skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My interpretation was that the marketers are very savvy at measuring the efficacy of advertising, but they're benchmarking it against an unknown LTV.

As you mention, Snapchat has no way of measuring their own LTV. If they were to do any Facebook advertising, they'd just be shooting in the dark.
scientific computing is mainly academic anyways.

...and just about every aspect of engineering and a non-trivial part of finance.
While admittedly, I know nothing about Apple's internal policies and how it tracks these workers and the hours they're working, I wonder how real those numbers are. What I see often (very often) is that people see data and they take the numbers at face value. Could it possibly be that in order to appease Apple, the suppliers are cooking the books on the hours their employees are working? Obviously, in terms of profit margins, they want to squeeze out every penny of labor they can.

What type of data integrity system does Apple have set up to make sure that these are truly the case? With 1 million workers and multiple companies (and all the suppliers) does Apple truly have an independent employee (unaffected by any pressure from factory management) at every factory to watch over the labor standards? I kind of doubt it.

But yes, 60 hour work weeks, how noble of Apple. "Thank you sir, may I have another?" Personally, this really does make me rethink buying an Apple product.
This code is so ugly that I thought it was Lisp :p
Here is a (text) article on the same topic:
http://www.vox.com/2014/9/22/6826869/a-linguist-s-history-of...
In Favour of Self-Signed Certificates
You don't have to be Snapchat CEO for that - every empire will turn to dust.)

The law of diminishing returns works equally well for FB or MSFT or NOK (remember that?) or AALP or whatever it is.
The chips Atmel is trying to move are not AVRs; it sounds like a money sink to push a harvard architecture in a von Neumann world.
His hypothesis isn't wrong though. It may be more productive to attack his rationale than his experience.
I think this has to do with learning styles, but I've found that working on real problems (like those on Kaggle) is a better way to learn machine learning than reading text books. When I'm working on problems, it becomes evident what I don't know. Then I'm able to intelligently go through the books and learn the relevant bits. When I start with the math, I tend not to remember anything because I have no foundation to attach the math knowledge to.
I'm not in the online retailing market, but I'll hazard a guess anyways.

It's a combination of things you guessed (pricing tricks/marketing) at plus, real-time anything is very hard especially when you're making an offer to consumers. Goods can move quickly and purchases occur at the same time (many in fact) and it depends on the location an store house of goods. If you don't have tight controls around location, order times, and a host of other things, it's difficult to reliably give that information to an end user. I can see it being a bit easier for a warehouse only or B&M online item where the location and the product are very specific (we have 5 TVs at the DFW location) but get hairy when factoring in entire regions or product that is on various statuses but you can still deliver by a certain date. You don't want to over promise and constantly disappoint/refund customers or under estimate and not sell enough. Logistics, inventory tracking, and real-time data are hard especially all together.

Keep in mind I really have no idea what I'm talking about...
Well read the news, follow the tech scene in India. cold call /email some founders offering to help out by mentioning how your skills can be beneficial.

yourstory.com
10 mind-blowing space images through tweets
There are other frameworks that are as productive and have better performance so why cripple yourself right from the beginning.
Just a thought, not so certain myself how important it really is, but:
The web dev world also might mostly abandon Python very fast, vs once you got a foothold in academia there is a good chance you're going to keep that for years. Having a language in the universities' curricula gives exposure for a long time.
What is wrong with 12 hour shift?

And what's up with ad hominem?
Not to mention Instagram and WhatsApp. Not the same kind of hardware tech, but certainly diversifying. Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are 3 of maybe the top 5 or so apps out there right now.
10 Amazing Things to Do with a Hadoop-Based Data Lake
Personally I don't care, although copy-pasting Python can be annoying. If your biggest concern with any general-purpose programming language is its syntax, you have probably not put enough thought into semantics issues - the ones that persist no matter how familiar the syntax becomes.

Anyway, Walter Bright, designer of D language, wrote an article on language design [1] touching on the issue:

> Yes, the grammar should be redundant. You've all heard people say that statement terminating ; are not necessary because the compiler can figure it out. That's true — but such non-redundancy makes for incomprehensible error messages. Consider a syntax with no redundancy: Any random sequence of characters would then be a valid program. No error messages are even possible. A good syntax needs redundancy in order to diagnose errors and give good error messages.

I thought that was interesting. It is a pretty much undebatable argument against taking terseness too far.

On the other hand, I have never had a problem with Python's error messages.

[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/so-you-want-t...
It's mapped to the base of nerves. He doesn't have the entire nervous network that an arm usually has.
What would those frameworks be?
The reality is if we dumped as much tax money on it as we dump on spaceships landing on comets, we'd be all done with this in 1 year and headlines like this would be old news.
The shortest way (but not the easiest) to stop procrastinating
Most people I've seen question the North Korea angle absolutely acknowledge that they have the capability to do things like this. They usually argue that this does not fit the style and MO of a state sponsored attack, that The Interview was never mentioned by the hackers until after the media starting running with the story, and that there simply isn't enough public evidence to justifiably attribute it yet, among other things.
Not disagreeing with you but

>be skilled enough to evade the FBI, but still somehow be stuck in some mid-tier Sony IT gig.

Skill (whatever that is) has very little to do with how successful you are at your job and/or which company you are working at.
Wow, I'm really surprised. Guido is usually incredibly nice, but he comes across as very condescending in that comment.

I love Python, it's my favorite language by far - but I love all those different tools (numba, pypy, hope, nuitka, cython etc) that make you sacrifice a small amount of dynamic magic in exchange for significant speed ups.

I don't have to use them - but when I need to write fast code, it's really nice to be able to do so in Python.
I love it. The day C and C++ die I'll be dancing on their grave and twerking on the tombstone.

Will be hard to find an ARM equivalent for the ultra low power MSPs though.
Or maybe they'll run Oculus into the ground, too, much like Yahoo did with dozens of companies it bought for a lot of money, too (Flickr would be one of the more known examples).
Many of us "care" about languages – they have emotional significance – but what is the practical value of near-dead languages to society? How would you even measure the impact of lengthening the lifespan of a dying language? If we taught hundreds of children to speak an ancient language that no one else uses, would that make anyone happier?

Should we teach children extinct professions just to keep some cultures alive?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cutting
I think you read that correctly but I think he is being glib or expressed this poorly (McWorter is a serious linguist so I am surprised by his statement). The example he gave was a straw man.

There is good and disturbing work on how language affects decision making (see, or example Lera Boroditsky). In some languages, like, English, you're more likely to say "he dropped the glass and broke it" while in others, like Spanish and Hindi, you're more likely to say "the glass fell and broke", or even "she had the glass and it fell and it broke". So what? Well if you use these formulations in a controlled trial in a single language (e.g. in English: split a group in two and describe a scene to one in an agentive and the other a non-agentive way they end up with completely different views of responsibility, guilt etc). Yes you could in theory do all this work in one language (like Lakoff) but you might not even know that it could be interesting. There are lots of interesting examples.

This kind of stuff can be useful in uncovering (or exploiting) propaganda / advertising, but also decision making in science, law etc. And language is one of our few tools for investigating operating brains since setting breakpoints in brains is frowned upon.

To what degree do these differences really affect culture? Who knows (yet?). I find a full Sapir-Whorf cultural-determinism-from-language very hard to take seriously, but in the small at least it seems pretty likely and who knows how fundamental it is? It needs research.

Plus it's fun. My wife, kid and I use three different languages together even in the house, depending on context or whom we're talking about, or what we want to say or just by whimsy. We listen to different kinds of music depending on mood too. People don't live in a world of fordist Gadgrinds!
3 Steps to Increasing Brand Awareness with APIs
The Unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand
The majority of data theft, cybercrime, etc is done by insiders these days - a lot of companies just don't talk about it unless forced to by regulations...
Well.. it's simply using the size of the dot for the 3rd dimesion. Not a new idea.

What makes it visually appealing is that the 3rd dimension is time. And the x/y parameters do not change much over time. So many dots of similar size are close to each other generating a path.

Also the motion blur from one dot to the next is useful only because the 3rd dimension has a special meaning. It would not work if it was "income" instead of "time".
i find http://www.talentbuddy.co useful to learn idioms in a language because after you complete a challenge, you can see all other answers to that challenge..
Where can I see more of your work?
It's grammatically incorrect. English pluperfect tense should be used like so:

Sony Hackers Seen Snooping for Months, Planting Bomb

The actions of snooping and planting the bomb are in the past but before the implied event of discovery which is also in the past so it must be pluperfect. The form "Having Snooped" can only be used in a pluperfect inversion such as:

Having snooped around for months, the hackers planted a bomb.
There was a good blog post this by Armin. Basically, if you have to concatenate strings, don't do so via += but use "".join([]).
Labour, yes, but pushing shouldn't take nearly that long.
Not just open-source hardware, actually hardware itself is hard, maybe that's why it's called 'hard'ware.

Digest thousands pages of datasheet, find the best price of the ICs, making sure no potential supply issue or long waiting time for the order, PCB, SMT, cost, more importantly quality assurance at manufacturing, logistics....

I would say it's 100x harder than software, been there done that.
Show HN: Text “carols” to 907.312.1412 for Christmas carol lyrics
I built this a couple days ago after seeing carolers lyric books and thinking, "Who has printers and copiers anymore?"

Here's a pic of the menu. Any songs I should add?
http://imgur.com/3ZhAqGd

Disclosure: I'm a Twilio developer evangelist.
Inventory numbers are also an irrelevant metric when it comes to how long an item is going to stay in stock.

New items come in all the time, so what might be 3 in stock this minute may be 103 the next.

Also, depending on the item, 12000 in stock right now might be zero in one second if there's suddenly a run on it.
You're going to need to be a bit more specific. What frameworks? How are they more productive?
An infographic about the super computers in our pockets
Kudos to a lot of people in this discussion who have noted that they do not have any real numbers to back up their opinions. It is funny, because the CEO of Snapchat had no numbers but didn't let that stop him! I like that their is a higher level of integrity in an HN discussion than a Business Insider article. :)
It's exactly like sales. Each of those channels work, bring a different type of lead, and need to be nurtured differently. It is a constant, slow process unless you blindly overpay. You're always working the talent pool - priming candidates, vetting them even when you're not hiring. In house vs out of house, remote vs local can all be managed.
When I worked in the Facebook advertising space we were definitely tracking "engagement" with our clients' ads. But this was often artificial measures like "clicked like" or "downloaded the app"; we did sometimes measure actual revenue (i.e. "clicked the ad and then bought something at the linked store") but this was less common and many ad campaigns simply weren't set up for that kind of response.

So it's not completely blind, but I suspect many companies are paying for "brand awareness" and "user engagement" - the things they can measure, like the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight - and maybe haven't fully validated that those translate into real revenue.
Good write-up. I've been observing this phenomenon for years and I think that one of the main causes is poor cost estimation by developers (or, often, no cost estimation).

The new project lead asks management to allow him to re-write the project. It's a 10 manyear task so the management declines.

At that point he decides to do the changes in gradual manner, completely ignoring the fact that it's still a 10 manyear task, while, realistically, his team can spend 2 manmonths a year on refactoring. Thus, the re-write will be accomplished in 60 years.

The same pattern repeats with the next project lead and so on.
The ruby interpreter is really, really slow. I don't think anyone will argue that you could do something Google or Facebook scale with rails.

That said, ruby is an incredibly easy language to program in. If you start with ruby and an SOA, it doesn't matter where you start to hit scaling issues - you can replace the code (that you wrote far faster than you would have in Java) with something more performant.
If anyone finds this helpful, I hacked together a quick test tool to check for vulnerable rompager versions:
https://rompager.hboeck.de/

Still uncertain if this is to be taken seriously, because detailed information is lacking.
A couple months back I was on a panel on Agile methods with a fellow from Intel. [1] Normally I scoff at large-company Agile efforts, but I came away impressed. As I understood his presentation, they had virtualized their entire System-on-Chip development pipeline [2], allowing them to use software methods for hardware products.

Clearly we're not there for open hardware, but I think that's the kind of tooling necessary. If the cost of a build drops from $1k of manufacturing to $0.01 of electricity, and if the hardware experts express their knowledge as automated tests, then suddenly randoms like me can, as with open source, jump in, try a patch, and be given a chance to learn how to do it right.

[1] http://computer.ieeesiliconvalley.org/agile-update-and-is-it...

[2] http://computer.ieeesiliconvalley.org/wp-content/uploads/sit...
There is no MO regarding an attack from a country like North Korea. That country says bombastic things with regularity, and has seemingly little concern for blowback. How a country like Israel or the United States might do an attack like this has no relevance to what North Korea might do, whether directly or through a hired proxy.

The Interview was never mentioned by the hackers until after the media starting running with the story

North Korea threatened war over this movie - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28014069

Now again, North Korea's words are kind of cheap, but they were talking about as big as you can get before this hack, and then specifically warned Sony to "obey" them. We have absolutely no idea what communications happened between the group and Sony and then law enforcement, so the whole what the media reported angle seems rather spurious. Sony/Law Enforcement, people who know more than us, seem to believe it was related to the movie.
The stores don't charge sales tax. The state mandates that they collect sales tax. If the state doesn't mandate that the store collect sales tax, the store won't "make" you pay it, though I think technically in most states, you're still supposed to file those purchases with your state income tax and pay then.
Here's the library that implements this pattern:

https://github.com/gwatts/manners

And Mailgun's fork that supports passing file descriptors between processes:

https://github.com/mailgun/manners
Kidneys too.
As someone who doesn't know what Meteor.js is this doesn't actually tell me what it is, what it can do, or what it can be used for. Now to be fair I'm not a webdev so I don't much about most of these technologies nor am I really the target audience. But still. I feel like if your article is literally called "What is X" it should do a better job telling you what X is.
▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell
> The common narrative in discounting any involvement of North Korea is that they're too famished and uneducated to perform such an operation.

This is the common narrative? Every narrative I've read bases their skepticism on problems with the language used by attackers.
Well I'd agree but Twitter made it some how (or should I say twttr)
The date for the alpha is hard, but the final release of 1.0 is not. That seems like a good compromise.
A couple of things really bother me about Meteor.js.

One, the Atomosphere package manager site is insanely slow and buggy. Everything feels like it takes forever to render or rerender. Opening the side menu is a jaggy experience.

If performance is that terrible on a super simple list of packages how terrible is it on an actually reactive site?

Two, I've never seen an article on meteor that wasn't also an advertisement. They all list how easy it is to start a project or add a package as the main draw. That and constant connectivity/"reactive" application structure.

It just feels too orchestrated.
Ask HN: How do I get started working for myself?
Hi,

After working at an agency for years, I'm starting to feel the burnout. I have a couple of side projects that are starting to be profitable, but still not enough that I could quit my day job. I also have a lot of requests for freelance gigs that I just don't have the time to do because it would interfere with my full time job and family time. Between side projects and freelance work, I feel that I should be able to keep up the same income level.

I have been thinking about this for a long time, I just can't get myself to make the decision and get started with this. I love working on my side projects and that's something that really keeps me going.

I am looking for any books, blog posts or alike with people who have been in a similar situation as me. "How do I get started?"

Thanks!
Well, perhaps they aren't two, but that is completely irrelevant to the argument (How do you "count" cultures anyway?). The important part in that sentence was that there were opposing sides in conflict, thus removing any form of will to preserve from the equation.

And yes, evolution (particularly in the context of darwinism and derivatives) is what I am talking about, specifically, some kind of mechanism that seems to exist that prevents us getting stuck in a "local maximum".

A mechanism that I mentioned because I find it interesting that you can find signs of it at so many different levels, and in many different contexts.
Can a slow car move lots of stuff?

Sure, you just use more of them.
Just curious, did you ever actually do this yourself?
While I find reading way more productive, I'm a fairly lazy person, and I find I tend to bear with whatever I need to study better when watching videos. I simply lose focus too fast with books.
It's really, really good. Even if you're a web designer, building stuff is really quick and effective. I recommend checking out Differntial's GitHub page [0] as they provide a nice boilerplate and also a cute blog that you can setup in two minutes, gives you an idea of the very basics.

Either way, Atmosphere [1] has thousands of packages to choose from, just use the search function. Good alternative is Fastosphere. [2] Many people have said that if you write a lot of code with Meteor, you're doing something wrong.

0. https://github.com/Differential

1. https://atmospherejs.com/

2. http://fastosphere.meteor.com/

I'm very new to this myself, and I know that it gets tougher (duh, it's JavaScript!) after a while, but I feel right about giving it some praise!
It's exactly as simple as natural selection. Because a language is not just expressing thought - it's driving it as well.
Actually, it's exactly as the whole evolution in the animal world: languages are inheritable (parents teach their language to the children at the very least), mutable and there is a selection process among them, involving armies and navies among many other things.
That's honestly just how the Meteor.js blog posts are. Google around a bit and you'll find two dozen articles stating Meteor.js is the best thing since sliced bread, beer, marijuana or Ruby on Rails. It will completely revolutionize your face, twice over!

But they'll never explain what it is, or how it's solving hard problems for them.

But hey look how easy it is to add social auth!
Amazed that we are still having this discussion several years later.
It always amazes me the way in which people make up an entire complicated chain of events in their mind to fit their world view. He boils Facebook down to a one note company that could never respond to changes in the market.

Fed stops QE => Tech stocks cool => Less money pours into VC technology => Companies stop buying app install ads => Huge hit in Facebook revenues => Facebook implodes

Ridiculous.
Building future .NET projects is quite pleasant
Meteor.js is basically Ruby on Rails for Node.js and MongoDB, plus a Javascript library for view-model binding. It's a monolithic framework for building database-backed single-page applications in 100% Javascript.
I've been using it with gorp (simple ORM-ish API) for around a year. No issues so far!
How do you know he doesn't have access to numbers? Just because they weren't included in a leaked email didn't mean he hasn't perhaps seen Facebook's data in some sort of disclosure period or exchange between the two companies.
And it's more precise to say someone is 'skilled at something' than 'skilled'. You can be exceptionally clever at covering your criminal tracks, but merely adequate at fixing broken printers. You can be fantastic at writing lock-free multithreaded code, and utterly incapable of cracking the IRS d-base.
Indeed it is similar to seam carving. Which technique would you recommend for this task? Do you know of any other example implementations which can be run on a smartphone grade processor in near-real-time?
true! I tried to find that, thanks for the link.

Is the OPs music (i.e. the game music) up on Soundcloud or Youtube or may I take it from the sources like 'wget https://notendur.hi.is/~keh4/TRON/assets/boats.m4a'?
> The best thing that could happen to Python would be a benevolent, and mercifully silent, retirement of GvR

Just out of curiosity, who do other pythonistas think would be the best candidate for new BDF"L"? Travis Oliphant is one who comes to my mind.
I like it. Platform threads should just be lightweight enough, that you don't have to patch on top of them.

And if you really need to M:N behaviour, it is still available as a library.