skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Freebase updated the data dumps monthly. The main data source is Wikipedia, with many other data sources that update their content frequently.

Without releasing the tools and without a community who adds/fixes the data, it will be a lot less useful/useless. It's like reading a years old printed lexicon.

There is a lot evidence that the up-coming event will be a big loss - do a web search. A lot of software has been written and a lot of effort at e.g. http://schema.org has been made, all based on Freebase ontology with links to Freebase website. Freebase is basically the machine readable form of Wikipedia plus a lot of other data sources.

It's basically like closing down Wikipedia. And then a data dump of Wikipedia of March 2015 will be useless in 2020!

Do Facebook, Microsoft, Nuance, IBM, WolframResearch all have already an in-house Freebase clone. Or how do they update their databases in near future - the data used for Siri, Cortana, Siri, Watson, WolframAlpha. If not, would one of these companies be so kind and boot-strap/support an open Freebase rescue project?
Ask HN: Ads provider for charity?
I have a small website that I created just as a hobby project (http://pcp-comics.com/). The website receives ~50k visitors per month.

Is there an ads provider that I can use where the money directly goes to a charity of my choice. I know I can use AdSense and similar, get the money and then donate it to charity, but I don't want to deal with W-2 and tax filing.

If it works through ad blocker then it will be a plus. Thanks !
KaTeX does a lot of interesting CSS tricks. I don't think it goes all the way down to the Metafont level, though.

https://github.com/Khan/KaTeX
Yes, like you say, only allowing that one definition of success is exactly the moral framing that the author is talking about! I would say that any person is successful if they feel like they have been successful. Additionally, they should not need any external validation of their success, and somebody else's diminution of their standard of success is oppressive.
And that just worked out brilliantly, and the Ancien Régime ruled peacefully for the next hundred years.

Oh wait...
Most dominance contests among non-human animals are also non-lethal. It's very common for there to be a sort of "rules of engagement". For instance, cobras don't strike each other when they fight --- they do this weird body-slamming thing.[1] Rams never sneak-attack each other side-on, they only square up. There's a good explanation of this in The Selfish Gene.

These behaviours come from the pay-off matrix. The stakes of these contests are often low, in comparison to the possible losses if your competitor fights dirty, too. So it's not worth the risk of breaking the rules of engagement first.

So: yes, kicks to the balls might be a winning strategy. But if you shoot first and miss, you might get kicked. Even if you win 90% of fights with your groin shot, you'll take enough groin shots back that this is not worthwhile.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdNuFgsobDY
Work will set you free!

First define success in a way that isn't just "happy" (because then you're defining anti-work, as the OP was). Then take the set of all successful people, based on that criteria, and the set of all hard working people, and tell me how big the overlap is.

I suspect that many successful people are hard-working. But the other direction that hard work is the foundation of success will be transparently nonsense.

You're using the classic fallacy of affirming the consequent here.

This is exactly the point made in this article and others. We've uncritically accepted the myth that hard work leads to success.

The prime beneficiaries of this are the successful people who control masses of capital and are thus able to anti-work (i.e. they do what they enjoy, building their business, creating new products, competing). The prime losers are those who do hard work for them for squeezed wages.
Development has been quite stable: https://github.com/HaxeFoundation/haxe/graphs/contributors

You should try the nightly builds or compiling straight from Git. They are stable enough for many purposes (and if you report a bug chances are that its fix will soon be available) and you can take advantage of new features.

By the way, there's a new release planned for the next weeks.
Yes, that would be great, but I've yet to find a superoptimizer that lives up to its claims: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5509254 Possibly the gap between predicted and actual performance is just too large? But CPU-internal performance monitors are sufficiently advanced that it seems reasonable that one could check actual performance rather than relying on flawed heuristics.

One application I'm thinking about right now is how to optimize "interpolative coding", which is a very tight way of compressing inverted indexes (better than Golomb/Rice/Elias), but so far very slow. It's not immediately obvious how vectorization can make it faster, but possibly some use of the BMI instructions should help, perhaps combined with a big lookup table. It's hard even to get close enough to the right form of solution that a superoptimizer can make headway.
Show HN: JZip – simple, buggy string compression in JavaScript [sometimes corrupts]
I read well through chapter 70. I did imply that scientific investigation shows up a little, after all! I agree that the line people gave me wasn't correct, but I've heard that line enough that I felt it was appropriate to dispel that particular notion.

Perhaps also germane is that I am not personally a believer in Less Wrong-style rationality, and so the intellectual content of the work was not relevant to me except in the detached way that philosophical or political or religious schools can be interesting to non-adherents (which is one reason I read as much as I did.) Whether the story accomplishes its actual goal, then, is something I can't judge, but I can say that, as a non-rationalist (irrationalist?) I didn't find it to be a good or engaging story.

But as I said in my previous comment, this is my own reaction, and I include it for informative reasons, not because I think others should necessarily share it!
Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro – review
I did something very similar to this last summer, written in Python. No idea what state the code is in at this point because it's been months, but here's the code I had sitting around: https://gist.github.com/schlarpc/86e20aa3f3aaf3d78269
On the "follow your passion" advice... There are a number of occupations that can lead to success. Many of those occupations require a certain amount of skill to pull off. And if you are passionate about a given skill, you stand a better chance than average of acquiring a high level of proficiency in said skill (at least in most cases). Therefore, the advice to "follow your passion" is to find the occupation that you are most comfortable with, and not pursue a job that you hate just because it pays well.

This even works for some of the "follow your passion" cliches, such as being an artist or musician. In those cases, you may not make it rich on stage, but you could do well in advertising (which requires artistic and/or musical talent). But you also have to refine some secondary skills, such as psychology (so you know the techniques to combine with your art that will be successful in getting people to buy product).
Washington DC would be the obvious example, but it's organic growth is more of the reason for its success as opposed to governmental action.
Yes; part of an ongoing experiment to reduce the randomness of /newest by giving substantive stories multiple chances to make the front page.

Edit: though it looks like we broke HN's rule about duplicates in this case. Sorry!
Yeah, don't you just love how "Enterprise" vendors make it more secure with going with ftps instead of picking a different protocol?
Here's another one; a bit more stylized and can be copy+pasted:

http://people.mozilla.org/~mclaypotch/CSS-Sans/

(GitHub: https://github.com/potch/CSS-Sans)
Fine, the real name policy is a fuzzy issue and not really fit for discussion here.

Charging people doesn't work since most people want the convenience and ability to communicate with friends but don't want to pay for it. Not a viable model for Facebook. I'm sure you don't just browse the web and offer to pay every site you visit do you?

"Don't use Facebook" is not the point, this is all about fear of privacy in general and just targeted at Facebook but much of it is FUD.
All that's doing (I think) is encoding the font file as base64. You're still using the font binary blog.

The link itself is actually drawing/creating the font itself in CSS. Different method entirely.
I wouldn't call that a pure CSS font, as it's just a Base64 encoded WOFF font embedded in CSS as a data URI. It can save you for that extra HTTP request, though, if you only need to support modern browsers which support WOFF fonts.
TerrAvion (YC W14): Hiring Software Engineers to grow our aerial imagery service
Judging from the comments, this article was written around May 8 2014. Can we get a (2014) in the title?
Advertising is one of the most scalable models and it's what works for them.

Who is "we"? Why not (as this article complains) just stop using it then? That's your problem isn't it?
Am I really that rare that I treasure people above all others who will speak to me directly if they don't like something?

With the themes in this article and others like it, are they how you should behave if you want to meet your own goals, or about how people you're subordinate to prefer you behave, in order to not rock the boat too much?
"I'm pretty sure there are good objective metrics both for readability and maintainability, they might not be the only aspects but calling it subjective is going too far."

I think you explained better what I mean.

I'm not denying the good objective metrics (for example, one of the aspects would be following Pep8 in Python)

But beyond that it's mostly about subjectivity.

So, evaluate on the objective metrics as much as possible, but don't waste my time saying that "A is better than B" when it's mostly a subjective aspect
Can you start by listing what you've tried so far? There are innumerable strategies and opportunities for inbound marketing today.

Your site, for example, is not going to work to attract clients, but I assume you know that? If not, you need to start by reading some top ranked books on Amazon for marketing in general and inbound marketing in particular.

Prospective clients will find out about you because they saw your ___________? The most important thing a prospective clients will need to determine before they can consider hiring you is _________?
Chris, although it's slightly off topic I just want to fanboy your work for a second. Your blog posts about how Graal/Truffle can inline C into Ruby and vice-versa and beat Ruby+C, all on the JVM, is the most mind blowing compiler tech I've ever seen.

Saying Graal performs about as well as C2 and sometimes better is modest. The Graal/Truffle combo does a lot more than C2 can ever do. It is only really comparable if you ignore the astonishing capabilities it has vs the competition.

For readers who are not aware of this work, and who have an interest in VM/compiler technology, I strong recommend checking out Chris' blog and the Graal/Truffle presentations that are floating around. Basically they've built a program that converts simple syntax tree interpreters into full blown JIT compilers. It means that basically any toy scripting language can have similar performance to, say, Javascript on V8, just by writing the base interpreter with their framework.

But where it gets really crazy is when you write an interpreter for C or (say) Objective-C, and start to get aggressive speculative just in time compilation with seamless cross language optimisation, to the extent that C code can actually be run on a compacting garbage collector.
If you continually do this though it could certainly come off as passive aggressive. I feel there's a line to draw; if you have 100 different items to go over, it's going to quickly become annoying if all 100 are phrased as questions. Sometimes you just need to say 'this should be in a function.'
This announcement is not very Apple heavy:

http://www.usb.org/press/USB-IF_Press_Releases/Type-C_PR_201...

I wonder when they got involved.
Positivism. Logical positivism.
107 years, the court moved there in 1682, and the revolution only happened in 1789.
"Ne Travaillez Jamais" (Never Work) - Guy Debord, 1963.

http://oaj.oxfordjournals.org/content/28/3/391/F4.large.jpg

To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed to maintain order. Thus power manufactures the dose of fatigue necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats. What carrot is worth working for, after this? The game is up; there is nothing to lose anymore, not even an illusion. The organization of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning dogs. One day, will we see strikers, demanding automation and a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love in the factories, the offices and the culture centres? Only the planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists would be surprised and worried. Not without reason; after all, their skin is at stake.

"THE REVOLUTION OF EVERYDAY LIFE" - Raoul Vaneigem, 1972

(Full text: http://www.scenewash.org/lobbies/chainthinker/situationist/v...)
Seconded

Also, think that the programmer might have already thought of that issue. Does that loop really never terminates? Isn't that test obvious/really needed?
Not true in my own case. I believe that being appointed team lead was a direct result of applying egoless programming principles.
What's next? Citing 4chan posts as sources?
Strange logic. It's much easier to take someone out with a groin kick than any kind of head hit, specially if you're not a boxer.

Kicking the groin requires almost no technique. If you just aim at the inner thigh and kick upward as hard as you can, inevitably you hit the groin. If you're close, you can knee. Hitting someone's eyes or throat enough to incapacitate, on the other hand, isn't nearly as easy.

Groin attack is a recurring theme on Karate, which emphasizes bare hand fighting, and in Muay thai it's almost a primary target. That's how effective it is.
If Facebook wanted to support it they would probably just implement a standard proxy server that would be more efficient. If anybody can handle the traffic it would be Facebook, but I bet their chat services are not really tuned for this kind of usage.
99.9% of people dont care about all that. They want an easy way to connect with friends/family and even strangers. They dont want to pay for it though so they're willing to be served ads. The model works just fine.

And I keep hearing this all the time, if there are better alternatives than what are they? Facebook has thousands of employees, most just like you and me. They are not an army of evil people planning destruction, they're just optimizing their platform to better serve ads for both their advertisers AND the users. That's it. Where is this "privacy invasion"? What are they taking from you without your consent?
Yeah, it is only base64ing the woffs. The reason I post it is that it has all the benefits of this project (only CSS) without the downsides (being ridiculously hard to use).
No - for that you'd need a Go implementation on the JVM.

Last time I checked there was a half finished student project that does this. But not a full implementation. That's a shame. I've encountered a Go shop that was really suffering from things as basic as "our best debugger is gdb which doesn't really work" and "how do we get a stack trace from our running program?".

The Go crowd like to talk about how Go programs are small and standalone, but obviously the HotSpot JVM is not just a big pile of NOPs. You can get very small implementations of Java too, but only by cutting lots of useful functionality.

I bet if a company produced a solid, compliant Go for the JVM, that'd be a license to print money. I feel like lots of startups are coding themselves into a corner by relying on the relatively new and simple Go runtime. If they could bring their code across to the JVM and get access to all the useful tools it has, that'd be worth some money.
It's amazing how people think the only options are unlimited or nothing. A prepaid ptel 5c/min 2c/text plan is great for essential communication. Combine with a forwarding service like Google voice where you can turn on/off text and call forwarding and the costs are extremely low. But the fear of overages and unwillingness to manage the details drive a lot of people to choose no service.

All those stories about thousand dollar bills were great marketing that drove tons of low usage customers to unlimited plans.
What do you mean by code? Most digital chip design is done in Verilog or VHDL which are hardware description languages.
Chrome Now Has a Memory Team
As you suggest, there is a big difference between self-defence and two manly (but somewhat inebriated) men going out to the carpark to prove to each other and everyone watching that they are manly men who do manly men things.
well, speaking as an american from the midwest, unions are usually sneered at as a waste of resources by people who have to pay for union workers.

We need to make sure that we aren't getting taken advantage of by our employers (examples: shitty pay, terrible work environments, bad equipment, conspiracies to lower wages), aren't implementing poor practices (things like backdoors for the government), and aren't subject to things like sexism, racism, ageism (as you age and learn more and get better at what you do, its going to be harder to get a job - does that seem fair?).

I'd prefer to be part of a tech union that helped ensure my safety in these areas.

admittedly i don't know enough about unions to know how the current structure would benefit our industry, but we need something similar at least.
The Oracle JVM is virtually all open source under a different name (OpenJDK) and there are lots of other JVMs out there. Oracle won't care about this project.
FYI, Angular, React, Backbone, Ruby on rails all started as in-house frameworks.
I remember possibly the same article - it was a guy who noticed that airport wifi allows DNS even if you haven't paid.
Wonderful proof-of-concept!

Humanity needs steganography-as-a-service. But think how difficult it is to implement in a regime where all networks are monitored and even Android phones are assumed to be backdoored. Most services will re-encode data during transmission, potentially munging whatever secret happens to be embedded. And more generally, its the metadata that often de-anonymizes, not the data itself. If all the dissidents one day begin communicating via Lutheran Insult memes, its simply becomes a matter of picking one up and applying "rubber-hose" cryptanalysis to put an end to the party.
This is the wrong way around for that. It won't give you Java/Go interop.
My favorite developer productivity trick is office hours. Post times you are available on your door/cube and most people will respect it.
I've just been using oDesk. I get referrals from these, but bad clients generally aren't friends with good clients.

Last year I did a cute thing on HN where I offered to build prototypes for $2,345. That was much better, but I can't consistently rely on stunts like that.

Re: my site, I have a private portfolio page I show clients I'm trying to court. My reasoning is that people who hire by googling e.g. "web developer" probably aren't good clients.
Frameworks seem to be most useful for churning out a lot of mediocre websites quickly. If you're doing something really original, a framework is less useful.

Another downside of frameworks is maintenance. A company hires an outsourcing company to make a website. They use a framework, and might not even use it correctly. The incentive is for the outsourcing company to use a framework, because that lets them ship a website that sort of mostly works quickly, so they can get paid.

The contract is over and now some other programmer (such as me) is now supporting it. Now, making changes is several of order of magnitudes harder, because you're fighting the framework in addition to the code that was already written (especially when they didn't use the framework correctly).

For example, I was working on a website that used Zend forms. Now I needed to modify the form so that it was pre-populated with the data (an edit page instead of a submit page). I spent a couple days looking at the code and the zend documentation, and I just couldn't figure it out. The form had some javascript on it also, so I couldn't just use value="" to pre-populate the data.

It it was plain HTML/PHP, I could have just used value="" to pre-populate the data and be done in 5 minutes. The framework make a 5 minute task almost impossible.
I've been fortunate to anti-work all my life. I've started companies, built technology, made sales, written books, and generally got paid well to do what I love. I've anti-worked very hard. Often 15 hour days for months on a new project. I have a spouse who is a homebird and provides me the flexibility and support I need for that. In return I support the household. I've been reasonably successful. Not rich, but I have a home, a residual income, assets, I can buy nice things, and buy nice experiences. I can provide for my children and give to charity.

There are plenty of people who work, who work more than one job. They turn up, are told what to do, are at the mercy of the politicking of the organisation, get paid poorly, are physically exhausted, are pressured into moral compromises, have little medical or mental health support, have no assets or qualifications to be able to escape, and are well aware they would not be able to find anything substantially better. Perhaps they work 10 hours a day, then go home, cook for their kids, put them to bed, do the laundry and clean and crash.

When people try to compare my effort against those people, and say "look at people like him, he's proof hard work is the road to success!" I find it morally obnoxious.

The lie that work is the road to success is perpetuated by those who are able to anti-work, to maximise their own success on the backs of those who can't.
What makes this interesting is the fact that Facebook chat traffic is subsidized by Facebook and free of charge in some countries as part of their anti-net-neutrality "Internet.org" initiative. This project allows you to hijack the Facebook subsidy for purposes they didn't intend. Of course, if it becomes popular then Facebook will have to block it, emphasizing the self-serving commercial nature of the subsidy.
Very cool how this project uses the font face to explore how CSS rendering has evolved over time. I find it strangely beautiful when rendered in IE 6/7, almost like an alien language.

http://yusugomori.com/projects/css-sans/archive
> A comparison to law/medicine is more appropriate.

Which are both regulated and treated completely differently than the tech industry. I speak of unions because the way we are treated (not the level of skill) is more akin to a construction worker.
What's the criteria for a "substantive story"? Not being snarky or difficult, just genuinely curious.
C++ (possibly abusing the preprocessor to abuse the templating system...)
How I increased my margins 40% for my subscription business
I believe the appropriate term for someone like this is "architecture astronaut"

Edit: Apparently this is where I heard the term: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html

Obviously this was written from a software engineering perspective, but it seems at least marginally fitting, as the topic in question is literally computer architecture.
Great post.

BTW, this product (Scalyr) is a lifesaver. We (Periscope) are able to operate ~ a dozen heterogeneous servers with no FT DevOps largely because of Scalyr.