skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might want to give this a read: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html ("Do Things That Don't Scale").

It's the best piece I've ever read dealing with the question of attracting users to an early-stage startup. The gist of it is this: your first 100 users will be completely different from your last 10,000. The first 100 have to be courted - you're going to have to bend over backwards to make them happy. If that means customer support emails from the founder, so what? Those first 100 users, the ones who are overwhelmed by your support, will be the most valuable customers you'll get, because once they're through the door, network effects can really start to kick in.

The apocryphal story I've heard (but never verified) is of how PayPal broke out in the eBay marketplace. Instead of trying to convert customers with advertising and the like, they pretended to be customers on eBay, offering to buy inexpensive items from popular sellers before asking if the sellers accepted PayPal. This got the first few sellers through the door, and once they started using it the network effects propagated through eBay and beyond, turning PayPal into the giant it is today.

Hope this helps. Good luck!
Would you rather Mozilla pretend to be a company that doesn't need funding? I'm not understanding what a better alternative would look like.
Curious, why the resurrection?

Personally, I found the post distasteful, though not enough so to merit a flag. I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright. I think that does the women in our industry a disservice and exacerbates the problem.
I've seen several other journalists/bloggers/media-people react to this news as if Andrew's decision was clearly driven by structural economic factors rather than a more benign desire to step away from blogging as his primary form of writing. Ben Smith--of, yes, Buzzfeed--seemed to interpret this as the death knell of independent internet commentary.

What's going on here? I think we can agree we're all sad Andrew Sullivan is quitting The Dish, but are we symbolically sad over what that blog represented which will now never exist again, or are we just sad that a pretty great blogger won't be blogging any more?
If you had contributed to chromium for weeks, and then google come with it's monthly dump and overwritten everything you and others did in the open, you would have a different opinion.
You realize this is just a fancy bookmark, right? Lynx has bookmarks, too.
> Edit: this was meant somewhat ironically to get the point across that we can't be expected to succeed with AI unless we know how HI actually works

That's only true if the way HI works is the only reasonable way at achieve AI.

Biological solutions can be a good inspiration for some problems, but not always. See the film Gizmo, which is the subject of another story currently on the first couple of pages of HN, for some footage of what happened when people tried to base aviation too closely on what birds do.

I can't see any reason that it is not plausible that someday, after we do have AI, the sentence "we can't be expected to succeed with AI unless we know how HI actually works" will be regarded similarly to the way the sentence "we can't be expected to build vehicles that travel 60 mph [1] unless we know how cheetahs actually work" would be regarded now.

[1] 97 km/hr
Traffico – An Open Source Traffic Sign Font
Do you really think, we do have cause to worry about ELIZA after all?
Jamming is very different from exploiting a protocol flaw (which is basically what the rouge AP mitigation does).
Oh, when Mozilla add "Share Screen" feature to hello?
California Issues Public Health Advisory on E-cigs
Omniref for JavaScript
How does your browser plan on accessing or seeing its "peers"?
This is interesting, because the well-known paper "Why functional programming matters" identifies two key aspects of FP: higher-order functions and lazy evaluation. I wonder if John Hughes has reviewed his opinion on this, or if the FP community thinks the paper is no longer an accurate insight into FP...

In particular, I'm thinking of the last paragraph of Hughes' conclusions:

"It is also relevant to the present controversy over lazy evaluation. Some believe that functional languages should be lazy, others believe they should not. Some compromise and provide only lazy lists, with a special syntax for constructing them (as, for example, in SCHEME [AS86]). This paper provides further evidence that lazy evaluation is too important to be relegated to second-class citizenship. It is perhaps the most powerful glue functional programmers
possess. One should not obstruct access to such a vital tool."

Maybe it turned out that practical evidence has shown that lazy evaluation wasn't as important for modularity as Hughes thought, or at least that its drawbacks have been found unacceptable in practice?
Actually, filters that select on galaxy scale are unlikely to be the "great filter", because we don't seem to see any artificially generated signals coming from within our own galaxy. This particular filter does strike within our own galaxy though, just to a lesser degree.

So maybe.
>>I think its us-vs-them tone and cherry-picking of facts makes it very easy to dismiss outright.

This only happens because the problem is constantly ignored. Personally, it's clear to me that nearly every single time anyone tries to talk about *ism in tech it degrades into a meltdown of horrible and/or needlessly pedantic comments. So much so that the actual problem never gets addressed. No choice but to try again and again; focusing harder and harder on examples. I do notice though, over a wide enough range of time, the conversations do very slowly inch towards maturity. And just think, if not even HN can handle the topic... what hope is there for anywhere else? Seriously, if anyone knows of another online community of mature discussion comparable to HN I'd like to know. Right now, HN seems to be in a class of its own in regards to quality of comments.
I know I may get dinged for this observation, but it is something that really bothers me about certain types of forecasts...be it weather or things of this sort...

That would be the "50% forecast", which, when examined with a bit of thought, really is saying "well, maybe it did, and maybe it didn't...we don't really know but hey, doesn't 50% sound scientific!"

For sure, GRBs are scary, potentially life-wiping events, but, really..don't we deserve better than a coin-flip?
I thought the Fermi Paradox (and hence the Great Filter) was about the absence of life originating in our own galaxy? I don't think anyone has suggested that any species is likely be able to cross intergalactic distances.
Stanford. Indeed, this is centralization. But as others have mentioned, it's much more like "exchange your CPU time for equity in our security" than it is like "participate in our distributed, decentralized currency." No sustainable decentralized currency could use inputs like protein folding, SETI, etc.

Counterparty is really innovative, and this is a great way to leverage it. Unfortunately, it's really easy to confuse with typical altcoins which really use miners.
Special report on Uterine fibroids- the DIverge
Why Now Is the Time to Learn R
That hit likely made that hotel run at a loss that year, which when you're a massive corporation it might not look like much, but Marriott uses a franchise model.

The corporation can't risk a franchisee revolt, and you'll get that if the franchisees think there's a corporate policy out there that could potentially wipe out their profits for a year.
Speaking as a high energy physicist, they're absolutely a legitimate publication. I don't read it regularly, but the CERN Courier has been part of particle physics culture for a very long time (maybe since CERN was founded).
You aren't wrong that the author probably exaggerated with that sentence, but I think I am not alone in being awfully tired of your conversation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

EDIT: I guess I am alone.
SF Public Defender Detained by Police Trying to Intervene in Questioning Client
WebRTC is encrypted end to end. afaik Telefonica is only providing a STUN/TURN server so NATed clients can discover each other. You don't have to worry about Telefonica or anyone else eavesdropping.
If I read this right, Canada's largest single export is cars (probably from GM Canada to GM America)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada#mediaviewer/...

Russia is the Saudi Arabia with snow:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russia_Export_Treema...
Npm install remove-ads
You're missing the point. Marriott doesn't want to block your wifi because of some evil master plan, they want to do it to be able to sell you their wifi. If the fines cost more than the money they make selling you their wifi, they will stop, and the fines were high enough to do their job.
HIV Used to Fight Cancer
“Make illegal states unrepresentable”

Types pay off the most on large systems. Architectural requirements captured formally.

This more than ANYTHING else is why I want to move enterprisey app code to Haskell. Having worked on numerous ginormous enterprisey systems -- which are usually doing pretty straightforward things, just at scale, and needing to be maintained by non-brilliant developers -- I can say pretty securely that north of 95% of the invariants could be lifted into the type system, making run-time errors a thing of the past.

Also, in most frameworky big systems, you WANT to stop devs from "just doing IO" or pretty much doing anything without a strong contract around it. Monad stacks do wonders for circumscribing your computational context in an app.

I wonder why they rewrote Aeson though ... perhaps before it was mature? Aeson's pretty awesome.
Yeah, there's even this: "In Wirral, one team paused moments before attacking the ATM when an oblivious citizen walked up. They hid as he made a transaction and departed." Terrorists would have hurt the guy to, well, incite terror. More hardened criminals might have killed him just to avoid "loose ends." These guys sound downright friendly, by comparison.
Some day someone will convince me that sexism can be fixed with more sexism. That day has not arrived.
Your personal data isn't going anywhere. The server is only used for establishing the connection when clients are behind NATs (which in today's environment you usually always are). If I understand WebRTC correctly, once the link is established, all communication is peer to peer.
> At the end of the day, we need investors to pour money into telecommunications infrastructure, which is very expensive.

And that's not going to happen under the current regime, because the investors get more bang-for-their buck through monopolistic practices instead.
"Protein folding / structure prediction is NP-complete, so seems unlikely."

Are you sure about that? I am not sure that a protein structure can be checked in polynomial time, given there is no algorithm to check a protein structure besides manual labor.
Use VNC, it's better anyway. I run vnc over a ssh tunnel to make it safer.
In addition to the benefit of brevity, something like your proposal also has the virtue of being compatible with the `checked/unchecked` keywords.
Please file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org, or you can email me the details (email in profile) and I'll file it for you.
I think that there is no cut and dried answer. Laziness appears to dramatically improve modularity, but it's unclear whether all of the tradeoffs are worth it. It's difficult to analyze the downsides still since (a) more research is needed and (b) a lot of it can be shrugged off as "weirdness", but it's clear that there are reasons to prefer strictness as well as to prefer laziness.

I've grown to be of the opinion that neither is best and that languages ought to be developed which allow free and clear choice between evaluation strategies throughout. Lazy defaults at the right times and clear strictness types might be a way forward, but it's hardly anything I have expertise in.
It uses webrtc. The link you share will work on any browser that has webrtc. The icon is only to make things easier if you use firefox.
Funny that I felt the scripting side of while reading some projects like wmii, or some plan9 utils. I'm under the impression that in UNIX early days, C was almost a rapid prototyping / scripting language.
I think you misunderstand the point of FOSS. It doesn't matter if government funds it (Tor) or if private interests fund it (entire GNU ecosystem). It's about freedom to distribute and modify the source as one sees fit.
I'm not saying the article should be dismissed; just that I think the author is overplaying her hand a bit in this one particular sentence.
Ask HN: Using spare VPS compute for?
I have a VPS on DigitalOcean and I use it just to host my personal website which takes almost no resources. What are some cool (legal) things I can do with the extra compute I have?

It is the smallest droplet (512 MB, 1 vCPU), but I figured that's enough for something.
I have a bit of a theory, specifically in the US, that in the near future there will be some very lucrative opportunities in things like plumbing and electrical as most folks got the idea in their heads that they HAD to go to college to avoid such work. And now equipped with a college degree there is a strange mental block in becoming s blue collar serviceperson despite the absolute need for plumbers and electricians.

A friend of mine skipped out on college, worked for 5 years for the local union and last year started his own electrician business. He now has two employees and makes fantastic money, which I only expect to go up as more of the old guys retire with no replacement.

Yeah it's not glamorous but at the same time he's doing what most folks on HN dream of in running his own business with high paying customers.
Isn't the author exaggerating in the other direction? There is obviously correlation between the two time series. Sure, who's saying there is causation (as mentioned in the article there can be a third random variable that the first two depended on)? But also, who's to say there's no causation? Is it ok to always remove the correlated part of the two time series? What if that's the interesting part and the explanation you're looking for?
None of the people I knew growing up here even live here anymore. None of my high school friends, no one.

It sucks.
RCMP have said fairly clearly on a couple of occasions that they have no interest in prosecuting individual offenders for piracy. They took down a tracker, stated explicitly that individuals who had downloaded from it had nothing to worry about, and funnily enough nothing ever came of it.

Stephen Harper is about the likeliest person to get a bill through to illegalize downloading, and the most we've got out of him so far is one that actually made it financially unviable for media companies to attempt to sue individual downloaders by capping penalties so low you couldn't even make money using a paralegal in small claims court.

With the election looming, and the economy seemingly committing seppuku just in time to wreck his ability to beat the economy drum like he did last election. So there's a strong possibility he's going to be out, and I don't think the other parties have any interest in passing any new copyright laws.
When will they add a public API - so that you can develop share screen or P2P games or whatever..
I think you're putting the emphasis on the wrong word here. The important thing here is not worrying/considering but "feel".

I would guess that Linus makes a categorical distinction between emotional and physical welfare - because emotional welfare is ill-defined and easy to manipulate from the 'reciever's' point of view, he considers it at worst a waste of time or at best a secondary consideration after definable things, like achieving a software objective.
As for STUN/TURN being painful, Twilio recently released a STUN/TURN service platform: https://www.twilio.com/stun-turn. At least makes things somewhat simpler.
This is great -- now I'd like to know what movies the keyword quotes were taken from.
Why the hell should the poor be buying cars at 20%+ interest rates to go work at shitty jobs just to pay for the damn cars? It's a cruel joke perpetrated by profiteers.

You know what there should be? More BUSES. Oh man, what an idea. Lets build more public transportation! No, that's not profitable. Never mind, lets exploit people instead, because it's good for them.
Not alone, just on your own island here.
We agree, then! Should have worded my thoughts carefully.
It's just statistics. You look at how often we see GRBs, how long they last (on average), how intense they are (on average) then do a big time integral and figure out the odds of a big one hitting earth over such and such a period of time. There is no better than a coin-flip, the coin flip is the odds of it having happened (by the author's approximations). If I can help explain any further please let me know.
The reason it is costly, is because it needs to be costly (sorry for the circular logic). ~3600 Bitcoin is given away each day to miners, which means that rational actors in the mining network are going to be able to spend that same amount in power on mining (~1M USD). That money is put into the Bitcoin network, as prevention of some kind of exploits on the blockchain. An attacker would need to spend that much in order to be able to fork the blockchain for any period of time.

As far as why it needs to have no benefit, the main reason is that the state of the blockchain needs to be transferred into a hard problem of some kind in order for the proof-of-work to work. You can think of each attempt at solving it is a "vote" for that particular version of the blockchain. If everyone could vote very fast on their own particular version of the blockchain, then it would very quickly pollute the bitcoin network, and consensus would be very difficult to achieve. If, instead each vote could be scored some way (randomly), and only one out of every thousand one of your votes for the state of the blockchain is broadcast to the bitcoin network, then that means it's going to be much less polluted, and much easier to come to some kind of consensus. By being random, the fact that you are able to send a vote at one out of every thousand, means that each vote really represents 1000 votes. This is how bitcoin works, but the thousand is a much larger number (200,000,000,000,000,000,000).

In the naive implementation, the proof of work could be done by having a function f(x) producing a number in [0, 1) based on x (and f is irreversible), and then submitting votes that are below/above some threshold. Suppose f is the protein folding problem, and f(x) is some energy on how well you folded it (I don't really know how folding works, but bear with me). The problem with this is you could sit in your basement for several weeks and solve a bunch of these problems, and then all at once use them to fork the blockchain by having several blocks that have a proof of work assigned. This means that the work that's being done needs to be related to the state of the blockchain that you're voting on somehow. Another way, is that there needs to be a function w : b -> f where b is the blockchain state that you are voting on, and it produces f. In bitcoin, this w function is the merkle tree of all the transactions in it, and f is sha2(sha2(blockheader with the merkle tree and x)). This step is what makes it very difficult to "do actual work" when mining, since it's hard to make a hard problem that is dependent on random data, that's actually useful.
Is the gamma-ray burst a spherical field, or is it a narrow, directed cone? If the latter, I wonder how the burst spreads/diffuses as it travels and what sort of equation governs the energy flux with respect to distance and initial conditions.
As a note, too, R. Paul Wilson did a rather decent DVD series of The Royal Road to Card Magic, which you can get for ~$60. The book is a useful reference, but actually -seeing- the sleights can be amazingly useful.

And as others have mentioned, if you do go to Erdnase (or get sufficiently hooked to just want a copy), there is both the Annotated Erdnase by Darwin Ortiz (which is pretty readily available), as well as Dai Vernon's Revelation book (not to be confused with the 'Revelations' series of DVDs), his own annotations on Erdnase ( http://www.mcmagicwords.com/books_revelation.html ).
Either one is great. Short of it is that OCaml and Haskell will both teach you a lot of the same things. OCaml has better modularity features (namely, genuine modules which are replicated almost nowhere else) and Haskell has better purity features (namely... purity).

It turns out that sophisticated functional programming essentially stresses that good modularity and good purity are both killer features and techniques and they should be in heavy use all of the time. In OCaml you'll have an easy time expressing the exact modularity concerns you find important, but will struggle a bit to manage purity explicitly. In Haskell you'll find it beautiful to express pure and typed-effectful computation as much as needed, but will struggle a bit with expressing modularity as you'd like.

Haskell also has the whole typeclass system which is really, really interesting and valuable for many kinds of expressiveness. It's sort of an oddball feature, but interesting to see the impact of.

Personally, I find strict purity more important than expressive modularity. But if anyone could really put them together in a way that worked it'd be great. I'm not so sure such a language exists today, though.
I saw this in the '80s. A PBS station in Los Angeles showed it once, and someone I knew taped it.

He also had another amusing movie taped off of that same PBS station, that is even harder to find than Gizmo. That is "A Natural History of the Water Closet: A Documentary Cantata" (1974) [1], apparently created by WITF-TV [2]. That is exactly what the title says. It is a history of the water closet, done largely in song in the form of a cantata.

It's a shame that these old things are disappearing.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0404271/?ref_=ttpl_pl_tt

[2] http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/21313634?selectedversion=NBD265...
So taking out the magnetron and putting a beamforming waveguide on it was a bad idea?
The idea of slack entails the possibility that a programming ninja can wash the coffee mugs while the sales/administrative person is head down in payables for last month.

Above jumping into the dumpster to retrieve a dollar isn't limited to one skill set.
It's simple in models where you assume you understand the causal structure. Then whenever things get murky people tend to try to operate without clarifying the causal structure and end up in a bind.

Of course what you say is true, but executing it in practice and having a sufficiently rich language to identify confounders well is what's usually lacking.
Price control of commodities is not the same thing as controlling the interest rate on loans. No one is going to starve if they can't buy a car that is out of their budget. They will simply end up having to do something more practical, like getting a used car, riding a bike, or taking public transportation.
I used this to think about a business deal I have in process, and was a sincerely useful tool to structure my thinking.

To those interested, I refined my view that attempts to very actively edge people out of a few percent of the gross deal amount are signs you should stop doing business with them, if you were operating in good faith. What I think is much more wise is: attempts by a party to edge you out of a few more percent, AFTER terms are agreed to and money is in escrow (which is the case with the deal I am having troubles with), means that you can no longer operate in good faith with that party and can/should stop the transaction unless this is remedied (which is not always possible).