skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I imagine I am not alone in wanting a pretty specific pizza order (the restaurant, the toppings, the crust, etc.), which greatly diminishes the value proposition of saving time.
All companies mess things up occasionally, especially if they're overloaded. Clearly other folk have got what they wanted which is why there is such a demand for their service.

p.s. Your website - www.complexventures.com - appears to be down, just in case you didn't know.
Actually the article link should go here: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-sauna-he...
No, but I understand that there's plenty of people who do.

FWIW it's more like 5-10 minutes every time I've ever ordered pizza (admittedly not often, I'm sure my pizza skills could improve, if I worked on them. I don't want to.)

Magic doesn't magically know your address/payment, of course, but it remembers it in the future. For every service, including new ones. I'm sure you actually knew that already. Point is it's one-time, ever.
Machine intelligence, part 1
> "... who are people of interest?"

I think you've missed the part where everyone is now (effectively) a person of interest.
Public funding of science and universities stimulates more innovation. The stuff you see from companies took years of research in universities before they pushed it the last few yards.
In my city, restaurants are typically very loud and staffed by someone who does not speak any of the languages that I do. There are ~ ten million people in my city with this problem, so Magic/Seamless/whatever is valuable because it prevents me from shouting, straining to hear, and repeating myself four times, only to find later that the order is wrong because I have no meaningful checksum to insure correctness.
Hmmmm. I'm searching New York to Europe (March 25th to April 23rd) and it's giving me a $303 round trip to Madrid. Thats absolutely incredible, but when I click through the fair jumps to over $800. Anyone else experiencing things of that ilk?
"Baseball pitchers regularly play well into their 40's"

Unless you're someone like Mark Prior who had their body give out when their career was just getting started. Why are you only highlighting the outliers, the genetic freaks (amongst genetic freaks no less)?

The thing with baseball pitchers is that there's an enormous selective pressure on their bodies (primarily shoulder & elbow) being able to withstand the brutal toll throwing all those pitches causes. The absolute best pitchers (talent wise) might never even make it to the MLB because their arm falls apart before they get a chance. There are pitching motions which hurt my arm just doing them in slow motion, now imagine heaving a baseball 90+ mph repeatedly for your entire life.

This is a far different selective pressure than what e.g. soccer players would have where quickness & speed on their feet is what matters.

The problem with these discussions is that people are using words like "taxing" to only narrowly mean what they want it to mean.
So I guess their value will be all the real life data they are getting about their users. Knowning what you like to eat, buy, where you're flying to, etc.
I liked it as well, I think these kind of "immersive" stories are highly execution dependent and in this particular case quite well done.

In particular the series of 3 slides (pages) - that showed the lake shrinking over time were quite effective at conveying just how much of a calamity the situation is.
Show HN: SuperTCP – upload/share/backup faster
These billboards tell the stories of London's housing crisis
Also Shoreline Amphitheatre, which regularly gets reasonably good concerts.
Nah, people with sour grapes are most likely are all arm chair wantrepreneurs. I doubt there are many people that are actually out there doing things that would be sour about this. People who think this went viral solely because of YC are likely too crippled by their cynicism to accomplish anything.
Now read this and try to explain your clients why you're billing them extra for an upgrade they did not request: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/releases/1.8/#backward...
I moved this to an issue on Github [1]. The key you uploaded to our server has a UID that expired on 2014-11-09. The key you linked to on the MIT key server has updated self-signatures (and subkeys), so doesn't have this problem.

[1] https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/1410
Any time an article headline is "climate deniers.." Then immediately the rest of the article is suspect. Even the attempt at objectivness is absent. In terms of that article, where's the investigation into Al Gore becoming a billionaire from this issue? Are his scientists somehow less influenced by money? Al Gore has been debunked on numerous occasions; weren't the ice caps supposed to have disappeared? Over 5 years ago he made that claim but they're still there. Al Gore has almost godlike status among the global warming crowd yet he flies in private jets with motorcades and has a massive mansion. If he was so worried, why has he done nothing to curb his own carbon use? It's hypocricy at its absurdest.
How SQL Changed Segment
Oh really? <throwing away pieces of Google Glass while wiping from my face the blood flowing out of a broken nose>
Because I'm sure those 20,000 employees are all just waiting with their bags packed ready to follow Google where ever they decide to settle down... Or that they are all completely fungible and just picking up another 20,000 somewhere else won't interrupt operations at all.
>>A full-fledged package manager automates the process of installing, upgrading, configuring and removing software packages in a consistent manner.

That sounds like deb(dpgk)/rpm's job. In golang-land I just need to use vendoring+godeps for repeatable builds.
not to mention the vast number of packages, documentation and questions and answers on stack overflow for just about every topic that exists.

rest api's (no out of the box support but plenty of documentation to make your own or just go with Django-rest-framework)

Built in administration system/back end.

easy cache plugins, middleware extensions,

GIS support with Geo-Django
Is the trend in tech companies to have sprawling campuses or has it gone back to multi-story office buildings with the latest fad of packing everyone into a big open office?
The whole global warming hysteria is FUD.
The only place you can criticize the (weak) efficient market hypothesis from is atop a pile of money. Where is it?
Honestly, I've been following along with these trends a lot and it seems like the answers for 1&2 come down to team size. If you have a bigger team, with more development inertia microservices can seem amazing and the tradeoffs are worth it (repeated work vs. development tempo).

To a small team that doesn't have the inertial issues to generate the benefits of microservices, it seems like they are nice in theory but have too much overhead to supplant monolithic approaches.
Agrisul PLANTA MEDICINALA
This is one of my fears for when I graduate next year.
Exactly what I was saying. Google here is claiming that people don't often buy the cheapest listed flight... and the reason is because they can't.
Except conceirge services are usually high-ticket items. So if I'm wealthy I know that there's a major incentive to be treated right and be given premium quality goods. Reputation in these services is everything.

What the hell is magic going to sell me when I ask for roses from my wife? From the great florist down the block who wants $79 or from the chain florist that wants $49 and has 1 star ratings because he only delivers beat up looking flowers? When I dont like the goods, what happens then? I've already been charged. Who do I complain to? Magic directly? This florist? Even then, who cares?

I imagine magic is busy making connections to the low price leaders to be their exclusive dealers. Now you don't have some tastemaker worried about offending you, you have put yourself in a captive market situation where one organization decides what vendor to use, and that vendor may or may not have your interests in mind. In fact, it would be stupid if they did. They are there to please magic, not you. Making you happy with over-priced cut-rate flowers is magic's job.
Magic is really just a concierge service via text message. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not revolutionary.

To really make it work and to scale rapidly, they might think about a franchise model, so that franchises can be started in numerous locations by people who actually know the local area.

Magic could make plenty of money providing a reliable and customizable back-end service for local operators.
The big difference is that Mountain View is increasingly a one-company town. It's not just fear of change, but fear of that specific change.
Hey lots of people use administrative assistants, for good reason. Days have 24 hours; somebody else to help you save minutes or hours has good marginal value. Doesn't matter what they're doing, just so you don't have to do it.
> It's not capitalism, it's human nature.

I disagree. Capitalism makes investments much more fungible than they would otherwise be, changing the incentive landscape. It can set up a prisoner's dilemma (i.e. a failure of global optimization due to induced local optimization) which preferentially allocates capital away from investments which are intrinsically difficult to value in a timely fashion or intrinsically difficult to capture value from (i.e. science).

Correct tulip speculation gets you $$$, making a correct incremental step towards curing cancer gets you nothing on the market. Nobody will be able to tell if your contribution was valuable for the next 30 years, and by then you won't have any mechanism by which you could retroactively hold back your contribution in order to obtain a fair market price for it. According to capitalism, this unfortunate (but completely incidental!) state of affairs is a good reason why investors should speculate in tulips rather than fund biotech. Yuck!

Can we do better? In the narrow sense of solving this particular problem, the answer is yes: a prestige-based economy (see: academia) is able to reward investments whose value can't be captured by a market economy, such as the "incremental progress towards cancer cure" example above. Of course, a prestige-based economy would fall flat on its face if one tried to generalize it to more mundane facets of everyday life, so it's not a satisfying solution for the general problem. But it IS a good way to get free-market drum-beaters to acknowledge their very constrictive assumptions about timely valuation and value capture :-)
Not always; I've heard the words used interchangeably at our university.
Good points. I will do my best to answer. Generally, almost everyone involved in your points was compensated to do something, even if it wasn't the work that became the Internet stack, or if compensation was not their primary goal.

My point was actually rather minor - that the military does not function as a top-to-bottom altruistic organization. You went meta and made some good points about society in general. Please indulge my meta trip because I think it might illustrate why Google et al have the "successionist" impulses of which they have been accused.

A principle of justice we seem to accept nowadays without too much question is that one shouldn't have to be bound to an accident of birth - e.g. Racial discrimation. Then why should someone be bound to the accident of being born American?
A plausible argument there is that the success of something such as Google might be impossible for a non-American company.

Neither argument seems eminently provable, but maybe more important questions might be whether one can choose to whom one might share the fruits of one's labors and how much one should share.

For example, the Christian Church had a nominal demand of 10%. Certainly that was a lower limit but at least it was publicly known. Modern society doesn't seem to care for such clarity - as best I can determine, the cut seems to be "as much as we want", which is probably a harsh interpretation, given the complexities of our political and fiscal systems.

A way to rephrase the who question is - "assuming I have to share my fruits with others, why must it be with the country of my birth? Why can't I pick someone else? Why can't I pick myself?" This isn't an argument from left field, it's not too far from the position of the USA c. 1776, though the Declaration seemed to dwell on the injustices of the British Empire more than on the right to choose one's master.
I read that I'm not sure what the point is?
We can't very well ask them for a 0% failure rate, can we? Mistakes are going to happen, it's the nature of the world.

For example, humans try really hard to build "failure proof" nuclear reactors, and those still have problems. I claim that's evidence that 0% failure is just not a reasonable goal.
Atlas by Layer – Open Source Messaging UI Components for Layer
Codebreaking has moved on since Turing's day, with dangerous implications
This is a much more trivial task with SourceTree.
"Lets hope Charlie Stross is right and the capitalists can take over the government and fix this."

> ...but [capitalism does not require democracy] means that the interests of the public (labour) are ignored by states increasingly dominated by capital (because of [automation privileges capital over labour]) unless there's a threat of civil disorder. So states are tooling up for large-scale civil unrest.

Let us hope, indeed. Sounds like fun.
VINTAGE NASA PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE FIRST VOYAGES BEYOND OUR HOME PLANET [pdf]
Sure. For example, Census data is currently not linked to postal codes. You'll need to purchase a database that links the 2 together.
I'd rather (and did) live in Mountain View than Palo Alto. I like Castro Street.
> If the next version of iOS didn't even have a browser, you would be astonished at how little that impacted most users.

If time spent in an application is your criterion, true.

But that way you hugely underestimate the importance of, for instance, that daily (or even weekly) Google search the average user performs in their browser. It takes little time compared to your average social feed, but definitely impacts their lives. Just one quick example: a local business' phone number lookup.
Universities warn Congress that patent reform would harm US innovation
"Okay, google. Send a text message to magic I'd like a hand-tossed pizza, supreme but without olives, with butter and marinara sauce on the side, and a 2 liter of coke."

I mean, you're going to have to tell someone the specifics of your order. It's all the rest of the details where you're saving time.
Not true. $30 is the total cost of 100 minutes per month and unlimited data for their pre-paid plan. BYOPhone and you pay $30/mo total.
Today Is National Adjunct Walkout Day
The major companies (Papa John's, Dominos, Pizza Hut) are exceptional at it. I've used all of their websites in the past year and have no complaints.

Local pizza delivery companies vary more widely.
If the Pizza company is doing it right, they do have my address and payment info just from the number that pops up on callerID.

There is some pain points (god I hate myself right now) that magic could solve, but ordering food isn't one of them.

Grubhub or seamless is just easier. It takes longer to tell someone your order correctly that to just to it yourself.

I also do wonder if a pay per use secretary will actually work. My secretary knows me so she can better make choices. Someone with just a chat log has a harder go of it.
I'm especially sad to see "desktop" used as a synonym for "Windows".
Do you think perhaps the same motivation could have been at play there - stifling web competition to their native app store?
You've neatly summed up why computer people have so much trouble talking about the real world.

Some things are inherently imprecise. We can talk about them anyway.
That doesn't necessarily work because wrong answers can have natural correlations. Let's say you have two questions about finding a slope on an exam. Anyone who thinks that slope is change in x over change in y is going to get both of those questions wrong in the same way, even if those wrong answers are both individually rare. It would be really hard to distinguish between when these correlations are expected and when they're unexpected.
Hi

In the case of events, it is because I later have to store different event types in a List

so I define the list as [Event] . That is the container that feed the monad with events.

If I define Event as you suggest, I would need a existential type anyway.

data Event a = Event EvType a

data ListEvents= forall a.[Event a]

In the case of the continuations, I need to use a state monad that store this EventF data And I need to "erase" in some way the types to allow it to store them all for all events, no matter wich a and b they produce. I know that if in

x :: IO a

f :: a -> m b

If within the monad definition I store f (the rest of the computation) in the state monad, the type of this continuation when executed will be (m b) and it accept values of type `a` so I can coerce the continuation to this type even if I "erased" it when i put it in the state monad.

Anyway this approach has some problems that I solved in the second part
For a ground-up, thorough, and free course on functional programming in Scala, take the course Martin Odersky teaches our undergrads at EPFL (Functional Programming Principles in Scala):
https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

Given as a MOOC on Coursera.
How  to Improve Your Software Engineer Salary
So, I definitely didn't study GRBs in any depth, but based on my increasingly vague memories from my degree in astrophysics, quasars don't have much to do with it. All of the major proposed mechanisms I recall for GRBs are on the scale of a star or two (supernovae, neutron star mergers, and the like) whereas quasars are a phenomenon involving supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei. Please, definitely correct me if I'm wrong!
YC's Female Founders Conference Doodles
What cognitive dissonance, exactly?
You're right on both counts! Betelgeuse is burning helium now (post main-sequence). The higher output of helium fusion inflates the outer atmosphere like a giant floppy balloon.
I'm not sure wanting more than 5 Mbps (a service level that's been commonly available for more than a decade now) would classify someone as an early adopter in 2015.
Not applicable here. Apple just want to retain the usage of their patented API in this case[1]. I.e. they are simply being greedy jerks who don't care about the Web.

1. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/12/is-apple-is-using...
Very Cool.

I did a similar project using a Neural Network instead of a look up table, similar to how deepmind did their Atari game system. The neural network adds some overhead to the training time because of backprop, so for small state spaces which the table can handle easily it is a bit overkill. But the neural network can scale up to much more complex state spaces that would be impractical to use a table for.
Humanist Interface: The Mental Model
Encryption is orthogonal to policy, which is the topic of the article.
Pixate Studio Beta
Came in to search for a comment on this.

Until one of these sites includes all airlines, I'll remain relatively unimpressed with anything new that comes out.
> " And now these things have gotten so easy that the value of knowing how to do them is basically zero."

Have they gotten easier...or have you, yourself, gained more experience and knowledge that you understand things better now?
You're wrong. It's not only reasonable, it's common.
This is true - while mentoring at McHacks last weekend, I've seen more high schoolers and undergrads using GitHub via the app with a very basic understanding of how it works; some making sole use of 'Sync' button.

Once you're experienced and you need to use all the "advanced" features of git, SourceTree makes it easier to do so without having to remember every correct syntax without the fear of doing something fatal to your working commit (before pushing it).

EDIT: Not to mention, the integration with git-flow is just amazing for someone who wants a set work flow (pun not intended) and naming convention without the extra overhead of thinking about how to manage it.

EDIT2: Typos and grammar.
Today's post explores the gap in knowledge between designers and users' understandings of software.
I like a LOT of these comments, but some just leave me scratching my head:

// bad
void function() { /* IIFE / }();

// good
(function() { / IIFE */ }());

To me, the "bad" one was more readable until I noticed you were invoking the function. Personally, I don't like either notation, but the point is that this example (along with quite a few others) seems to need more explanation to get the point across.

I would maybe think about defining "IIFE" as well as maybe sectioning off the more "functional programming" sections.

Thank you for taking the time to put this together.
Access to Visual Flexibility Including Word Wrapping
"it is actually the responsibility of browsers to somewhat govern what standards do or do not move forward"

An underappreciated point. Browser developers incl. Apple also have a responsibility to recognize that it's a mobile world. A compute cycle might look like it's getting cheaper, but a mobile CC is vastly more expensive than a desktop CC because of the cost of energy.

We might have three monitors plugged into 100A mains, but the typical end user has a 1900mAh battery and 7.5 seconds between Starbucks and the car door to send log in to the school's website to approve a field trip permission. It will be a while before mobile web standards can progress in the blue sky fashion we'd prefer.
@RKoutnik Thank you very much for adding this!
They weren't in a $200,000 house. They aren't in a million dollar house. That doesn't mean that a similar 5x increase in their property taxes would be affordable, but the 10k doesn't apply.
Commuting to the Googleplex from Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, and large parts of San Jose isn't that far.
> Their apps are a shockingly effective alternative to the internet

To some, very limited, parts of the Web.

I think this statement is very telling in terms of illustrating how people's perception of "The Internet" has shifted over the years, along with the notions about is its overall purpose. Ad frankly, I liked the old notion (the one that centered around communication, rather than "apps and services") much better.
The amount the tax assessment can increase is capped by prop 13 (IIRC at 2% per year).
Google's new service is even better.
From Pixels to Actions: Human-Level Control Through Deep Reinforcement Learning
Its not just the tests, plagiarism is absolutely rife in Canadian Universities and the institutions are doing very little to combat it.
Milestone ECMAScript 6 updates to JavaScript standard on track for June release