 replays, doesn't mean it doesn't have state.
That's a solid point, assuming that it actually does create bloat (which I don't know much about, I admit).

Could another advantage of coupling browsers with development tools be that it makes it logistically easier to maintain 'parity' between the browser and its development tools? Or is that not how these things are done?

Edit: I see my question has been addressed elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7933515)
I suspect that many sites simply do not have staff and/or resources capable of producing NoScript-friendly (degradable) work.
Over the past few years, I've put myself out there as well, not because I'm extroverted but because there is no better laboratory test of your ideas/convictions.

I'd only add one thing to this approach: make sure that you are at least solving one of your own problems and that the solution is real -- i.e. it really benefits you in some measurable way.

I did this a few years ago with a relatively obscure gem that solved a real problem I actually had with refactoring business logic. I put it out there to get feedback on it and was rather disappointed with the initial reactions ("You don't understand MVC!" "You've done it all wrong!"). But I put myself aside and tried to understand the feedback from their point of view.

One thing that became obvious is that most people didn't see the solution as valid because they had completely different context and approach. Fair enough. There were also several that simply 'cargo-culted' mvc responses without realizing that my gem was a thin wrapper around methods that DHH had already put in Rails (so if I didn't understand MVC, neither did he! ;) And no one commented on the biggest problems I legitimately saw with my approach: thread-safety and closures on controller instances in a prod env.

But none of that stopped this gem from being incredibly useful as I tried to break apart a giant monolithic legacy app that challenged traditional refactoring approaches. Maybe it's not perfect, but at least it's a way forward.

So the moral of the story is: put your idea out there, expect feedback and criticism (maybe only criticism since the people who like things tend to keep quiet (e.g. the rvm story last year)) -- but so long as this thing is useful to one person (only you?), use it to make your life easier!

If it's useful to others, that's a bonus learning opportunity, but that shouldn't be your sole motivation.
Any idea what TLDs they currently support?
I agree with the overall tenor of the comments: this wasn't a very good article. Much of what he's saying is well known to quantitatively minded fans of sport, and the presumption that the game has failed if it doesn't identify the better team with near certainty is silly.

However, I've liked that blog for a while and think there's a lot of interesting stuff on there, for example this conversation between an economist and a physicist:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...