skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We occasionally get questions from clients about using some file sync tool or another for their backups, and we are very firm with them: file sync is not a backup.

It looks like your software protects to some extent against accidental deletions of files, which puts it far ahead of most file sync tools. But, if it's still possible to accidentally delete the contents of a file or otherwise corrupt it, then it's not a backup.

We usually end up recommending Acronis TrueImage, which is in the same price range as your software. I'd happily recommend your software instead, since TrueImage is clunky and slow, but without archiving it doesn't count as backup software.

(For one real-world example: we had a corporate client get hit by Cryptolocker. It looks like in this case your software would've automatically copied the changed files over to the backup directory; is this the case, or am I missing something?)
I think the point is that even when individuals accrue large amounts of power, like Page/Brin, Zuckerberg, the Kochs, the Bushes, or the Clintons, that it is never really all that concentrated, because there are still thousands and millions of competing interests to consider.

Power flows from many different places. At least for the past couple of centuries, it is never so concentrated that a single individual can orchestrate the world without repercussions.
Not really, since the equivalent formulations in Rust are also existentials, just slightly massaged syntax-wise.
At high altitude you boil water in a pressure cooker. That takes a long time - perhaps that's what he's referring to.
I stand partially corrected, but sorry, I still stand 110% by the general idea behind my comments. I'm not "pushing" my services so much as pushing the concept of rigorously thinking an idea/concept through and testing it before rolling it out to the public (and getting other professionals involved in the process) - even if it is a "Show HN" post. When something is posted on any public forum you do open yourself up to criticism. My apologies if it's taken the wrong way, but startups DO need to consider this.
Does anyone know how these compare to FlameStower? Their tech looks pretty cool because you can use it with any heat source (campfire, camp stove, etc.), but I don't know how the efficiency stacks up against these standalone devices.
I underwrite that wow also, I have fantasies about my own custom FPGA designs, looks that it could be done with garage-like resources following this workflow!
At first glance I'd assume this is like don't break the chain for alcoholics and drug addicts.

Site looks great though.
I used to feel that way and did the same thing. I'll still do lower-case keywords on the command line for one-off queries. But for checked in code or anything that anyone else will look at, the all caps convention is the way to go. I've actually started thinking that it looks nice, now that I'm used to it. Especially when you format your crazy long query so that each indented line starts with the capital SQL keyword…
Is a Raspberry Pi Model B+ with 4 USB ports on the way?
Today I launched a book, here is what I did
Comfort is the trade off for efficient cooking.
Using that criterion the immediate example is Craigslist.
Does it have an API for generating contrasting colors? For instance for a chart, you'd like to generate a set of colors that are all not too alike each other.
If anything, AWS is overrated. It already has some decent competitors and more will grow up soon, though they're massively underutilized. The idea that Amazon itself is critical to internet infrastructure is very disturbing, yet in many cases, it's true these days. We really need to get other cloud providers in the mix.

Amazon as a retail store has been consistently great for me in all major aspects. Any issues I've had with orders have been promptly resolved and Amazon has gone to bat for me several times. I agree that Wal-mart or another major department store could give Amazon a run for its money if they played their cards right, but like you, I don't think they're in that headspace.
> Amazon pays taxes in every state where it has a presence, and doesn't in states where it doesn't. Just like every business (and individual) since, well, ever.

Um, you do realize that this has also been ILLEGAL forever, right?

You, as an individual, are supposed to pay sales tax on your purchases. Period. That is the law.

The fact that the appearance of Amazon allowed millions of people to break that law when the local businesses could not is why the states went after Amazon directly.

Would you much rather that we start convicting people for not paying sales tax? This is the alternative.

Amazon offering zillions of books in stock is disruption. Amazon offering overnight delivery is disruption.

Amazon enabling millions of people to dodge their sales tax isn't disruption--it's called being a jerk.
Easy Way to Keep Your Rails Unicorns Slim
Raspberry Pi B+
"Sobrr will make sure there is no evidence of your craziness. You will always be “sober” online."

The only way they can make it sure is that they don't allow you to post anything. Otherwise it's just the same lie that Snapchat started and less tech-savvy people may believe it (that nobody can save their photo that expires). I'm sure they quickly become sober when they see their "expired" photo spreading on the net.

To say something positive:
I like the 24-hour friendship thing, because it makes sure there is only active "friends" in your list, and also forces a little more interaction:

"At the end of the 24th hour, you two will be cleared from each other’s friend list, unless both sides tapped “Keep.”"
If it's unethical to do it as an experiment, it would be unethical to do it as a reality TV show. Experiments are unethical when they're cruel and abusive. It's not like it's ok to be cruel and abusive as long as you're filming it for entertainment.
Not to mention the common argument that "ubiquitous computing will necessitate that everyone have a high degree of technical literacy" is false. Computers are heading from becoming tools to appliances and circuits. You'll never interact with most of them directly, and when you do, it'll be through an abstracted shell or interface of some sort. The actual internals will be arcane to most, running some form of Contiki, QNX, specifically tailored variant of embedded Linux, or whatnot.

We're already seeing this happen with smartphones and tablets. They offer an ecosystem of applications and network-enabled technologies that are useful to users, but in the end, they're digital handcuffs.

The practical benefits of teaching programming will be outweighed by the sheer incompetence and farcical mess that compromises public education in general. There's no way I, personally, can trust such a system to make anything worthwhile of this.
This interesting.

There is a story of when people are given from "above" an item without an explanation, they imbue all kinds of meanings to it. Perhaps like in the past when a meteorite fell from the sky, all kinds of religious meanings and explanations for it followed.

The second aspect is that Mao recognized this and quickly capitalized on it. The lesson is, if you see a hype starting, regardless if it is irrational or not, it can be taken advantage of easily.

Then there is a third aspect, and that is the "middle managers" if you wish who also took this to a heart and punished and killed people over being irreverent to the "mango". It might have never been about the mango but it was a pretext who punish someone as a scapegoat to keep control and fear going, if it wasn't the mango it could have been another thing (joke about the party for ex).

As I read that I wondered what if you took one of the mango worshipers and ask them why they are respecting this mango object so much? I wonder what they would have said. You might get a different answer depending if they were afraid of repercussion if they seemed irreverent and didn't say "It is a symbol of Chairman Mao's Love or something.

One can draw a parallel here with cargo cult followers of technologies (frameworks, langauges, api, operation systems, products) and so on. When someone decides to pick a technology and you ask them "why did you pick this framework?" or "what made you want to learn that language?" you can learn quite bit by how they answer. Quite often you'll find they don't understand how basics work and you find out they picked it because it a cargo cult. They start repeating "canned" phrases they heard like "it is webscale" or "it is non-blocking so it is better". Or they say "this is slow" and "this is fast". And you ask "have you measured, how did you measure?". And they haven't, they just repeat something a friend with a cool shoes and haircut told them.

Cargo cult and hype following is not always black and white. I can see some validity at least on saying "a big company is sponsoring this toolkit, so I'll pick it because it will probably have enough ecosystem support to move forward". They might not understand the advantages or trade-offs so they use a heuristic. It is not bad, but it tells you something about the person, too.
More importantly, there is no way you'd get through any customs or immigration in any country while blindfolded. It simply wouldn't be allowed.
Why would I want to delve into my backup run's log files? Seems pretty counter-intuitive as it's something you expect to work out of the box, not something that you'd have to debug and have issues with.
Not only that, the article makes it sound like Larry Page set out to conquer the world and decided to start from a search engine. The reality is far from that, there is no master plan to capture the personal information of everyone, just the need to provide useful services and an incredible business acumen on the part of the management that consistently acquire winning teams and companies over the years.
Do we know that it isn't enumerating the whole hive? that seems more likely to me.
I clicked on the link wondering how an app is supposed to help with sobriety. "Does it count days clean? Does it hook you up with somebody to talk to if you're having a compulsion to use?" Nope! It's yet another damn photosharing social network. Awesome. Now I can finally share my photos with people online. Thanks Sobrr.

I like how an app named Sobrr promotes itself with people drunkenly messing around half-naked, people at a concert, people at a bar. All the things I personally associate with my own sobriety!
AWS is far more vulnerable to online competition right now than Amazon the retailer is. There's several companies that have the available infrastructure to compete with Amazon in the cloud... Google and Microsoft are already out there, and Amazon is finding themselves cutting prices to compete.

Nobody really has Amazon's physical goods delivery infrastructure. You can look at Wal-Mart and Target, but they have infrastructure designed to solve a very different problem, getting large amounts of the same goods to certain physical stores. They rely on semi-truck drivers to deliver palettes of goods to stores. What they don't have, for example, is Amazon's very close relationships to UPS and USPS. Could they develop it? Maybe. At great expense. Would they be able to peel off more existing Amazon customers than they'd be cannibalizing their own current sales? Who knows.
I assume that this comment will just be buried so that others can't even read it, since it will go against most people's belief systems.

I saw several people in here say something about "conspiracy theories" as if to refute a "conspiracy theory" that was stated in the thread. But I didn't see any such thing said. Maybe I missed it.

I will go ahead and start on the "conspiracy theories" by linking to the following story from Al Jazeera:

Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-goo...

Why would anyone think that everyone (the world) would just let Larry Page and Google do whatever they want? At a certain point, either people with power attached themselves to this enterprise, or they just decided to give up their power and let Page and Google take it.

I think its a fantasy to believe that there aren't governments involved or that they really just have everyone's best interests in mind.
A little harsh, but I agree in general. The Koch Brothers spend their money promoting mainstream political causes in a legal, and as far as I know, fairly standard, manner. There are financiers on the left that do the same things, and just as it was silly when the right was foaming at the mouth about Carl Icahn, it's silly when the left foams about the Kochs. It seems that people hate whichever one their chosen media network decides to demonize, but really both are playing according to the rules (as far as I know; neither have been convicted of a crime related to this yet, at least).

Some people are just bitter, and specifically, the hacker community has a long-standing issue with tolerance.
The fact that it reads like an advertisement and was written by a CEO of a payment processor, doesn't make it less relevant. He makes some valid points. Points many here might not like, but the masses do.
AWS was never really something to sell excess capacity, thats a myth. And anyway now, it is vastly bigger than Amazon's compute needs. The stockmarket would like it to be sold off, but not sure it will be.
What exactly do you mean? It looks quite similar to all the numerous bootstrap.js websites out there. Not that I'm saying it's bad, or anything...
From financial perspective dollar coins make sense, as they are cheaper. But from the weight in my pocket, I much prefer dollar bills.
We have banned many chemicals in the past that were proved harmful and no doubt we will continue to do so. The point is.. the chemical in the article was introduced because it is LESS harmful than it's predecessors (DDT for example). I agree, probably more complete and broader scope research needs to be done before releasing chemicals (and drugs as well for that matter), but with technology you don't always get everything right the first time. Believe me.. farmers don't want to spend any money they don't have to. And I highly doubt Monsanto and friends are out to enslave and poison the world. They are simply producing a product that there is a need for.

There is a level of negative impact we have to accept if we are going to have this many people on the planet. I would note... the chemicals that make your computer monitor colored, the fuels that run your car and heat your home, the production and use of those has severe environmental impacts as well.... much more persistent and severe than neonicotinoids. Short of reducing population or living standards, we are stuck moving forward and cannot go back. So there are impacts yes... we have to work to minimize them, and maybe we should do more, but doing things like calling for an all out ban on all pesticides is unrealistic. Are we willing to accept the death of millions of people due to rising food prices and starvation over the deaths of several species of birds and bees? I don't think we are (well...maybe some of us are and maybe we should, but that's a different topic).

My point is... all pesticides cannot be lumped together. They aren't all the same. We need to do the best we can and maybe that is better than we are currently doing. But we are going to need pesticides. They aren't bad. It isn't a conspiracy. I don't think a company presenting it's supporting research when their chemical comes into question is "suppressing". I appreciate they need to do this. I might add... you can't always get good information from journalists and people who write sensationalist books about the BIG AG CONSPIRACY!. Maybe there does need to be more regulation of big companies, some of them are abusive of the environment and humanity in general, this isn't confined to ag companies... it is a pertinent topic and I don't disagree with you on that.

People really are trying to work on the problem, generally keeping the needs of people to eat as first priority. The whole sensationalist-superstition- unrealistic approach doesn't help and it really boils me because I have been close to the issue. It would be like people trying to ban the internets because OMG HACKERS iz stealing our bankcards!!! Sorry for the hot and aggressive tone earlier... I think I explained my irritation.
Work is in progress; you can track it in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516752
From this datasheet (http://docs-europe.electrocomponents.com/webdocs/12de/090076...)

"Broadcom BCM2835 SoC
700 MHz Low Power ARM1176JZFS Applications Processor
512MB SDRAM
Boots from Micro SD card, running a version of the Linux operating system"

This is basically just a new footprint on the model B. I like the fact that there are more USB ports, I'm not sure I understand the point since there's only a limited amount of power this thing can provide. I guess if you are one of these people who always needs a breadboard / shield for expansion purposes, this will be quite useful. I'm personally disappointed that there's not an update to the SoC. Maybe there will be a model C? One can only hope.

My wishlist for a "Model C":
>1gb RAM, 2 /4 core SoC, Improved graphics, ~$50-$75 price point
> Look, I'm a lawyer who, among other things, helps process DMCA requests.

Who sadly doesn't have an email address in his hn profile (although maybe you're just in house at a larger entity, vs. available for startups).
Is channelling the hot combustion gases up the side more efficient than having a recessed or concave bottom (e.g. a flange that fits down around the circumference with insets to fit the grid on which the pan rests)?
It also only works for open-flame gas stoves.
Yes, I can see how differentiating a clone from the things it clones will be a tough row to hoe.

There is nothing innovative about this at all - it's almost a parody of useless SV startups.
Every time I come across one of these color generators it just reminds how much a good designer is worth. Putting together a pleasing color palette with the appropriate amount of contrast, interest, and color quality is really hard to do. I always laugh when our designer updates color values to ones that may look identical to me, but as soon as they are implemented and play off the other colors in the design (including the white space) everything just instantly feels more polished.
You can. It's just that the actual owners will probably sue you for doing so against their work if they've given permission to legally access it and you try to revoke that with a DMCA.
On Swift’s array semantics
It received enough positive votes.
I don't think of this as a branding problem. I think it's a business model problem. Why another social sharing app? How does this make money or compete in a viciously crowded field against billion-dollar giants?
Thanks for that. My intention was not to offend anyone.

The creative/design/branding people often get ignored and are often not a part of the process for ANY type of business, including startups, and we have way too much to offer for me not to speak up.

Using the services of someone like me (NOT necessarily me specifically) can help sharpen focus, define direction, and reduce negative comments such as what have been posted here.

I'll try to soften my bedside manner in future comments. My intent is to help clarify purpose.
Monsanto is now a relatively focused company that mostly sells seeds: Many GMOs, some bred traditionally. They also now sell some services related to optimizing seed selection for a particular field. If you read their PR(which you might believe or not), there is much focus on minimizing pesticide application, and instead make the plants themselves more resistant to pests. So instead of spraying your field with a liquid full of Bacillus Thuringiensis, they'd rather have the farmer grow plants with leaves that produce the same toxins than BT does.

The market cap is just 63B. In comparison, a Walmart is 240+. The main reason they are smaller than their competitors is that they separated their biotech arm from their chemical company roots, while most of their competitors are still mainly chemical companies: BASF and DuPont. If we just compared their seed-producing operations though, Monsanto is probably larger, but it's not as if I've checked the numbers.

The thing about political influence is that it's not really about size, but about being in a position so that you do not have clear opponents. Farmers as a whole do not dislike Monsanto, or they'd not buy their seeds. They tend to lower crop prices, so it's not as if the next level in the food production chain has a problem with them either. So, as far as getting laws that are helpful to them, their one opponent is certain kinds of environmentalists. It's how lobbying works: It's easier to get a few people to spend a lot of an effort than to get a whole lot of people to do very little.
How about this? http://colorbrewer2.org/
I was not suggesting that Walmart compete in home delivery, I was thinking that they should ship things to their store (which as you mentioned they already have that system in place) where it would be boxed up and ready for pickup by customers (because everyone has a walmart fairly close to them, and that's a huge advantage). The cost to them would be minimal and the customers they would gain that have been using online shopping with shipping to their homes could be significant. Even for a small surcharge it would be worth it to me.
Can you provide a concrete example of a possible edit? (I'm applying the logic of the article).
> So... why are the 99% working on things they know will amount to nothing? I think this is the central thesis of the article. Yeah, there are a tiny number of disruptive companies out there, so what the hell is everyone else doing?

We don't know. We go and we pour our hearts into something, knowing that the probability of failure is 100 to 1, but honestly not knowing if this is the time that you'll not only succeed but actually change the world.

That's my belief anyways.
Sounds like the new CEO is very good at "fluffing" up his word count. He says a lot, but says very little.
This reminds me how every time someone posts a salad recipe to /r/cooking the whole discussion inevitably converges to the topic of a salad without a mayo not being a real salad ... just as it is not a salad with the mayo :)

Every backup has a set of risks that it mitigates. If the goal is to mitigate human errors, then, yes, versioning/archiving is a must. However if someone just needs to have a daily snapshot of their photos and documents to protect them against fire of theft, then you can certainly call it a file sync, but it still is a backup. To each his own. "Backup" is not an exact term, but rather a range of data protection techniques.

All that said, the archiving is coming up.
Hey guys, I'm the guy that wrote this. Colorblind mode and contrast are common suggestions and I'm totally working on adding them in. In the meantime, thanks for all the feedback and enjoy using Please.
I wish this was a smaller article and not a 18 page paper