skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Before making suggestions like this and getting the HN bandwagon to support this POV, perhaps we should put ourselves in the startup's shoes?

As a founder, I am in a startup's shoes, and my intention was not to provoke an angry mob, but merely to state my own opinion. I don't want to use Firebase for anything my own revenue will depend on, and that's a shame, because they have made an awesome product.

> Forcing an open source on acquisition severely limits your exit options and lowers your acquisition value.

These acquisitions of 3 year old companies are always sort of disappointing to me. On the one hand, I'm truly inspired and encouraged see their measure of success. On the other hand, I'd really like to see more startups committed to building lasting companies that strive for win-win outcomes that include users, employees, investors and founders. This isn't supposed to be a zero sum game.

> As much as the users feel like startup founders owe them something, startup founders are human like everyone else. They don't exist to be our slaves.

With a company like Firebase, there's a chain of trust that's really important. They are not responsible for just their own individual users. They are responsible for other companies' users. The effects of everything they do are multiplied accordingly.

Part of offering a platform is the guarantee that "this thing you depend on to serve your users will not go away unexpectedly without leaving a viable alternative." That's not an unreasonable thing for someone to demand when they're building their house on your foundation. Their use of your service also represents an investment of their own developer time. You go away, they lose that investment. If you as the operator of a platform don't want to take on that level of responsibility, don't go into that business.

> Imposing rules like this on companies would result in fewer tools and companies overall as the companies themselves would no longer make economic sense.

Who said anything about imposing rules? You're putting words in my mouth.

There's a trend to throw VC money at open source force multipliers: http://words.steveklabnik.com/is-npm-worth-26mm

This isn't perfect and it contradicts my point about wanting to see sustainable companies, but I find it encouraging nonetheless. I think Firebase could have easily fallen into this category.
Good point. So if I use OO while maintaining immutability then am I doing functional programming, OO or both?
The newest version I can find on their site says it's from 2012. Link?
I wonder why this is voted down. The US has some severe laws against vandalizing computing devices and against unauthorized access. Why wouldn't these laws apply here?
What I always wonder - do people actually use email for private communication? Everybody uses email at work, but at home? From time to time I sign up for a new service or order something and get confirmation mails or I send a couple of emails back and forth to resolve an issue with a service I am using, but it is always between me and some business.

The number of emails I have written to or received from friends is negligible and I am not aware of anyone heavily using email for private communication. Everybody just calls or writes a SMS or uses WhatsApp or Facebook or ICQ, but never email.

So am I - and the people I know - a rare case or did just nobody advertising email related stuff recognize that no one uses email for private communication?
You're not satisfied with email itself, you're satisfied with your filtering software, plus your rigorous discipline, plus email. I don't think email is necessarily broken, so much as woefully incomplete for the kinds of tasks it's typically used for.
I loved that part. "We're going to complain because Apple won't let us use their design, so we came up with our own design that we also won't let people use".
Bloom filters seem like the big thing to write blog posts about now.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=bloom+filter#!/story/forever/0/blo...
> You should be completely mistrustful of anyone who offers you shares and doesn't tell you the # of shares outstanding.

this is an amazingly important point that many people I've seen new to the startup world ignore to their peril. it is too easy to get big eyes when you hear you are getting 50,000 options not realizing that it is only 0.000001% of the company since you don't know # of shares outstanding, across all classes of shares.
Hard to say, the Northern lights would move to the other hemisphere, the entire sky might glow if the field were not present (solar ejecta hitting the atmosphere everywhere)

It is possible that the Van Allen radiation belts would vanish and reform in a different configuration. That process might damage satellites.

A big chunk of ozone would get 'zapped'. The reason there are holes in the ozone layer at the poles (human cfc's not withstanding) is that highly charged particles can break it down[1].

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050228/full/news050228-12.ht...
Placebo effects include biological responses that can be measured in objective ways such as heart rate and blood pressure, observable allergic reaction, immune response in blood samples, or healing of tissue.

That's a very specific claim, and I would expect it to be published in a medical journal article that we can all look up if it is true. More than that, if this claim is generally accepted, it will be found in authoritative medical textbooks used to train medical practitioners. I have resources for looking up references like that--I go to my alma mater university library just about weekly to look up facts about things I read here on Hacker News. Do you have any references for anything you have read on this topic?

Meanwhile, I am sure that if any of our friends here on Hacker News are (may it never be) injured in a car crash, they are not going to go look for placebo treatments, but for actually effective treatments. The medical researchers who look at the issue with proper study designs and statistical controls know that placebos are essentially useless, as they at most have influence just on self-reported subjective symptoms, not on any sign that affects the progression of a disease or maintenance of good health.[1] This topic keeps coming up over and over and over here on Hacker News because most participants here have heard about this issue only in popular press reports or blog posts that are mostly wrong. I encourage you and all our friends here to take some more time and effort to learn more about the actual research base before assuming that a placebo can change your heart rate over the long term, reduce allergy symptoms (I know all about those), or heal tissue. (Which tissue?)

Findings on placebo effects by researchers who have considered the issue carefully include

"Despite the spin of the authors – these results put placebo medicine into crystal clear perspective, and I think they are generalizable and consistent with other placebo studies. For objective physiological outcomes, there is no significant placebo effect. Placebos are no better than no treatment at all."[2]

"We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed."[3]

[1] http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/michael-specter-on-the-p...

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/ted-kaptchuk-versus-plac...

[2] http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-rise-and-fa...

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20091554
I've been wanting something similar, but in the form of automated expiration after a certain amount of time (able to set "expiration" to either "Archive" or "Trash" in said rule).

For example, I'd love to be able to add a rule so that certain "deal" emails (those to which I'm purposely subscribed) to expire after say 1 day or 1 week - whatever the standard time for the sender's deals to typically last.

Then on the occasion that I end up in the woods, whether literally or figuratively, and unable to maintain my email for a couple days, I don't end up with an overwhelming and generally self-perpetuating inbox debt
thanks, thought i was also crazy.
It's on iOS, too. I just installed it! I had to find another app from Google so that I could get to the list of all apps from them to see it first, though.
Why Apple just set an all time Mac sales record
I am extremely skeptical that $19/year is significant compared to the value of the resources used to build an app (any app). I realize people can be in situations where getting $19 together at one time can be hard and still be able to develop apps, but that seems like a very corner case.
I liked Mailbox but Dropbox own it and I'm more and more concerned about how they handle my privacy. Add to that that for Mailbox to work your emails have to be stored on their servers (AFAIK, please tell me if I'm wrong) I switched away.
It's a little stilted, maybe, but I see much worse written English than this all the time.
The link to the patent 7,517,222 is wrong; it's to an application with the same title. Here's the key claim:

1. A magnetic connector system comprising: a first connector having a first plurality of electrical contacts and a plurality of magnets; and a second connector having a second plurality of electrical contacts and a magnetic element, the second plurality of electrical contacts being adapted to mate with the first plurality of electrical contacts when the first connector couples to the second connector, wherein the plurality of magnets of the first connector are proximally located and are arranged in opposing polarities with respect to each other so that when the first connector is brought in close proximity to the second connector, magnetic field lines travel through the magnetic element of the second connector from one of the plurality of magnets in the first connector to another one of the plurality of magnets in the first connector, thereby increasing magnetic attraction between the first connector and the second connector.

All the magnets are in the laptop end of the connector pair, not the cable end. Selling only the non-magnet end might not be infringing, since that's just a metal plate around some contacts. You might be able to beat this. But it would be tough.

If you really wanted to pull Apple's chain, you could make a better connector than Apple makes. You could fix the problem with their smaller magnetic connector, which is known to fall off too easily. Here's how.

There's an exotic device called the Correlated Magnetics MagPrinter (http://www.correlatedmagnetics.com). This is a CNC machine which magnetizes magnets. Not just ordinary uniform magnets, but single pieces of material with custom-designed magnetic patterns. With this, you can make one piece of magnetic material behave as if it is multiple magnets. You can create magnets with various self-aligning properties. You could probably make a plug for Apple's socket which didn't look like Apple's, didn't have a "plurality of magnets", mated with their connector, and worked better.

TechShop in San Francisco has a MagPrinter, and any member can use it. They also have the software you need to design the magnetic fields and create the files for the MagPrinter.

So get busy and out-invent Apple.
Bullet Trains Aren't Magic
I've been using Inbox and you won't miss anything. The auto-surfacing is really not as aggressive as you might imagine. If you just use Inbox without changing any settings you basically just get a cool GMail UI with the addition of 'Done' or 'Remind me Later' on each message.
"free press" meant "gratis" in this context.

If you really think the political news/anything ratio is higher in the average megabyte of internet download than in Metro I am afraid you live in a very unusual bubble.
That analogy is misleading, because you don't have to run a marathon to get a high school diploma.

I'm not advocating that students use this to cheat on their homework. I'm just pointing out that most people reading an algebra textbook aren't in there for self-improvement. They just want a good grade.
"Juice Drink" e.g. http://www.welchs.com/products/chillers-juice-drinks, sweetened teas, and lemonade are pretty common. Hawaiian Punch is available in many soda machines.
The funny thing is that we reported this sometime in 2009 (might have been 2010), they "fixed it" and released a new version, but the new version only crashed somewhat less often.
Thanks for the heads up, this will probably affect us car nerds too (I'm sure my cheapo KWP2000 cable has a fake FT232)
Google Apps free edition (up to 10x users) no longer exists unless you were grandfathered in. Now it starts at $5/user/month.
UNC Chapel Hill releases investigation into irregular classes
same here. there was a while ago article about usefulness of these manual organizer interfaces. they just don't work. what works is a system that can infer what you need to do from what you have done before give you maximum shortcut value. Example was presented - in facebook if you enter school you've been to you can post messages to these people - to field gets macro selector for your friends that have attended same school you did.

usually if I can't remember something - i usually don't really need to do that. I will definetly won't engage in this pseudo work.

Also how does this pass 20/80 test?

Well good on google. this sort of reminds me buzz they had. but I haven't played with this yet.
Big fan of Point - stumbled across the app when they went big on Product Hunt a few months back. Quickly spread it between my friends and we point back and forth almost daily.

Great app.
I'm sure Fabric (http://www.fabfile.org/) will be none too pleased about this name choice.
I say, the lengths people go to justify a trite thought-terminating cliché don't fail to astonish me.

If the mere possibility than a service you use might in the future have ads is sufficient to justify the phrase "you are the product", then I don't see how anything can be an exception to that. After all, the next release of Tor might have ads! Who knows?
Getting Ready to Declare Brackets 1.0
Maybe there's a business venture behind this idea - stock promo videos for mobile apps?
Show HN: A lightweight planning tool suitable for Kanban/Agile/Scrum
I've been using Inbox at El Goog for a while now, and I am happy to answer questions (in between dealing with a newborn...)

FWIW, I really like it, and use it exclusively for my work and personal accounts. Inbox functions very much more like a ToDo list than it does an email client. Here are the workflows I have:

Work:

I filter all mailing lists into different clusters that I have appear at 7AM every morning. I then scrub through the subject lists to see what happened yesterday, pinning things that require my attention, and then sweeping the rest. At this point, everything pinned in my Inbox is now "something I need to look at". I then read the email, and decide if it has an action item or not. If it's actionable and I intend to do it today, I'll leave it pinned. If it's not something I'm going to do today, I'll Snooze it until I think I'll have time to do it, or at least evaluate another Snooze time.

To make sure I don't miss important emails, I have a cluster that I put all email that has myself explicitly in the To: line, and have that appear whenever anything arrives. I do occasionally miss things that didn't have me in the To: and went to my 7AM clusters, but this is few and far between, and I hazard happens less than my Gmail inbox where I had far more cognitive load on managing the emails there.

Home:

The defaults are tuned well for home, and I use the clusters (like Travel, Purchases etc) like I do for work, having them appear at 7AM each day. Most things get swept immediately, and again I pin things that require my attention and are maybe ToDo items.

Inbox is really opinionated about its workflow: if you struggle against it, you'll have a bad time, and you'll prefer Gmail's flexibility. However, if you are Inbox Zero or GTD minded, I think you'll love Inbox. Inbox is my ToDo list, and replaces Wunderlist/Things/Evernote/Google Tasks for me. I set reminders to myself for work items that don't have an email attached.

I encourage everyone to give it a week to see if it suits them, but I'm afraid I'm all out of invites for now :(
so they can over-win the next elections by campaigning as the Proud Small Sovereign David against the Evil European Union Interference? That seems a rather stupid move.
I wonder if anti-virus and anti-malware companies will add this to their black lists.
I received the same error; I tried again a few minutes later and it worked.
I was actually talking about LepriconSoft's Slackware Linux :)

But your argument holds, stable, well tested, non-fancy software is the way to go regarding stability.

Yes my OS might be boring and my Desktop UI looks like 1999 but I can say in good faith that my system never crashed on me.
This is a good related article on the early days of WotC:
http://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/
Using Interactive Content to Increase Conversions
For purely local use I really don't think there's actually a substantial difference between mercurial and git in terms of interface, mother's love or not. When you start talking about running it over apache you've gone into a whole other use case (and suddenly you have apache as well...).

I also think this is a relatively old complaint. Git's interface has improved a lot in the 1.8-2.1 window of versions, and now gives pretty decent guidance on some of the hairier parts of itself even.
Dan Arieli's lead researcher talk on 11/19: you are what you buy
This needs to be repeated more often.

"Lets use the block chain to solve X"

Is often the most short site solution, and over looks a lot of problems with the underlying block chain. Permance of publicity is messy when applied to electronic information.
It's good that they got the 'bundles' in there, but much of this looks like it's a Google Now integration into Gmail. There's a ton of anxiety around information gathering, organizing, monitoring, and 'checking the box' that this solution glances by, but doesn't directly address. I don't believe this solution will compete with most people's other email inbox.
Former Blackwater Guards Convicted in Iraq Shooting
Twitter trades passwords for phone numbers with Digits login
How cargo ships full of diamond hard drives could connect a quantum sneakernet
On Influenza A (2009)
Thinnest Ultrabook in the World Our Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro Unboxing
It's a coin toss, but I went with iOS and don't regret it. The biggest reasons I don't regret it have nothing to do with the platform itself and have everything to do with having resources like raywenderlich.com and the articles on that site. I found that community and environment to be very very helpful.

The only frustration I really had was that, in the Apple world, things change fast. When I'd Google something, I'd find some code from 4 years ago that would show ways of doing things that were outdated. There are also minor disputes here and there on what's "the best way" to accomplish things, but overall, coming to -a- solution in most cases never took more than a day or two of frustration.
Hyper Plan is a simple visual planning tool. Like sticking post-it notes to a wall, but in software. Currently in free open beta for Windows and Mac. Would love to get your feedback.
First: Why do you think they created a completely new app rather than integrating features into the gmail app one by one? I understand it has a good integration of Google Now in it, but Google Now itself works very nice for me (Like showing important stuff from my gmail). Thanks!
> Think before you print
A new green file format: WWF
The WWF format is a PDF that cannot be printed out. It’s a simple way to avoid unnecessary printing. So here’s your chance to save trees and help the environment. Decide for yourself which documents don't need printing out – then simply save them as WWF.

You don't have to think about printing it, you just can't print it. At that point, I would stop thinking about printing and start thinking about murdering someone. Sure, that saves a tree, but someone else is going to die.

Painfully.

Whether or not to print something that looks like it should be printable should be my choice. If it shouldn't be printed, then don't format it like it should be printable.

Or, you know, put messages on it saying "Printing kills trees and causes Ebola" or something.
Ask HN: Busines cards for testing a market
Hi All,

I have an idea in mind and am visiting a related conference next week. I would like to give a business card to people that I talk to. Do you know of any website which prints cards in low volumes, example 30 cards. I am trying to save costs as much as I can.

Thanks
Seriously folks, who cares. It's a minor change to gmail's workflow.

No really, think about it. It's just email.
Thanks AVTizzle! Glad you and your friends are liking it so far.
> If you think about it, if you want to do a startup, you basically have to become a psychopath

No you don't.

> because you constantly have to tell yourself that everyone who is getting a job is doing it wrong, which is 99% of people, you have to be willing to lose everything, not be afraid of anything and you have to push yourself out of the comfort zone all the time.

That's not what a psychopath is so doing them doesn't make you psychopath. Seriously, what on Earth are you talking about?
This came to mind:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/linus-...

The reason is that RH right now is deep in two camps, cloud and military/government contracts.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/techflash/2014/09/u...

and systemd has two parts as best i can tell.

One part is aimed at cloud via containers and sandboxes (soon to come to desktop as well via Gnome).

The other is aimed at securing "seats" via logind. This because the earlier consolekit had a limited reach because it didn't have a partner sitting as pid 1.

And the military is after all the origin of the concept "trusted computing".

I am not saying that there is a willed conspiracy. But with Red Hat being a for profit organization, anything that bring in the cash in the short run will be given priority...
You did mention it: "the average net wage is $650/mo"; I assumed "net wage" meant "wage after taxes". There's no star to indicate that this phrasing is the result of a later edit.
Elsewhere Hackaday links to a Russian microelectronics company's blog[1], where they decapped real and fake FTDI chips and found that:

"It seems that in this case Chinese designers implemented protocol-compatible "fake" chip, using mask-programmable microcontroller. This way they only needed to redo 1 mask - this is much cheaper than full mask set, and explains a lot of redundant pads on the die. Fake chip was working kinda fine until FTDI released drivers update, which were able to detect fake chips via USB and send only 0's in this case. It was impossible to foresee any possible further driver checks without full schematic recovery and these hidden tricks saved FTDI profits."

[1]: http://zeptobars.ru/en/read/FTDI-FT232RL-real-vs-fake-supere...
there is a cap on the tax though, you'd basically pay extra on the first couple of movies (well, there isn't any netflix in hungary, so you'd be paying for torrents)
I agree with the don't archive email... Who cares if all my mail is in my inbox? That's what search and labels are for, but... Why bother with a "todo" label? Emails I need to act on are simply "starred".