skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It'd take a lot of convincing for me to turn a generalized app into something more specialized.

For this scheduling app, wouldn't it be possible to modularize features such that a "general purpose" platform might exist, with a "plugin" system, or maybe just child projects which inherit from the parent, to satisfy the needs of specific industries?

I guess initially one would focus on the restaurant app, but abandoning the larger market would just rub me the wrong way.
Shameless plug: at WebAction we have an enterprise-grade (exactly once processing, scalable, built-in streaming data integration) SQL-based streaming platform. It's clear real-time analytics is headed in this direction and we have some interesting problems to solve.

If anyone is interested in chatting about it, feel free to email me john@webaction.com
Right, and that's where (most of) the rest of my concerns lie. It's not completely clear to me why they needed to implement a new currency and why it's being distributed the way it is. It's possible there's a good reason though; I just haven't had time to think about it enough yet.
Great question - here are the two key items:

- Stellar is a nonprofit. No one owns it. The board and advisors represent a diverse group of people in tech, finance, nonprofit and academia to encourage cross-pollination of ideas. The board is also required to expand to 5 members by year-end.

- Almost all the stellars will be given away for free (95%) because the goal is to educate and provide access to digital currency/financial services. This is really good for cryptocurrency as a whole because it provides access to a huge segment of the world that would not have access to digital currency otherwise.

This should all help the effort be open and transparent.
The thing you have to understand about PHP, is it's meant to easily work in a world where every value is in a string. You get strings from the browser, you get strings from the database, and strings from the file system.

It was expected that these strings contain numbers and that you should be able to rationally use them as numbers without conversion. So "10" > "5" returns true in PHP where as that would be false in most other languages. The underlying representation of the value (sequence of characters, 2s compliment binary, or IEEE 754 double) means nothing in PHP; they are all supposed to be equivalent. So "12", 12, and 12.0 are the same and "0" and 0 are the same.

The consequence of this design ripples through to every aspect of the language. And it ripples down to the implementation of empty. Empty(0) is true. So therefore Empty("0") is also true. The fact that one is an integer and the other is a string is not a distinction that exists in PHP. It's super weird and unexpected but it's not illogical given the rules of the language.
I see you guys have you been exploring the spreadsheet world for a while. Have you had a look at financials consolidations? The de facto software for this is Hyperion and it is terrible. Also, nothing I know of allows to build complex web reports. Another "consolidation" tool is BPC, which is another nightmare to maintain. Everything I am using in my controlling job makes you waste literally days a month due to bad implemented UI, functionalities and overall slowness (even business objects/hana is not that fast...).
Since I'm honest: I also have a DO account for the things I feel a VPS is good for; IRC bouncer, little programs I just need a shell for, etc.
Tram-train
Is it really worth breaking all legacy websites?

The most important thing to do is to ensure that people use new solutions.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an HTML5 only mode in your browser and it would ignore legacy tags?
Other discussions here are saying that Stellar scans the Facebook account to check whether it looks like a spam account set up to exploit the giveaway. It rejects accounts that are newly registered, for instance.
Sent! I'm tomanthony. :)
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I want this, I've been wanting this for the past four releases of Excel. Excel is a great tool for engineers. It gets the subpar results fast, while code, matlab, and DBs get's the fantastic results slow, which I hardly ever need.
Disrupting TC, probably.
holy shit dude how many times are you going to make this comment
Patrick Collison here. I think that Stellar's governance is going to be one of its strong suits. (And something that we thought was lacking in other efforts.)

Stellar is a nonprofit organization and will have public financials and governance documents. It will also hold just 5% of the stellars -- 95% is being given away as quickly as possible. The board is composed of Jed, Keith Rabois, and me. A number of other advisors (http://stellar.org/about) are ensuring that everything is run well and fairly.
I assume cost per watt-hour is the dominant factor.
> Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.

The submitter didn't do this.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait.

Guidelines != rules. Sometimes authors write poor headlines (this is a great example). The community benefits from headlines that are more descriptive of the article. Having mods change them back for consistency's sake harms HN more than it helps.
> Further, what happens when you commit a crime where there are no witnesses?

Someone testifies as to what they've witnessed that makes them believe you are guilty, giving you a chance to question them about any flaws.
A browser plugin that replaces bullshit with bullshit
So Laravel is a lot like Rails, but it doesn't compare to Rails because it's not matured yet. Ok..

MySQL vs PostgreSQL vs MongoDB vs Neo4j are all data stores with very different principles and goals. To say they all "achieve the same thing" is like saying an airplane is the same as a speedboat because they both get you from point A to point B.

I certainly believe that frameworks and libraries are tools for different problems and
there isn't a one size fits all approach, I just have trouble discerning what problem Laravel is solving better than other frameworks or what makes it advantageous to use.
I'm always a little surprised when someone says "This app looks nice, but I don't trust you, especially when you don't even try to take my money."

It's not that I don't understand what you mean, but I think it's silly to say: personal data? no thanks... exact same situation as before, but now you're taking my money? Yes!
Could you please post some benchmarks ? I'm really curious
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It was the fact that the guy was Joshua Bloch which got me to read the presentation - and I'm totally glad I did! I would never have read it if it was just named "The Lowdown on Lidar"
If you're looking for flexibility in a Angular-driven framework for building mobile apps, you may want to check out Famo.us/Angular (github.com/Famous/famous-angular). The framework is still relatively young, but at 0.1.0 and nearly 5 months of development, it's gaining some traction. (disclosure: I'm a contributor)

The cool thing about Famo.us is that you can express animations imperatively, and the framework enables those animations to be GPU accelerated (i.e. "buttery smooth".) So imagine if jQuery animations were performant. Add AngularJS to the mix and you get a pretty powerful mobile app framework.

The flipside with regard to Ionic is that there are (as of yet) fewer full-blown UI widgets like Ionic provides [though there are some nice ones like LightBox in the Famo.us core], so though you aren't boxed in, you also don't get quite the same "one directive and done" simplicity that you get when you're working with-the-grain with Ionic.
Good to hear, I hope you have some ideas, since else, this "facebookers only" feels like discrimination -- as I explained here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8115706
sending 1000 from egypturnash, waiting to see who'll join the chain here!
If it is not proprietary, please explain how you force Excel to use your computation engine, rather than its own internal one?
Ask HN: Is it legal to provide a phone tracking service?
Let's assume that I made up a small algorithm that takes a phone number as input and spits out the current location (country and maybe city) and availability information (on or off).

Now let's assume I wrap it into a nice service that checks for location changes constantly and alerts the customer whenever one of the monitored phone numbers has changed its location.

Assuming that I'm feeding public data into my service, is it legal?

Please keep in mind this is not a question of ethics.
Sent! I got my first name, "graham"
Just to contrast your experience, I had a very interesting two month working near Tokyo. The whole time I was there I didn't see any anime, or hikkimori and the whole thing didn't resemble anime at all (though.. granted, I'm not an expert in the genre). The only places you saw anything anime related was at gambling establishments and certain districts of Tokyo. I think on the whole, that subculture is looked down upon - just like in the US.

Most people just live boring normal middle class lives. I'm not denying that there is a problem, but I think it's not necessarily a statement about Japanese society as a whole. It's like if goth kids started slashing their wrists in large numbers. It might be a reflection of US society as a whole, or it might be a toxic subculture.
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This looks really cool!! I can't wait to hear what some of those guys have to say.
I think the language would really need more features, like using blocks from C#, to be effective without RAII. The finally clause was only just added in the last release.

The spec, as it stands, is flawed. Any removal of RAII should be left to major version (e.g. PHP7). Since this spec is meant to represent the current state of PHP, it's completely incorrect in this area.
I think it makes more sense to set aside for now the 0.1% of cases that fall into that category, and work on ways to avoid the other 99.9% of suicides that don't.
Nice!! Thanks
Why I would never file a bug on wikipedia
i'm interested, shoot me an email at routemailhere@gmail.com
sent you 1000. I'm arturhoo on Stellar
Just a note: the system was never actually used in any Grand Prix. Williams had problems with packaging and weight balance (safety was also a concern). They later followed other teams and settled on battery-based solution. Flywheel had only one significant advantage over these: lower operating costs. That's what makes it feasible for use in public transport, I guess.
Can you re-write a USB thumb drive's firmware, over USB? the only reference to that I saw in the article was that it can "spread from USB to PC and back" which is kind of vague. Is there a specific vulnerability on a specific chipset that is exploited?

I understand the point that USB drives are more, well, promiscuous than other bus hardware, but saying "A thumbdrive with modified firmware can affect a computer it is plugged in to" and equating that with "USB security is fundamentally broken" seems like a bit of a reach. i.e. there is no specific provision in the USB protocol for re-flashing device/USB stack firmware. I think "Certain USB thumbdrive chipsets are vulnerable to a specific exploit that allows the USB host to modify the thumb drive's firmware" is a much more accurate headline, given the content of the article. Right now it is no different than saying "I got a virus over email, therefore Ethernet is fundamentally broken"
Oh sure, but imagine how all the people providing their content to your site would feel about you deleting their content!
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Sent! I'm ludo :)
I mean that it doesn't seem a safe upper bound - `time` will return, but there are situations where to get a useful result, you need to increase the limit; and it's easy to get in those situations even when neither bot is running lots of repeated simulations.

This class of difficulty can't be completely eliminated, but it seems that being able to run bots for a long time relative to the overhead of `time` would reduce it.
We would have loved to be able to provide a month or even more of sunset. Unfortunately, everything was tied to a complex internal schedule which shifted the sunset too much. Today is the earlier we could do and even so, we had to provision the cost of the platform to make it available "that long".

Sorry for that.
This is great stuff! Super useful!
No, white labeling requires a ton of work and a whole different approach to marketing, sales, support, etc. Not in the cards for the time being.
Maybe now their iOS app will show you when you're on-call next without having to jump through hoops..
There seems to be a session bug. I have to log in again every time I refresh the page. Of course, the page is updated automatically so the refresh is probably unnecessary, but the session bug is still there. :)
Thanks. Fortunately, the numbers show that most people do not.
Chile is more stable, Colombia has better weather and Perú has tastier food.
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From what I've just read it seems that Mark Madoff wasn't involved in his father's fraud, so I fail to see how his suicide was entirely appropriate.

Also from a pragmatic point of view, the victims of the fraud didn't get their money back, so his death was basically pointless except for the revenge factor.
It's absurd that they would get caught doing this.
Thanks! Please feel free to send any feedback to diego at algorithmia dot com.
agreed. i think it will be here within 5 years.
Perhaps.

Might be better worded as "The more gambles I've taken, the better I've become at figuring out if my next gamble is going to work. But your mileage may vary."
It's actually not a bug -- it's because the client never sends the password to the server. (It decrypts your wallet locally.)
Extremely competitive pricing, so so customer support (well, understaffed so hard to reach but polite and competent, nothing like the horror stories coming from the US).

Very simple commercial offering, little in the way of options and extra charges.

They design lots of their networking equipment, from the triple play boxes customer get to some of their core infrastructure.

They also keep their engineering in house, where the competition (Orange, SFR, Bouygues) relies a lot on external companies for about everything...

A very peculiar company, unlike any other in France, save maybe OVH the hosting giant.
I saw the earlier title of this post while flipping through HN on my phone, and I wanted to read the full article during my lunch break. Now here I am, I checked the front page and was very confused where the post I was interested in went, and why some post apparently describing Lidar is at the top.

I guess they're trying to keep the title to match the title of the link/article. But sometimes the article just has a bad title. This slideshow is a great read, but with a title that puts me to sleep.
This is kind of the wrong question. You can trivially run openstack ontop of mesos and vice versa.

Mesos is bigger on services, openstack is bigger on virtual machines. They are different solutions for overlapping, but fundamentally different problems.

Here is an example of Ebay running mesos ontop of openstack:

http://www.ebaytechblog.com/2014/04/04/delivering-ebays-ci-s...
Check out BlackLine Systems -- a fantastic SaaS solution for account reconciliation and other parts of the financial close process
Ok, so now they're promising me my free stellars "tomorrow".

Which is fine in one way - feel free to take your time handing me my free stuff. On the other hand, it doesn't give me much faith they can scale to the mass market...
Is this where a Solar City type of setup would come into play? Tesla's charging stations generating their own electricity, thank you very much, partnered with SC. Or would that be feasible? Of course, Tesla could also use vertical windmills [1], geothermal, etc at its stations. I'm a big fan of distributed generation; that makes the electric grid's shortcomings a moot point.

-----

[1] http://www.quietrevolution.com/qr5/faqs-qr5-turbine.htm
Well they make a loss per user, but they intend to make it up in scale!
There's cultural incentive to report results that are favorable even if they are wrong.

This has the unfortunate side effect that research coming out of China needs to be taken with a grain of salt and extra doubly carefully verified.

It's nothing the scientific method can't handle (we're seeing the start of the verification steps here), but knowing that lots of research coming out of China is misrepresented it introduces another layer of healthy skepticism that it needs to be verified before being accepted as a thing.

Suppose University of Shanghai produces a result, and the University of Beijing confirms it. Rather than accept the result, it's likely that before it's declared "SCIENCE!" a NASA or MIT or whoever is going to want to have verification from someplace that doesn't have a long history of misrepresenting scientific claims.

This is going to be treated differently than if the original work was done at say...CERN and the confirmation was done by CalTech.
IF they want to seize domains in the country that is one thing. They want to seize, basically, the right to identify yourself as that country/origin online, as if to erase it from existence. Doesn't anyone see the de-humanizing aspect of this?
I walk a lot in CA. Not long ago I saw a cop not yield to a pregnant woman pushing a baby in a stroller, in a 4 lane road. She was in the crosswalk, clearly marked. There was no light or stop sign, but she was in the middle of the 4 lanes when the cop drove past her in the closest lane. I really couldn't believe what I was seeing.

When the cops don't even respect the laws, the laws are meaningless.
Pretty strange how Stellar is paying people to sign up with Facebook. Facebook is very centralized. These modern currencies are very decentralized. I don't mind myself, but it seems like paying someone to sign up with the enemy...
I'm so incredibly excited to download this app, sign up, play around with it for 3 mins max and never use it again! Can't wait!

EDIT: Before people start getting mad, I was referring to the real problem of app saturation and how incredibly difficult it is to change people's workflows even if your productivity task is in fact actually better. Marginal improvements aren't enough. It has to be radical. Tying things together isn't radical. Mailbox was radical (though they've largely ignored their product since getting acquired).
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"The network has been initialized with a supply of 100 billion stellars. 5% will be used to fund operations of the nonprofit (its spending, including employee compensation, will be public), and the remaining 95% of the stellars will be distributed for free as quickly as we can manage."

IIRC Ripple's founders (including Jed) kept about 20% of XRP, and Ripple Labs kept about 25%, so only 5% is a lot better, but it's still a very centralized solution to distribution.

I do like that they're distributing 20% of the Stellars to BTC (and XRP) holders, though: https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/#Bitcoin_program
Yeah, the image issues were unfortunate -- but the tech is good, and Jed and David have a lot of promising ideas about how to make it even better. Jed and Joyce have been scrupulous about being fair and transparent in how the Stellar Foundation is structured. There's more about this (including governance documents) at https://www.stellar.org/about/.
I think it comes down to the old "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" idea. We like to think that if we're paying (anything) for something, then we are the customer and there is an implied contract between us and the vendor.

That's not to say that being a paying customer means a company won't also sell your data (just look at nearly every major retailer).
I'm anxious to try it out, but don't have a Facebook account needed to get the seed currency.
Is Meteor.js still as hot as it was right after launching? Haven't seen much about it lately. For awhile there I was thinking it might be "the next Ruby on Rails", but then it seemed to drop off the radar.

Actually my main recollection from playing with it was that debugging was a bitch.
The "Founders Pledge" acknowledges this concern:
http://www.timeful.com/founders-pledge
EDIT: Brain fart; don't use this. See comments below.

Just use the following if you really want to account for strings containing the number 0.

(!isset($var) || $var === false);

Note the triple equals sign.
Lower courts (even in the Military) can't really establish any meaningful precedence
Since that charger can be an electrical outlet with no internet connection, I think it has to be a remote capability.
Really interesting, has my mind spinning around the possibilities. Would love to be able to apply this stuff to filter my Feedly account - how hard would that be using Algorithmia?
The 5% number seems a little strange to me. The post also said there are 1% more Stellars every year. So that is the same as the ruling central organization giving itself infinite money. I guess the 5% is kind of vanity metric to make people feel safe without much meaning.
> Being so far removed from the country they're based in

You do know that T-Mobile is German, yes? [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Telekom
Keep in mind we'll still be refining oil / petroleum for other uses (lubricants, ink, plastic, fertilizer, diesel, etc). If this is independent of the refining into gas, then all's well with your math.
We just turn off Excel's computations and then run our own.
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Where do the 10 microstellars go? Are they actually destroyed?
The inflation doesn't go to the foundation. The mechanism is described at https://www.stellar.org/about/mandate/. (Search for "inflation".)
the signup link doesn't work
>For a lot of start-ups rolling their own infrastructure is generally a giant waste of time and money in both short and long term run.

Exactly. Which is why people go to Rackspace: not having to hire their own in-house DevOps guy (which doesn't scale as your servers grow) to take care of their servers.
I am not super familiar with the the feedly api (or how it works) but integrating with Algorithmia should be really simple. There is a registration link at the bottom of the blog post and you can check out the docs at http://algorithmia.com/docs.

feel free to drop me a note at diego at algorithmia dot com as well.
what threw me personally about empty() is that it doesn't invoke magic getters: "__get".
I'm speaking about Twilio during AirConf - doing an intro to using Twilio for voice and SMS with your applications for developers who have never used Twilio.
The title has been changed to the title the original author used, which seems appropriate.

Titles have a context (which the author considered when they chose it). That context doesn't exist when it sits enumerated on the HN front page, invalidating the canonical title argument.

For instance when the author of this piece shared this, they did so under their own twitter account (coupling it with a name), and the supporting commentary "I gave this talk at a CA traffic ticket defense attorney seminar. Comments appreciated.". If these two elements didn't exist, and it was just tossed onto some pile of titles, it would be ignored.

I write a blog about software development, particularly financial and database related matters. I have vague titles like "Dealing with Variance" that makes total sense in the context of my blog and its readership, but is completely meaningless title outside of it.

While I do think there has been good transparency about title changes (a mod usually comments), the whole "what the original author intended" argument is misled.