skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Get on with your life. What makes the front page depends on time of day, what's in the news, whether people had a good or bad week, and what all else. Many, in fact most, of the links I submit also sink like a stone.

Now, it's a double bummer when you write something. But it's still there on your blog to be discovered and shared later. You could also rewrite or polish it a bit. I presume it's this: http://blog.hackensplat.com/2014/07/is-your-api-broken.html which I found interesting, but a little bit inaccessible because you fired off examples all over the place but your basic thesis was sort of buried inside.

This is a problem (a small one - I want to reiterate that I liked it!), because you're talking to engineers in engineer-speak (thus driving away most business-minded readers) but what you're actually talking about is a business problem (directly exposing your transaction handler to the outside world without building for failure could result in misplaced orders = customer dissatisfaction and loss of money). You're saying that it's not enough just to make the interface - you also have to worry about external failures. IMHO the best way to do this is put the programmer in the customer's position first (since almost all coders are also consumers, this shouldn't be too hard) and then work your way back to discussing API fragility.

As for getting more views from HN, I think it's fine to mention an article you wrote in a comment if it's relevant, or even to resubmit it with or without a redraft, as you decide as long as you don't do this too often, like once in a few months.
Because it smells like a manipulative post. The goal (it seems) is not to discuss the topic, but to deformm the opinion of the readers and the general mood of the thread.

If you want an answer, it is easy: companies like coinbase or bitpay know very well what they are doing, and participate in the market in ways that minimise the exposure risk. OP does not deserve to be top post in a site that is supposed to have quality debate like HN.
Assuming you could find a practical use for spending that much money, the United States and Russia are watching to shoot down or retaliate against exactly this kind of vehicle, 24/7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_on_warning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
I think Wildbow simply finds it more interesting to work on Pact than to work on editing Worm.
Intercepted audio shows Ukraine rebels shot down the plane – Mailpin
I keep thinking what the lead-up to the last big battle would look like. (You know what I'm talking about.) It's usually set to electronica in my head.

I think you could tell most of the story non-verbally: a good character actor should be able to get across most of the emotions. Put some more of that into conversations and I think you could get there.

(Aside: my issue with Ender's Game was that it felt "small": the whole movie felt like it occurred over a long weekend or something. There was no sense of complexity or time.)
OK, so I'll buy a 10G port to another random ISP. And they'll go to the ICX and say "hey Verizon, hit me up with the 10G port". Oh wait, it doesn't work like that. It works with peering arrangements, hmm.
Book on cognitive biases for CIA analysts [pdf]
I think the Russians get a bit twitchy when we start firing off ICBMs.

Also, they cost about seven million dollars each and one use only.
"IMO" ... you didn't find any "early adopters" who were cruising the new postings and agreed with your opinion. Sorry to see that your meta-posting was deemed more important.

EDIT:

I just checked the "spurned posting" ... it's important to me (and as described in the linked article, a hard problem to solve).
Besides the expense, I can think of two reasons:

- It has to be able to slow down before impact.

- To other countries it would look a lot like a nuclear missile.
Since Amazon became wildly successful by selling dead-tree versions of books before it even started selling ebooks, yeah, I would assume that selling rather than licensing was what the grandparent post intended, and that it referred to dead-tree rather than electronic books.
I agree. It is ugly.
It must be because of HTML reuse or something.

But you should try writing React templates in pure Coffeescript[1], perhaps reusing your HTML through a tiny tool[2] I wrote for it.

[1]: http://blog.vjeux.com/2013/javascript/react-coffeescript.htm...

[2]: http://html2react.alhur.es/
"will stop"? It's been like this for weeks..? Or is that only because I'm located in the Netherlands?
I am very sure you could value rationality and still hate the writing. Terms like 'valuing rationality' or believing in the primacy of truth (I think that's what you meant) don't have universally accepted definitions.

A rational person might readily find the novel to an Eliezer Yudkowsky's propaganda-novel along the lines of an Ayn Rand novel, and not find it a well written or enjoyable story. The number of parallels between Rand and Yudkowsky are really fascinating to me, Rand and Yudkowsky really seem to be birds of a feather.
Id shows off double-jumping, skull-crushing new Doom at QuakeCon
There's a lot of randomness in what makes the front page. We're working on a plan to reduce that randomness.
It is only natural for centralized parties to emerge. I'd rather have centralized players with a decentralized back-end versus the banking system we rely on today. With paypal there is no consumer oversight, but because of the block chain, anybody can verify that coinbase acts as it should.

And I'm not going to fault them for using every user authentication mechanism under the sun- it is the responsible way to operate.
I built an ETL that uses a Go stream for the transform. Once the data has been processed it's written to disk on our analytics servers. Since it can keep up with the stream, memory footprint is very small (which also means we never have to hit disk on ETL servers).

Go outperformed our previous solution by over 60x, making our new bottleneck disk I/O instead of CPU.
I thought I could maybe do better with a binary search system. Here is some napkin math:

Circumference of earth: 40,075,000m

Number of choices to get 10m accuracy: log2(40,075,000/10) = 21.9 ~ 22 bits

We need two numbers for latitude and longitude = 44 bits

We can get 5 bits from each alphanum character = 44/5 ~ 9 alphanum characters

Add the checksum character and you're at 10 characters.

Anyone have better methods that only use capital letters and digits?

This system has the disadvantage of two nearby locations potentially having totally different codes.
Samsung still doesn’t get it
I have a lot of psychiatrist friends. I had psychiatric treatment at some point, befriended my former doctor in the process and then his group of friends.

It's amazing how much they have chemistry as a conceptual primitive -- just as much as I have linear algebra as a primitive. They drop "oxygenase" (or something) in casual conversation like I drop "eigenvector".

And 90% of what they do is talk to depressed people and sometimes hand some Prozac or some Xanax!
You could similarly just make a few accounts and run them off of a few different VPSs, since it only takes a handful of votes to get you on the front page. That strikes me as unethical, but I'm sure more and more interested parties will be doing that or getting large employee bases to accomplish the same thing as HN's user base increases.
Hacker News has a voting ring detector, so this is not recommended. (it will penalize articles with a high probability of having a voting ring and eventually kill them). The Brandery article that was submitted today was likely hit by a voting ring.

That being said, there are some YC companies that do this. However, the flag mechanism far counteracts bad articles which have received unjust votes, so it's an unstable equilibrium.
They don't own the computer power. It comes from the miners who join the pool.

The 51% attack problem is something that needs to be solved for bitcoin. But it isn't as bad as you think it is.

I used to think that someone who took over the network could spend my bitcoins even without my private keys. But that is not true. The actual attacks possible with 51% are significantly more minor than stealing bitcoins.
While the factual you said we're true, they aren't anywhere near as useful as just linking to a calculator— http://people.xiph.org/~greg/attack_success.html

I don't agree with your conclusions though— at 40% a determined attacker reorgs 6 confirmations with a 50% success rate. Many users don't wait even six.

Consider, even with 20%— thats analogous to having five parties 'signing' blocks— a result which is less decentralized than a fair amount of traditional financial systems. (The comparison is better than it would be with other pools because ghash primarily physically controls their own infrastructure).

Even though this is all quite concerning, Bitcoin is very dynamic— the current state isn't something that will last, one way or another.
“Everybody wants to put 3-D on a smartphone”

Question is whether people will want to use 3-D on a smartphone. We may be hitting a saturation point where current generation(s) have absorbed enough change, and we may have to wait for the next generation, growing up with "a Cray 2 in your pocket" to be ready for the next big step.
Putin denies Russia plans to reopen spy base in Cuba
It's dependent on publishers. At any time you can ask Amazon to search through your _entire_ history of Amazon print purchases and it will give you free access to the Kindle versions, if the publisher enabled this feature.
I think it will be a big deal for Bitcoin when (if?) some of the bigger players decide to start publishing their dollar side volume (so that spectators gain some visibility into the net flow of dollars).
The NYTimes has published lots of code: https://github.com/nytimes
> You'd also have to add a phone number broadcasting service to make it work with phone numbers though, but I can see the potential. I'm much more skeptical about range, battery or security concerns

Have the app sync to a registry online when connectivity is available, and keep the key-value table locally (phone->deviceID).
> For me, I don't want a faster car, I want fuel efficiency. I want a car that doesn't require too much maintenance and repairs.

If we're talking about cars, my version of "horseshit" is traffic and parking. I do not want to drive in traffic, and I want parking to either be a non-issue or abundant.
If you'll pardon the reckless self-promotion, there's a few Java implementations to do Geohash calculations: https://code.google.com/p/simplelatlng/
AD. your issue with Ender's Game - mine was a bit similar. The whole movie felt like the book on fast-forward (you know, videotapes and FFWD button). I saw my friends who haven't read the book beforehand come out of cinema with confusion and not being really sure what the movie was about.
Larger companies can be more patient about long-term bets, but in my experience I've found that they aren't regarding experienced hires. Of course they'll train the young and inexperienced, but I don't see as many large firms hiring experienced developers with a different skill set than they are ideally seeking. Part of this can probably be explained by the traditional big firm HR departments.

Tech culture is probably the key ingredient regardless of company size, though I'd theorize that the type of culture open to diverse tech backgrounds is generally found in smaller shops.
Thanks for the articles. I recall reading about this last year when the paper was published, but I had since forgotten about this form of attack. This is definitely interesting.
I don't know about you but paypal asked me to send a picture of my id along with a recent picture of me. They froze my account until I did so.
The difference is that the BTC transaction system can operate independently of the incumbent transaction system.
Video on this page: http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/gla...
they're tied to a specific DRM scheme;

I have an ebook available through Amazon and opted to have no DRM. I'm pretty sure this is still up to the author/publisher.

I just got an E-mail about Kindle Unlimited and it had a link to make my book eligible. However, to do so you have to enroll the book in Kindle Select (or whatever it's called) and that requires that the book not be available from any other outlets.

Well, fuck that.

I can see this as preventing a good many books from being available on Kindle Unlimited.

I expect this is more of an issue for self-publishing authors with zero rep.

In any event your comment reminded me that I need to make a current backup of the books on my Kindle and strip them of any restrictions.
> Icon font with 123 weather-themed icons

Everything an aspiring app designer needs for his right of passage on Dribbble.
That's a pretty poor advice. (I'm French myself.)

French is pretty widely used (as a native language, and as a learned language as well) and very relevant in today's economy.

But moreover, learn French if you want to! If you find it fun, just do it. If you already speak English, you can already communicate with a huge chunk of the world's population. Any language you learn besides that is bonus!

(I am currently learning Norwegian on my own, just for the fun of it. There is little interest for me in doing that besides curiosity and the sheer pleasure of expanding my language skills.)
"WARNING: Forgotten passwords are UNRECOVERABLE and will results in LOSS of ALL of your bitcoins!"

I hate when my banker says this to me about online banking.
From where I'm sitting, this is an inappropriate level of spoilers to include in a comment here. Could you perhaps edit (or cut) your next to last sentence?
As an additional datapoint, Haskell's Snap Framework implements O(log n) routing like this: https://github.com/snapframework/snap-core/blob/master/src/S...
I feel this is especially true for french. There is so much grammar involved everywhere that trying to have everything perfect can be a huge burden. At the same time, the object of the sentence often comes last, forcing the listener to wait and "buffer" the words before starting to interpret the meaning.

When a speaker slows or halts a sentence because he/she is struggling on grammar, it makes it exponentially harder for the listener to keep listening and interpret what is said. On the contrary, grammar is so redundant that getting it wrong on half of the words would still leave enough information to understand even the nuances.
Bitcoin appeared on 2009 and we already have a few payment intermediaries.

VISA was created in 1958, and nowadays there are basically only 3 companies processing credit/debit card payments: VISA, Mastercard and Amex.

The threat is obviously there, but it's still too early to make any judgements. In my opinion, the entry barriers for new payment processing companies is very small, and we will see a huge competition.
Angry Birds was that way at some point, IIRC. Haven't looked in a long time though.
What particular aspects, interactions in this app make you feel like it was rushed? How could it be improved?
> I've never heard of Paul Graham saying or doing a single thing that smacks of cultishness

I love how he implicitly acknowledges that he does a lot of things that smacks of cultishness :)

But yes, believe it or not, I was the first person who posted "Paul Graham Ate Breakfast" as a comment in reddit, and someboy created a fake news webpage and submitted it.
I would like to have one, or at least a 3-D desktop display.

One without 50 Amazon apps trying to constantly sell me things would be preferred.

Aren't modern smartphones far more powerful than a Cray 2?
I can't recommend the Pimsleur language courses enough. They teach languages in a way that's similar to how a toddler learns to speak - by going from sounds to words, and by gradually expanding your lexicon while jogging your memory on previously learned words and phrases. In my experience, 45-50 daily 30-minute lessons were enough to comfortably navigate a new country. Most courses include ninety 30-minute lessons.
What you're seeing is merchants relying on the expertise of 3rd party payment processors. This is a good thing. Having them all reinvent the wheel would be a security nightmare. You'd be hearing about enormous Bitcoin heists daily.

At the end of the day, these are still Bitcoin transactions and if Coinbase et al started engaging in onerous practices you could very easily switch to another Bitcoin processor without much friction.

Now if you start seeing things like Coinbase only accepting payment from other Coinbase users...
Currently chargin $.99 with LTV also $.99 for the moment with no upsells (too early imo)
You go ahead and wait I'm ready!
Note I said effort, not money.

It takes a certain amount of money and effort to evaluate the effectiveness of an ad channel. Most of the people I know who make money with PPC spent probably $1000, $2000 or more before they developed a campaign that really makes money.

When it comes to online ads it really is you spend $X to get $Y of revenue and if you don't get to a place where $Y>$X fast, it doesn't make sense to spend more.

It makes more sense to develop organic traffic and that comes through mechanisms like you befriend a fitness blogger and if he likes the app he blogs about it. Another logical thing is to make your own blog about fitness where you can work something about your app into the posts.

It takes a huge amount of time and effort to do the above but not a lot of money, but the results are a lot more enduring. If you do want to spend money on it, pay a PR agency or a writer, a "growth hacker" or somebody who can do that kind of work.
Here's a good look into how much "whales" spend on IAP http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/26/only-0-15-of-mobile-gamers...
> Sorry to see that your meta-posting was deemed more important.

I know what you mean, but wouldn't put it that way. Meta posts are a class of their own. They're reliably popular.

If we didn't prune them, meta posts would be all over the front page every day, along with other kinds of reliably popular post that don't fit the mandate of this site.
Have they also made the alerts work reliably?
It isn't just loops. It's everything.

http://highscalability.com/numbers-everyone-should-know

If you just had to say "avoid nested loops" there would be no problem. Programming a solution that works at scale requires math and understanding where you will have bottlenecks before you write a single line of code.

>understanding the domain problem is better inoculation

How does one understand a problem without understanding boolean algebra?

Example. You have good/bad credit, car/motorcycle, new/used, drivers license yes/no. Which combinations allow testDrive()? Now add condition 'ok' to credit, moped and 18 wheeler to vehicles, and commercial to driver's license, because the boss forgot about those. Now how many combinations? Who is allowed to do what? How do you arrange the code so you don't spend time evaluating methods when driver's license of 'no' can short circuit the entire operation? (oh, except for moped, in certain states)

That's entirely boolean logic. If a person is not good at that, they suck at programming AND understanding domain problems.
"This is something that never, never happens, and it's unlikely to happen again. "

This wasn't an equipment failure or a natural disaster, so I don't really agree with this line of thinking.

"But we are not going to call for the government to go and catch the perpetrators or go to war."

If this was an intentional act, we do need to do something about it (so it doesn't happen again). Extreme pacifism just leads to bully nations like Russia taking over other nations with absolutely no intervention.
Maybe on Linux, but as I pointed out somewhere else; this doesn't apply to all *NIXes with a /dev/random or /dev/urandom:

https://blogs.oracle.com/darren/entry/solaris_random_number_generation

Short version is, on Solaris, you should use /dev/random for long-term keys and other high-value keying material. /dev/urandom should be used for everything else such as less demanding or shorter-term cryptographic uses like short-term session keys, paddings, and challenge strings.
Agree with this 100%. Qasar is one of the most dedicated and hardworking people I have ever known. I recall first meeting Qasar several years ago. We were introduced by a mutual friend and met at Google. Within a year of that meeting, Qasar put together a team, applied and successfully got into YC, and sold TalkBin to Google.

While at Google Qasar was one if the sharpest Product Managers on the team. I joined his team within a few weeks after the TalkBin acquisition. As the team, product, and scope grew, Qasar focused on building excellent product, never compromising quality. As a result he quickly rose the ranks because of his unique ability to balance product and business objectives. All the while he took great care of the people on his team.

It's truly sad to see him leave Google but he will be an incredible force of nature at YC. His passion and energy has always been on helping startups and founders succeed. He spent a tremendous amount of time mentoring and coaching his team at Google and will bring this same enthusiasm to YC. Above all else, Qasar is the quintessential example of someone that has more grit than anyone I know.

He's a no bullshit kind of person that's always helping getting things done. YC is very fortunate to have him. Even if you are not in his batch, Qasar is someone you want to get to know.
Paved with good intentions and so on...
Go's std lib is much more useful though (on top of being higher quality).

I've done a number of fairly complex Go projects without leaving the std library -- I can't say the same for python.
Amazon also own GoodReads, CreateSpace, Shelfari, Abe Books, The Book Depository, BookFinder and 40% of LibraryThing. Some of those compete.
I come back for every home game I can when NFL is in season...

That and I'm really excited to be a voice for Y Combinator (and startups) in D.C. -- in addition to just being an advocate for the open internet as a citizen.
The supposition here is that it's very unfair to impose a professional cost on getting sick. I don't see it that way. I see people getting sick because they take lousy care of themselves. They're fat and eat lousy food. Also, they make various idiotic stressful choices like having a 1hr commute, or putting a kid in some germ infested day care.

People who do not make such choices rarely get sick for more than the odd few of days a year. Why should they subsidize poor choices? Not being sick a lot is a reasonable and sensible professional expectation.
Tips for Better Deep Learning Models
I wish I could find the link but I read an interesting story about the history of successful new payment types. Dwolla (not), mPesa, PayPal, Venmo, btc. The successful ones all had an early sustained uptick. btc looked more like Dwolla which had not. So it appears that the patience argument, which in general makes sense, may not apply here.
Congestion-based pricing and paid parking. Or do you also want free?
100%!!! Our dev kits will be available soon: http://bit.ly/1oRwBkI