skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine this is just a courtesy; if they decline to answer, then the committee can issue a subpoena and compel them to.

Here's a nice white paper on Congress's subpoena power: http://www.mayerbrown.com/files/Publication/ec1203b2-a787-44...
It's not unreal for desktop apps to assume the user has a wide screen, every computer you buy has one!
"how to steal from my employer"
The article is talking about boring old queueing, like at the bank. The teller does not ask what kind of transaction you're looking for, even if they're optimized for check depositing. It's a straight up first come first serve scenario.

This type of queueing can smooth out demand spikes at the cost of latency. The author's point is naively adding a queue doesn't solve scaling problems. Although, as you point out, it may enable optimizations that are otherwise impossible.

NCQ actively interrogates the current list of work and optimizes delivery around what needs to be done. that's not the op's point.
Coercing Some (null) to None seems like a bug. Null is a valid value in the type and should be allowed (F# allows it too).

Otherwise, a function might accidentally return None and cause a bug. For instance, a function that looks up s user and returns the name. The name might have null as a valid option. Some(null) indicates user found with no name. None indicates user not found.
> Try to name your toy project something even remotely similar to redhat or debian and you'll be crushed like a bug.

In Debian's case at least, I don't think there's an objection to third-party projects or forks using names derived from the name "Debian", so long as they aren't actually identically the name "Debian". For example, there is a distribution called "Illumian" which is made up of the Illumos base OS and a Debian-derived userspace.

Besides, I don't really see a trademark issue here. The term "cdr" preexists both of the projects, and is owned by neither of them. A person named their software after a fairly generic derivative of this term, "cdrtools". And now they are complaining that someone else named their software a different generic derivative, "cdrkit"? Do they claim that nobody else should be able to use the prefix "cdr" followed by a noun? Given that they did not even invent the prefix "cdr", that seems like quit a stretch. That's like someone who named their backup product "Backup Tool" complaining that a different product is named "Backup Kit". Sorry, but you don't own the word "backup".
There are a bunch. I know of a couple but don't know how good/bad they are so don't want to "recommend" anyone. But quick google search of revenue-based funding SaaS should turn them up.

I've heard they generally work like this:

- Will lend you money equivalent to 1/4 to 1/2 your monthly or annual revenue/billings

- Take a % of revenue every month as repayment. Your repayment goes up or down with revenue which is a good feature.

- Take some warrant coverage as well (1/3 to 1/5 of the loan value)

Some will want to be hooked into your payment solution to take money right as it comes in but as we've not done it ourselves (have only looked at superficially), I'm not sure if that's all that common.

For B2B SaaS startups who can customer-fund to traction, this is the way of the future IMO. Unfortunately, the revenue-based financing guys aren't doing a great job marketing themselves primarily cuz their funds are quite small so far.

Hope that helps.
I wouldn't call 1.43:1 "almost square", especially concerning this opinion of Eisenstein. It's closer to "half again as height", a bit more than 4:3.

But I wouldn't trust Eisenstein much for that matter anyway.
That was really interesting, thanks. In particular,

"The Enforcement Process. Congressional investigations often begin informally, with the interested committee or subcommittee first seeking information on a voluntary basis (i.e., by sending a letter request or asking for an informal interview), rather than by issuing compulsory subpoenas. Although there is no legal obligation that a party comply with such a request, it is typically in the responding party’s best interest to do so"
You might want to consider F# over C# then, there's very little cognitive barriers to using the .NET framework with F#. For example:

open System.IO // F#

using System.IO; // C#

let thing = new Thing(a,b,c) // F#

var thing = new Thing(a,b,c) // C#

Console.WriteLine("blah") // F#

Console.WriteLine("blah") // C#

Essentially C# parameter lists become tuples in F#. So interop is mostly quite straight-forward. It's mostly quite a mechanical process to convert C# sample code into F#.

It's harder to go the other way, and take F# code into the C# world, because functions in F# allow for partial application. The type inference system is awesome, so you'll end up with more generic functions and use first class functions more. That stuff is tricky to bring back (though not insurmountable).

The OO grammar is a little tricky in F#, but I tend to shy away from that. It's not needed most of the time.

Then at least you don't have to deal with all the stuff this library is trying to solve ;)
They've released schematics for some of their small analog synths before.
> A 9% growth rate the business turns profitable after 6 months and on the 13th month is net profitable. Any rational investor would be frothing to get involved in that sort of business - it becomes a money-printing machine in short order.

That's not 100% true.

1) Growth rates like this are not sustainable long-term, and a 9% growth rate doesn't look great when lots of other companies are at 15-25% monthly growth with similar revenues.

2) The revenues multiples for Series A startup are very high. Would I invest in a $600k revenue/year startup growing 9% monthly at a $4m valuation? Sure, that sounds good. But a Series A would be more like investing $5m at a $25m valuation, which is way higher than the startup is worth based on pure fundamentals. The reason to invest at a $25m valuation is because you think there's a 10% shot the startup will be worth $500m, not because you think it's a 100% shot at $25m. High growth rates are one of the best indicators that a startup has a shot at $500m.

(My fund does seed/Series A investments.)
My pet peeve: The colonists in those scifi stories are douchebags. If they had the technology to overtake the first explorers by a factor of thousands, why didn't they stop by to offer their ancestors a ride on the newer, faster ship?
Is this what will replace (as a meta-solution, it appears) the backed-out third party cookie blocking stuff?
So, I completely agree with this letter, but I felt a sense of unease reading it. I realized why. Other companies are as bad or worse about privacy, where are all those letters? I wish there were a lot more of these and wonder if the only reason this one exists is because the blowup with Uber was so visible and so it can be used for political posturing.
Is Docker the Right Abstraction for PaaS?
Disgusting Virtual service

Disgusting management interface

Abysmal support

Way to fuck up a mustard sandwich Microsoftie

We moved everything we had away from that Virus named Azure.
> I think I'm a human

You sure? :) I definitely think the text does bias your interpretation though, I did the exact same.
A comment on the option type: I think transforming Some(null) into None is wrong.

- There is an x for which Some(x) is not a Some. This violates useful invariants.
- Some((int?)1) is a Some, but Some((object)(int?)1) is a None.
- optionValue.Cast<object>().Cast<T>() is not the identity function.
- I can't use your option type in existing code without doing careful null analysis.
- As a rule of thumb, generic code you should treat null as just another instance of T with no special treatment (beyond the acrobatics to make the code not throw an exception). That way both users enforcing a non-null constraint and users allowing nulls can use your type.
Yes, this is exactly what I intended.
I'd guess that they're unique passwords taken from plain text password dumps that ended up in dictionaries.
Franken will no longer be Chairman of this committee in January when the Democrats are no longer in control of the US Senate.
Odd that even with a smiley face, some people miss tongue-in-cheek humour.
Chinese Developers Can Now Offer Paid Applications to Google Play Users
Turning Apps Inside Out
Damn! I was certain nobody would guess my password of eight commas.
I just don't know why people still use passwords with SSH anyway! (ie userify and stuff)
Sounds like you should run a VPN
The viral patent grant in gplv3 is very scary to companies that that hold a lot of patents. This seems to be a decent overview: http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.asp...
This was my reaction as well. Yes, Uber's behavior here is reprehensible. But it's also kid stuff compared to what other entities (including the Federal Government itself, whose behavior we never agreed to in a TOS agreement) are engaged in, and I have to wonder what, if any, authority the government could exert in these circumstances (disregarding the appropriateness of the use of said authority, or any potential legislative action). Assuming nothing about Uber's user terms and agreements aren't unlawful, it's almost certainly the case that, as alluded to by Franken's letter, users of Uber have agreed to provide Uber with this sort of access to their usage of the app.

So while I agree with the spirit of what Frankin is saying, I'm just left with distaste for what obvious posturing and pandering it is.
This video http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2014/3-615; start at 39 minutes. Mark Russinovich explains their update rollout procedure (or at least part of it).

Willing to bet the rollout infrastructure depended on storage and so their ability to control or stop the rollout was broken once the storage failures began.
Udemy is having the race on Black Firday, each course $10
I hear what you're saying, but I felt that the reason for using Option in C# would be explicitly to deny nulls. If you are OK with accepting null, don't use Option and return null.

I think that's slightly different with F# where you mostly deal with value types that definitely have values. It's rare that you need to pull null out of the bag (unless interop'ing with .NET libs).

I understand why you might call it a bug, but I think I make the reasoning clear in the documentation. So I hope it's unlikely to cause confusion.
DDG's main issue is that their results are just not good enough. I really, really wanted to like them and use them, but in all but the simplest queries, I ended up back at Google.

I really want to ditch Google, but I don't see how. Except via Start Page.
Spooky Alignment of Quasars Across Billions of Light-years
Considering 10 ^ -9 seconds is considered meta-stable for a nuclear isomer that's also a seemingly pointless exercise. However, IMO this is interesting comparison simply because of the one edge case that's seemly stable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_tantalum lasts for ~10^15 years so we might also find a vary heavy but stable 'particle'.
This would never work. "Medium-high switching barriers" is a fantasy. The barriers are insurmountable, and not just because big retailers like to use in-house technology.

Every retail store is carefully engineered to make you walk around more. They want you to walk past things you didn't intend to buy and then buy them.

Ever wonder why household necessities are always at opposite back corners of grocery stores? They want you to spend as much time there as possible and pass as many shelves as possible.

Yes, there is a "problem" here for consumers, but it's one they will generally solve by using Amazon or the online pick-up systems that stores already have. You can already browse the inventory of stores and have your items waiting for you when you arrive.

Furthermore, because every store creates this problem, no store has an incentive to fix it.

If Target, for example, were to spend money on "TailSearch" (a LOT of money) and minorly improve the user experience at the cost of much of their sales volume, they would be screwed.

And what would the real benefit for the user be? Do you go to stores because it's easy to find things or because they have what you want at the price you want?

This is simple technology, and it could easily piggyback on the databases that tech-savvy companies like Wal-Mart already have. There's a reason they haven't done anything like this yet.
It looks like ever wrote the scanner (that hit this honeypot) thought it would be a great idea to count on instances where terminal becomes laggy/crashes during a password change.

Adminstrator would then set a new password by an accident.

My theory anyways.
Hi, this is Corey Sanders, an engineer on the Azure compute team. Yes, our normal policy for updates is to roll them in incremental batches. In this case, due to an operational error, we did not apply the changes as per normal policy.
This isn't really a breakthrough in object identification, as much as it is a clever pairing of identification with (mostly existing) language systems, is that right?

Wondering whether there's any merit to sibling comments speculating this is the future of e.g. surveillance
If you're a company with a lot of user data along these lines, this letter serves as notice that you'd better be able to answer these questions for your own company. Who knows when The Eye will glare your way?
Google added support for XMPP fedederation in 2006, hoping that other messaging services would follow suit: http://www.zdnet.com/google-embraces-open-im-standards-30392...

Seven years later, not a single other major IM service had added the same support. All XMPP federation support had accomplished was providing a spam vector to Google Talk users.

Google's public statement when they dropped federation in 2013 was: "XMPP was designed over a decade ago to provide a way for chat networks to interoperate, known as federation. Google Talk was the only major network to support federation, and after seven years, it’s evident that the rest of the industry is not moving to embrace this open system. If, at some point in the future, the industry shows interest, then we would then be open to discussions about developing an interface that's designed for modern needs." http://www.zdnet.com/google-moves-away-from-the-xmpp-open-me...

Calling this an anti-openness move seems a little backwards when Google was the only company supporting federation to begin with!
Not hypocritical at all. We have literally centuries of data on caffeine, and less than a decade's worth on electrical brain stimulation. Generations have lived and died drinking coffee and tea.

We know to multiple decimal places what a lifetime of regular caffeine intake in the form of coffee or tea will do to a person (not much, with the health benefits mildly outweighing any negatives) whereas no one has ever spent the bulk of their lifetime using this kind of brain stimulation regularly.

It may very well be harmless or even long-term beneficial. Or not. The only way to really tell is to perform the experiment, and as usual the early adopters will be taking the risks for the rest of us.
We changed the title because the original is baity. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. more accurate and neutral) title, we'll change it again.
I saw their talk on Slush conference today. Impressive idea, this seems to be just their first teaser product.
Like it already.
Well, in the Bay Area all signs are pointing to Oakland. It makes obviously sense.
Agreed. I couldn't even tell you what my current wallpaper is because I'm never not working in full screen maximized windows.

My current fave monitor at home is my ca2008 Dell 2405 with all it's 1920x1200 glory. The Pixel is second, but a distant second because the screen is so small that if you actually use the full resolution you can't read a darn thing.
Should I quit now before I get burned?
A little background - a guy who I used to work for (and trust) approached me 6 months ago with an idea for a web application that targets a non-sexy industry. He would be the CEO/sales/bizdev guy and I would be the developer. It seemed like a really solid idea and something reasonable that I could build. After a week or so of researching competitors and hashing out some other details I decided to start building the product.

Fast forward to 6 months later and we now have a product which I'm fairly proud of. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles that I was hoping for, but I think it's a pretty solid MVP. The only problem is that my cofounder and I have completely different values, and it's really hard for us to see eye to eye.

- He wants to aggressively pursue patents (even though we haven't made a single doller yet) - I think patents are a huge waste of time and resources and this stage in the business. Plus I don't think our product is super novel to begin with

- He insists that we continue adding more and more features before we release - I think we should just release the damn thing and see if anybody likes it

- I think that he should take a more active role in 'product' related activities, like creating mock-ups and performing QA. He thinks we shouldn't bother testing until the product is done!

- He tends to be very scatter brained with his ideas. This concerns me greatly because he has the domain experience in the industry that we're targeting. I have no experience in this industry and thus have to trust that he has the right vision for this product.

I really don't want to give up but at this point I've lost a lot of faith in the competence of my cofounder and I have a hard time motivating myself to keep working on this product. I feel like our difference in values cannot be reconciled, and I worry that his vision is not focused enough.

Any advice on how to move forward?
> Who knows when The Eye will glare your way?

It never will - Franken loses his chairmanship of the committee come January when the Republicans take power, which only serves to highlight that this "investigation" is merely him pandering to his constituency on his way out.
I work for a school district in the US and we have to have a gateway content filter to prevent students from accessing inappropriate web sites. We use an iboss content filter which can decrypt ssl and rencrypt on the fly. It can also force google safe search and such. I suspect this company uses something similar.

http://www.iboss.com/web_security_suite/wss_content_manageme...
Just replied to MichaelGG on the same subject [1]. I understand what you're getting at. I'm not particularly looking to create an algebraically perfect type. The explicit reason for this is to kill null as a possible output from a method, so that the consuming code only has Some or None to deal with. If you want to return null, don't use Option<T>.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634015
This looks pretty cool. I've often thought about how to build smart tech into the shower. What I always envisioned would require a more integrated solution (actually using controllable valves to adjust the temp instead of the old knobs, etc) but this looks like it gets a lot of bang for a minimally invasive add-on.
That really really depends on how well you prepare.
Brands Are Wasting Money on Facebook and Twitter, Forrester Says
Would you please consider modifying or extending this presentation to include other basics? You did a great job at making Docker finally understandable as a whole. I'd love to see more of your writing on this topic.
> Companies like Volvo are far ahead already.

Can you back up that confident claim? Do you have data?

> Google isn't helping speed up the technology.

How do you arrive at that?

> But wouldn't it be better for Google to focus on doing data supply deals with the existing car companies ? Far less money, risk etc.

There was no one to sell data to. Google are the ones that started using it at large scales.
A variant of SQL that can adapt to variable column rows should certainly be possible, much as SQLite implements a sql variant with variably typed columns.
This is an irrelevant point, but it's a stretch to call a 5-year-old company with $2B in revenue a "startup".
Hey nnx, this is Corey from the Azure engineering team. We have a standard protocol in the team of applying production changes in incremental batches. Due to an operational error, this update was made across most regions in a short period of time. I really apologize for the disruption.
Is there a way to quantify the usage of tools like this?
I mean, how many people actually use RelativeWave on a daily basis?

NoFlo, Origami, RelativeWave are all offering this visual programming, but any example I saw was becoming too complicated to follow before it was useful.
Sorry, bad choice of words on my part -- I shouldn't have said "any rational investor". What I meant is "any profit-focused, long-term investor" (as opposed to a moonshot-focused VC investor). I don't mean any of those things as negatives, just descriptives.

Your first point is right (and I addressed 1 later in my comment) -- if 9% isn't sustainable long-term, then the whole picture is quite different and a different metric should be used. And your second point, put differently, is "asking prices are too high", which is a fair point.

So I'd recast the original problem in a different light: "Company X is growing at 9% now, expectations are that it's unsustainable and won't be profitable for a while, and at the same time, they're asking a very high price relative to that growth & profitability rate", which explains why they're having trouble a bit more clearly.

My fundamental point is that the meme "anything less than 5% growth per week is bad" in a vacuum feels crazy by itself. With more context, it makes more sense.
the big difference there, is that Yahoo doesn't have a paid ad from LibreOffice, whereas Google does.

The other results are very similar - the official site, wikipedia article, download.com, etc.

So your complaint is that the LibreOffice project hasn't paid for an ad on whatever ad network Yahoo uses/runs?
The subcommittee, which is specifically tasked with looking at tech privacy issues, isn't going away.
The real problem is that this game is controlled by ADD children who can't differentiate between 9% monthly growth in something of quality and 15-30% "viral" monthly growth in Snapchat-for-cats (the original Snapchat was idiotic, and give cats some credit because they have way better taste than sexting tweens) bullshit.
> But if you're stuck with C#, might as well make the best out it.

That's definitely the crux of it. There's no way you can tame all of the issues of C#, but it's possible to smooth some of the rough edges, just.
> I was quite surprised by the parent comment because I had never heard of Musk being described as a founder.

I bet if you were to poll people around the world, most people would assume Musk was a founder.
Even if this is a Democratic-only concern (which I don't think it is), this would be an easy one for a Senator in the minority to sell to the Chairman as a personal favor. It would just be a subpoena to answer some questions; the Chairman wouldn't be signing up to actually do anything like sponsoring legislation.
So the new interface will look like Google but won't have Google's results.