skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Omg, nobody proofread that article? Since when did TechCrunch become this horrible at actual...English? Look at these:

"What Clinkle doesn’t do is allow instant peer-to-merchant payments via high frequency sounds without a like it was hoping."

"Clinkle was shooting for the kind of “Innovation” with a capital I that we laud in Silicon Valley."

"The app is certainly slick, with tons of delightful little animation flourishes."

Did their writers go full retard?
Ah that's a shame. Canflix, the other big one a few years back, did a midnight move when they went under.
Don't get me wrong I love Sam Altman I love y-combinator but a small part of me is thinking that a good first step to start a startup is to not watch that video and find your own way. Not because it's probably not great but because a startup is not a formula.

Your path is your own.
> It's almost like the executives at the studios and distributors who own the rights to these films don't realize that, if I can't easily, quickly and conveniently buy access to their film legally, I will just bittorrent the damn thing.

They realize that, they just assume that most potential viewers don't know how to bittorrent (and they are very likely right about that).
Distributors I know. BTW I'm not trying to make a big thing about piracy here, hence my off-the-cuff remark. But it's just basic economics - there's a fairly small but non-zero cost of doing a DVD issue even if its a rerun and some films just aren't going to earn it back.

Bear in mind that many, many films would not be profitable on their own, but are cross-subsidized by more popular films in package distribution deals, especially international ones.
Are transcriptions of these videos going to be provided?

It's much easier for me to consume lectures as text rather than watching the video.
I can't find in the article if those were sequential 1.5PB writes or random small writes (i.e. < 4KB). If the later case, this article should be flagged.
SCOTLAND CHEATED BY SCOTS COUNTERS
The Australian government is expecting bitcoin users to report for EVERY transaction, how much it was, to which address, and for WHAT.

Imagine if they had that kind of need on cash or even electronic bank transactions.

No way in hell that theyd even be able to look at all the data they'd receive at tax time.
One of the blog/book authors here (John Mount). Yes the book and blog are both by Nina Zumel and John Mount. Obviously my opinion is biased, but here is a bit anyway. "R in Action" is one of our favorite R books (that and "The Art of R Programming"). "Practical Data Science with R" is more about working examples of data science (lots of the grungy tubing steps, how to think about some of the statistical tests, what sort of software to use at moderate data size). So if you would like the book depends a lot on if you are interested in those steps are not. My more hard-sell push of the book is here: http://www.win-vector.com/blog/2014/06/how-does-practical-da...
Ycombinator leading the way once again. Looking forward to this!
Hey! Just want to say fuck everything about the mouseovers and commentary on this page:
https://www.clinkle.com/team

You think you're cute? You think you're funny? I'm so sick of this shit, I know it's prevalent in the startup world, but please just go bankrupt already. You're not cute, you're not funny and I'm not gonna trust you to help me pay for anything. Again, just fail already.
This is encouraging although even tests on early drives showed that an 'average' drive should last far longer than people need them for - purely based on the number of allowed writes. 750TB? That's more data than my department, an imaging research group, have on our cluster...

There are some more tests which are very hard to do because you need time and a large sample size, for instance what's the data retention time for a typical SSD?

As far as I can tell, nobody really knows because you'd need to leave the drive off for probably more than a year - and as soon as you turn the drive on, presumably you refresh the charge that's leaked out? Most of the time this isn't a problem because almost everyone turns on their PC or laptop weekly/monthly if not daily.
Yup, just confirmed that the raw folder size of the database is 39.8MB and reports 39MB (not 38) in my query. It is also 222.78M rows. Note that you need to remove the space between the sum and the bracket if you want to run that query.

I can only assume that IB does some sort of differential compression on the data to get such a small filesize on that data and that it's an artifact of the machine data I'm using. But that's what I think the next big wave of data will be - stuff generated by data loggers on machines and equipment and analysed to scrape out incremental improvements on efficiency, reliability, etc. from previously relatively low-tech industrial corporations.
Netflix made the argument some years ago that the world and their user base was switching to streaming. To the point of proposing to split disk and streaming into separate businesses (not just separate subscriptions).

I was dubious given the comparatively poor quality and degree of choice on their streaming service at that time.

Since then, instead of improving, I've seen that choice -- on balance -- get worse. A few TV shows I'm interested in have shown up -- and a whole bunch I'm not at all interested in; while many I might be interested in remain absent. At the same time, the movie selection has grown notably worse, with many titles I dug out of the mess and queued up disappearing before I got to them.

Now I read that the DVD service is indeed in decline, as well.

The most telling bit of the OP story for me seems to be this quote:

Check out this 2013 Netflix PR video communicating that the company should no longer be looked upon as a massive movie library. What it really is, it says, is the “Internet’s largest television network.”

Well, I'm not interested in remaining a customer of what is increasingly some sort of Netflix "television channel".

As with all the other "streaming", "rental" online services I've tried. I'm coming to the conclusion that they are not worth the investment nor the fees, for me. I'm being driving back to maintaining a personal library. And perhaps to reinforcement my support for my public library, where the membership's interests are still primary.
All debit cards have free p2p with Square Cash.
I was asked to do something simple on Azure, all I can say is it sucked
Hey, Clinkle engineer here. We know Josh personally from our time together at Stanford. He really dislikes the company, and hopefully it was quite clear that the article was biased, rushed, and overall pretty unprofessional.
Yeah you guys are doing great!! Heard so many good things about your leadership, program, and business practices.

Ha-ha
Also if your logging plugin / framework / module allows logging to remote syslog, that's a pretty good idea - no disk blocking. Although you are then risking data loss when the network goes down...
http://blogs.marketwatch.com/thetell/2013/11/19/salesforce-c...
We've invested very heavily in building out a solid infrastructure for extracting data. We want to make sure that the product Just Works for our users, and that includes rotating IP addresses (you don't have to fiddle with your own, we have access to a pool of thousands).

Robots.txt is a tricky balancing act. It was first conceived in 1994, and was designed for crawlers that tried to suck up all the pages on the web. ParseHub, on the other hand, is very specifically targeted by a human. A human tells ParseHub exactly which pages and which pieces of data to extract. From that point of view, ParseHub is more like a "bulk web browser" than a robot.

Here are some examples that make this line blurry. If I tell ParseHub to log into a site, visit a single page, and extract one piece of information on it, does that violate robots.txt? If yes, then your browser has been violating robots.txt for years. The screenshots of your most visited websites are updated by periodically polling those sites (and ignoring robots.txt). My browser is currently showing a picture of my gmail inbox, which is blocked by robots.txt https://mail.google.com/robots.txt

More importantly, your computer and browser already do a lot of robot-like stuff to turn your mouse click into a request that's sent to the server. You don't have to write out the full request yourself. Is that then considered a robot? If not, then why is it considered a robot when ParseHub does the same (again, assuming a single request) thing?

Furthermore, some sites don't specify rate limits in robots.txt, but still actively block IP addresses when they cross some threshold.

It is far from a perfect standard, so it makes a lot of practical sense to have the ability to rotate IPs, even if it's not appropriate to use that ability all the time.

Our goal here is to be able to distinguish between the good type and bad type of scraping and give webmasters full transparency. Obviously this is a hard problem. If you have any feedback on any of this we'd love to hear it.

ps. we've tested our infrastructure on many Alexa top 100 sites and can say with moderate confidence that it will Just Work.

pps. if you're a webmaster, having ParseHub extract data from your site is probably far preferable to the alternative. People usually hack together their own scripts if their tools can't do the job. ParseHub does very aggressive caching of content and tries to figure out the traffic patterns of the host so that we can throttle based on the traffic the host is receiving. Hacked together scripts rarely go through the trouble of doing that.
FWIW, Apple has frowned upon the browser cookie check approach and they might reject a submission using it: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/25/apple-rejecting-apps-using-...

Do you guys have any estimates as to what the rate of error might be for the fingerprint approach?

Excited to see where you guys are going with this product!
1, I cook because it is another place where I can demonstrate my creativity.

2, I used to. But as I have cooking experiences (more than 5 yrs), I can cook with whatever in my fridge and make decent dishes.

3, I am Japanese and many Japanese cook anything even at home.

4, No.

5, Many good practices in programming are applicable to cooking. That is, focus on one thing at a time, understand and maintain your tools well, keep your env clean, etc.
Hehe, once you start noticing staging, lighting and framing, looking for shadows of the boom mic shadow from above, you won't be able to stop easily. You'll be enjoying a movie and all of the sudden instead of just watching the movie you are explicitly noticing editing cuts and camera positioning and thinking about it.
Interesting. I'm just starting to learn about C++ but the sense I get is that modern C++ is moving away from the preprocessor. One example is preferring the use of enums and inline functions over the use of macros.

Now, that doesn't change the fact that this project is cool and could lead to interesting developments but are preprocessor advancements a good thing in general for C++ or is it moving backwards?
Keep in mind that laws may also exist to inhibit the powers of regulatory agencies. I believe that's what wyager is suggesting.
Thanks for looking into this.

Velarikapattanam in colloquial terms means a land where anything can happen.
"The search site sells the search information to an HFT who buys the domain for $10 (or better, just reserves it for a month without paying anyone), and then offers to sell it to you for $100. Have they have increased market liquidity in much the same manner as the HFT for a similar degree of public benefit?"

In general, I don't like speaking in analogies about HFT as it is a highly technical area that depends on details. That said, this is a particularly bad analogy because unlike equity shares, domain names are not in any way fungible. pets.com is worth way more than akjalfdj89898afdsfyyy834u384734.sexy and there is only 1 pets.com, so if a market participant makes pets.com harder to acquire they are certainly not providing liquidity.

If you really want a stretched analogy, lets assume that McDonalds has contracted with a purchasing company, to secure enough beef to support their SUPER SAD SEPT SALE of cheeseburgers where they will need an extra amount of beef. If that purchasing agent then tells his brother to go out and buy all the beef he can, and they then collude to defraud McDonalds that is probably out of bounds. Conversely, if the purchasing agent finds that the average price of beef on the market is $1 a lb, but he himself has bought some for $.90 a lb, most people would view him selling it to his client for the market rate as fair. If the purchasing agents brother has some $.93 a lb beef and pays the purchasing agent $.02 a lb to sell to McDonals for $.98 we also usually don't have a problem. Further, if the purchasing agent stocks up on Coke because he assumes the sale will drive up the price of sugar water for his other clients, that also doesn't seem out of bounds to most people. Finally, in our super stretched analogy, no one would expect a savvy farmer who notices the purchasing agent buying up all the beef around to not raise his prices.
You're reading too much into what I said. None of your claims actually contradict mine. This part actually supports what I said:

Fat and protein are not an optimal source of energy and its use as such will force the body to open up certain pathways that are metabolically inefficient and potentially ruinous in the long term.

Yes, that's exactly why low-carb diets work. They force your body to use a less efficient fuel, which is an effective way to counteract the problem of having too much fuel. And while ketogenic dieting may be "potentially" ruinous in the long term, obesity is definitely ruinous in the long term.

I'm not really a pro-keto person, I think strict keto diets are too extreme for the long term. On the other hand, it's evident that a high carbohydrate diet provides energy that is excessive and unsuited for modern, sedentary lifestyles. Most of us would be a lot less overweight if we simply ate fewer carbs (like <40% of total calories)
ClojureScript auto-compiler doesn't run in my web browser, where I want compilation to happen. Not a shell script I have to manually start every time I want to develop.
California Court Rules for Artist Rights on Pre-72 Recordings
I would imagine this class is not a cookie cutter business plan but rather "here's the challenges startups face and how to approach them." So likely a MOOC form of YC
I'm not exactly sure that you're unbiased in this discussion either.

While the article may have been rushed, it didn't really seem unprofessional.
https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/
All these DEs are giving the users options. The DEs themselves try to organize between each other to make sure devs don't have to write apps twenty times to support the different DEs, which sometimes isn't done fast enough. But the fact that users have a choice between many different DEs, with very different philosophies, is excellent.

KDE is for people who like configuration options. GNOME is for people who prefer simplicity. LXDE is for those looking for a lightweight DE that doesn't get in the way. Cinnamon is for those who like OSX but want to stay on Linux. XFCE is for the truly minimalists out there. Etc.

What would "one single highly extensible DE" bring? It'd just be a name. A desktop environment is a few things:
- A core session manager. This stuff is common to all DEs and works pretty much the same for all.
- A set of core apps for desktop management (eg desktop, panel, system settings)
- Desktop apps. They're just apps. Some DEs don't ship any, some ship a hundred. They generally don't require you to run the DE alongside them, they're just built by the same people in the same spirit.

So tell me, what would your ideal desktop environment bring to the table, exactly?
One is related to the other. If the police have a warrant for the contents of a car they don't contact the car manufacturer only because picking the lock is easier.
Ironically that's what the first 15 minutes is..."don't start a startup unless it's the best way to accomplish something you want". "don't start a startup unless it feels like an important mission" etc.
> yet people are learning effectively from MOOCs

Statistically speaking, they aren't, that's the problem. Completion rates with Coursera are ~5%. Some argue that many people don't _want_ to finish the courses, but this views the product as something fixed. For any other kind of business, is "people sign up but then don't value it enough to continue" an excuse for lack of retention?
> In particular pid 1 has ongoing communication with multiple other components, and misbehavior from them can, both in theory and in practice, deadlock the whole system. In case you missed it, this is roughly what "monolithic architecture" means: even though the components are modular, they're designed for use in a tightly interwoven manner that's fragile.

You mean like how if even one of my SysV init system start up scripts hung indefinitely, all subsequent components would never get started? Or are you referring to how the whole system would hang when the root filesystem device was temporarily unmounted (really fun with network filesystems, although to be fair, NFS implementations eventually became robust enough that this wouldn't be a complete disaster)? Or are you referring to fork bombs those race conditions you mentioned that would bring my system to a complete stand still? Or are you referring to how a race condition with date formatting in syslog actually hung my entire system time and again? Or perhaps you mean how a lot of init scripts had little (if any) retry logic such that you'd often end up without the critical component of your system not running... often in ways where you'd not find out about it or worse still not be able to do anything about it without some really intrusive intervention? Or maybe you are referring to how if you got your init startup order wrong for one of many critical components, you'd have a deadlock before you ever got a chance to actually fail.. Or maybe you're referring to how the right kind of getty failures triggered by a weird byte in a config file could turn your system to a paperweight?

It's so hard to tell which scenario you are referring to. ;-)
There's gccgo, and it certainly has a reputation for beating gc/6g in numeric computation, but IIRC it didn't have a huge edge overall.
Don't worry guys, I know someone who can fix your bent iPhone 6
We built this over the weekend at Hack the North. All of the code, along with an SD image for the pi is on github: https://github.com/alisha/seed It was a really fun project to build and HtN was an great event. Sam Altman made a cameo! Feel free to ask any questions.
Thanks for sharing such useful data. I just had a Seagate drive fail. Was able to recover data since the last local backup with various tools. It took hours of repair work.

I've been procrastinating about getting off-site backup. This post on HN reminded me that I've been meaning to get an account going with your company for a while. I just signed up and will test on my machine before deploying to other machines in my business. Thank you.
Data Visualization and D3.js Newsletter – Issue 97
It would be neat if we could easily wrap these various streaming services up in one UI so that you simply search for a movie and it streams it from Netflix or hulu if possible and bittorrent if not. Its unfortunate that in today's world this would get you sued out of existence.
Do's and Dont's on Building Your Robotics Startup
We run a headless browser to execute your extraction.
@3:12: "There are much easier ways of getting rich." Could I get some examples? Thank you!
Very interesting lectures and it's great that they are doing this. Both of the speakers could benefit from a public speaking class though.
Minor nits:

The "notify me when Android is ready" flow appears to not actually list my email address: http://imgur.com/NJU8QkZ

If I enter an invalid phone number, try again and use a valid one, then click try again, the "ERROR" messages don't go away. http://imgur.com/EHF4Es5 In fact, they build up: http://imgur.com/opkxW4G

You might also want to move the App Store icon up a little bit; it doesn't quite fit on my 13" Macbook Air in Chrome: http://imgur.com/mz6Jkma

Edit: Also, /try seems to notice when I visit it from my Android phone that I should just be asked for my email address. It would be great if the / page did it too so that I don't have to give you my phone number.
This seems like a really valuable recruiting tool for YC. Start early at Stanford, groom freshman to have a great mindset and understanding of the fundamentals, fund them and make money.

YC is still a for-profit company, after all.
Wellll the headline is does describe them as a "laughingstock"
"All the advice in this class is geared towards people starting a business where the goal is hyper-growth and eventually building a very large company. Much of it doesn't apply in other cases and I want to warn people up front that if you try to do these things in a lot of big companies or non-startups it won't work."
Blizzard cancels its long-delayed “Project Titan” MMO
Lots of companies pay a premium for receiving the 'best'.

He should put whatever in his email in his normal pitch(website, or whatever), instead of trying to compete against the bottom dwellers of the world
I can't speak to the DVD side of the equation, I suspect that is merely due to the fact that not enough people want to see relatively obscure old movies (on classic DVDs) enough to waste inventory space on them, especially as more and more people move over to Bluray (if only because their console supports it so why not) and online VOD/streaming more and more. But on the streaming side, it is the studios blocking Netflix out, not Netflix being oblivious to how bad their movie selection is.

I temporarily worked for a company in the VOD/Streaming space that was run by Hollywood-insider types when they sort-of-aquihired most of the employees of Chumby. Based on my limited time of seeing it from the 'inside', my impression is that Hollywood studio executives have a seething, furious hatred of Netflix and their business model, which they see as devaluing their content. (And I'm not saying they are wrong to think this -- at the very least the Netflix model certainly upsets all the applecarts of the way Hollywood has done business for nearly a century).

These people would basically instinctively scowl animated-villain-style when Netflix was brought up, even if it was in other contexts.

eg. Software architect explaining to business guys why default sharing on social media was not a good idea (at the time): "We shouldn't automatically share what movies a customer has watched because Netflix (studio-business-guys scowl, hiss, unhinge their jaws) recently got into legal trouble for that".

Originally the studios were OK with making some dough from Netflix on old long-tailed-out movie catalogs that would otherwise not be earning anything (because they sure do love money) but a few years ago they hit the brakes on that because they would rather earn less on the old catalog stuff than do anything to further validate the Netflix model, which they see as an existential threat to their business.
Yes, but your data is on more than one drive, yes? Presumably you have some sort of RAID setup whereas if the one drive were to truly fail, another would pick up in its place.
Curious what the author of that article has ever built or created. My guess is nothing. From the looks of his twitter profile, I think that is pretty much confirmed: https://twitter.com/joshconstine

So easy for those in the pseudo-journalistic world TC and much of the Tech press live in to knock down, destroy and critique.

Meanwhile, more talented folks keep building and creating....
It's INTER-net writitorics, even why edit, content go bye bye so fast.
As of a few weeks ago my Cursors implementation correctly `shouldComponentUpdate`s path changes as well as value changes ;)