skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Been waiting for this. I had been thinking of picking up an OpenPandora but it seems like they aren't being made anymore, which is understandable with the Pyra coming out.
Building better pages in Drupal with Paragraphs
Change your definition of "anything interesting" to stories about Paris Hilton's dead dog. If the definition includes much of anything technical, it's a lost cause.

Even if you could read all of HN, you'd still miss interesting stuff because everything interesting doesn't make it to HN. That's why people can submit stories.
Ask HN: Help me learn everything about mobile marketing
Hello guys,
So here is the deal: I built an app, it's starting to work quite well. I'm monetizing pretty well. The thing is, all the traffic I've got is organic.

I would like to know everything there is to know on how to get traffic/market my app. I understand it's a broad subject, but I want to become a master in user acquisition. Basically I want to grow my user base to the millions.

Can someone point me in the right direction? Either there's something I'm missing, but it seems that the whole point is just to have a CPI < LTV, once you're there you just have to inject money. Does it get more complicated than that?

If you have any website/book/blog recommendations I'd be very happy to have them. I'm an engineer so I'm probably lacking the fundamentals, any "reference" marketing book still valid at this moment is very welcome.
Cheers!

Another way to rephrase my question would be: what do the marketing/user acquisition managers actually do in startups that have a mobile products (game companies for instance)?
The reason this worked is because 1) the charity took the time to do economic modelling that shows the actual benefit to government in dollars, and 2) the scenario is actually tractable to this sort of modelling.

There are a lot of nonprofits out there that can't get funding because their benefits are difficult to quantify, or because their benefits are too diffused and doesn't impact government bottom line directly.
Who Needs Architects? Who’s Minding the Architecture?
I've seen this best debugger thing come up a few times before. I'm currently working with windows on a project right now and I'm finding the VS debugger more limited than GDB. With GDB I can create scripts which analyse and print complex memory layouts very quickly and efficiently. With valgrind, I can find memory leaks and other unwanted behaviors. With gcc's dump-tree family of options, I can see how my code is turned into assembly. I haven't been able to do these things well under VS and I think it comes down to preference and habit. So my question is, what makes VS's debugger the "best debugger", what am I missing?
SSIS is the most frustrating, worthwhile bundled app I've seen. It's gotten significantly better but for what is essentially a giant XML writer they sure do like to hide all the options and configurations. I love the API though, so handy.
How important is performance for an offline testing tool, when compared to flexibility?

Given that this specific form of fuzzing - basically non-directed randomization of inputs (it is pattern based to an extent, but...) performance matters. You want to cover a good portion of a huge surface. Performance tweaks add up in this case.

How many bugs will mucking with intercepting syscalls introduce? More importantly, how many bugs will be obscured since the tool is running Nginx in a decidedly non-standard and complex way?

Good questions - but in the overall workflow, these can be easily found by first running the fuzzing and getting a list of problematic inputs, and second, trying those inputs in a directed way against the unmodified version of nginx provides a nice filter.

As for the obscuring of other bugs - sure, this is always a problem with any form of testing. The goal with this or any tool isn't to find all bugs, its to help find a class of bugs. Other forms of testing will find other bugs. This is why unit tests are valuable, but don't obviate the need for integration and functional testing for example.
Unsupervised semantic modelling from plain text
First Developmental Test Flight of New Shepard
Why do people feel like they can just edit Antarctica out?
They are puppies from local shelters that they encourage people to adopt.
The big question is: which materials you have available for construction now - concrete, wood, glass?
Don't a lot of fantasy prone people already do that? It would explain a lot of fan-fiction and con-worlds.

That said, most daydreams have an element of wish fulfillment in them, which wouldn't make for good fiction.
Awesome, would listen to this all day with #jokes keep me smiling all day!!
This website is great. However, this doesn't actually touch on the real issue.

I work at a MSSQL shop, and all of us know and are convinced that PG is better. Most of us use PG for our side projects and some of the dev's don't even use windows that much, with some custom MSSQL plugins we've built for linux. However, the problem still exists, of how do you port a ton of Databases over to Postgres? We're a multi-tenancy shop, so close to zero downtime is very important, and it would get really complicated if we ran multiple production versions of our app, one with a PG adapter and one with a MSSQL adapter.

A cursory Google search will show that you aren't going to get a ton of help converting them[0][1], not to mention the overhead of switching 20 developers from MSSQL to PG overnight.

This website is however excellent at convincing people to use PG over MSSQL. Perhaps, given the direction that Microsoft is going, they'll open source MSSQL overnight and it will become something competitively similar to PG in the long run.

[0] http://www.convert-in.com/mss2pgs.htm

[1] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Microsoft_SQL_Server_to_Pos...
Hmm, as the docs don't exists yet some examples would be nice.
What would you do with the data?
how far along is Minix 3?
How an open standard API could revolutionize banking
I've used PowerShell quite a bit actually, even wrote a few script a couple years ago to work with Active Directory. I still can't see myself managing a server from there. I know configurations and everything are possible through it, like the registry and such. However config files are just so much more friendly to me. Which is probably why I would pick Linux on that. Permissions are also a little bit more basic and harder to screw up in Linux IMO.
Azimuthal equidistant on my house.
Why bother comparing the internet to supersonic jets? SST might have been a popular idea, but it never reached the same level of global acceptance and support as the internet.
Normally, I would just upvote and go on but that was actually hilarious.
tl;dr
App called "even" allows people with incredibly variable income (case study is on a massage therapist, lots of money one week, little the next) to even out their income. They evaluate their income history, then offer a stabilized value, say $380/week. Weeks they make more, the application takes it and puts it aside. Weeks they make less, it either pulls it in from a reserve, or an instant loan is made.

Costs users $3/week. Which is non-trivial, but less than a payday loan company.
Sorry that Points was unable to summarize your page. It can summarize most web pages but occasionally is unable to adequately summarize a given page. I will check this link out and try to adjust the algorithm to be more accommodating.
>> PostgreSQL supports DROP SCHEMA CASCADE, which drops a schema and all the database objects inside it. This is very, very important for a robust analytics delivery methodology, where tear-down-and-rebuild is the underlying principle of repeatable, auditable, collaborative analytics work.

Actually, if you drop the constraints first, you don't have to worry about the table-drop order. I do that on both Postgres and SQL Server, because I use a tool that generates the specific scripts for me.

I don't think manually writing DDL scripts is any way to manage an RDBMS in the modern era, especially if you care about "repeatability and auditability" like he claims.

Queries, yes, but schema constructs, no. SQL is just a terrible language for it. I'm not saying you have to use a full ORM, but every SQL engine I've ever encountered will let you do a lot of nutty things and won't complain about it, or won't complain until you actually try to query it.
It's nice that, with this approach, individuals can make some money besides a regular job. But what's not so nice, is that the level of the work is quite low. And what's also not nice, is that Uber is a regulator of that market (having strong financial interests themselves).
Thanks for the feedback! I am going to introduce an option to change the maximum number of points soon.
Yes, you can absolutely do that in MSSQL as long as there's a batch separator (it's not implicit at a line break,;, or something else. It's not uncommon to write large deployment scripts with proc creations/alters.

There's some other things like that in the post, some coming down to what seems like syntactic sugar and feels more like a difference that doesn't really need to be noted (like the types/dropping piece).
The Ayoade interview mentioned in this article is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjC3ycS_2js
4 tips for building a successful CMS
I remember this. I don't recall specific chats, but I remember it being complete mayhem, some people not understanding what was happening to them, some intentionally inflicting it on others and some understanding it and getting away from everyone. I thought it was pretty funny at the time and then recall that some group was studying it for the parallels of an epidemic in real-life. Pretty interesting!
Why rent control is a terrible idea
Well, feel free to waste your life and time writing a book for money. I will be the first person in line to never buy such a book.
The Earth-toned version looks much nicer IMHO http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/maps/wall-map...
Mildly misleading title there; the dishes are all in the southern hemisphere IIRC.

That said, Jodrell Bank is a very interesting place. Good article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/25/geeks_guide_jodrell_...
> It sounds like the slovak government was trying to implement its own version despite the europe-wide law being struck down.

EU countries first decided to create the directive, and then implemented this while it was in force. There was no big bad EU imposing it on reluctant states. And now most countries are in no hurry to dismantle the their national legislation implementing the directive.
Python Metaclasses, Abstract Base Classes and Class Decorators
The few with financially valuable digital assets?
Powershell has had that support for quite a while too.
I was also diagnosed with ADHD as a child and twice as a teenager. Today I don't believe in non-material diseases anymore, but the point stands that people like you and I have this thing in common with the prolific daydreaming.

It's unfortunate it's characterized nowadays as a disease. I enjoy it a lot, and sometimes whole afternoons go by where I was lost in a daydream. I never need to take books or anything anywhere to keep me entertained during dead times as I know I can barely choose what thoughts will engulf my mind next.

Have you looked into Jungian types? Without having an opinion as to its validity, I can say reading a thorough INTP description made me realize that this is really not a disease and some people are just more prone to being this way. I've learned to accept it (by doing my own research as for what this is) and now I'm happy without any meds whatsoever.
Not the first time it's been done.

Of course, it's only worked some of the time it's been done, I guess.
Blue Origin: Images and Videos from Our First Flight
I just hope the wait won't be too long anymore... :)
> Red Hat didn’t have to pay for the bulk of the development of Linux. As soon as it was clear how Linux could change the world of computing, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Intel, and many other companies added full time developers to the project. If Red Hat had to pay for all the development of Linux, it would never have become what it is today.

This is a misunderstanding of how the development of Linux works. It's not a project in the conventional sense and never has been. Anyone can contribute as long as their code is good enough and solves a problem or adds a feature. But because the code is under the GPL, no-one can take others' work and make it proprietary. It creates a level playing field for customers because OS development is not their core business but rather just a cost of doing said business.

It's also a misunderstanding of the value Red Hat brought - and still brings - to enterprise software. A subscription buys you enterprise support, certification with third party vendors and the guarantee that Red Hat will distribute improvements to the kernel in a predictable way for you.
Discussion of the company's own website from three months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8614198
The art of the startup pivot from a founder-CTO point of view
> I guess there's no accounting for taste.

Unless you're a hipster nerd trying hard to seem sophisticated. In that case, fashion is everything.
> VS can debug processes on remote machines with only a small helper process running on that machine

You first please :)

I've tried doing that several times and always ended up giving up. If it's not firewalling, its UAC or cross domain trust issues, or DCOM configuration, or process permissions and probably 200 other things which has failed on me in the past.

It only works in the most trivial of configurations. Back in the real world I've only been able to use it once or twice, non-repeatably.
PVS-Studio: Analyzing FreeCAD's Source Code and Its “Sick” Dependencies
Free-for-dev: A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers
How would you suggest optimizing queries except on stats? Do you find instances where the stats are incorrect? If you're trying to do small things in a big table, have you used indexing to help target the small sets/fields you're looking at?
10 Magical DIY Lamp Ideas
"Even when the data quality is great the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job in always showing the right amount of information."

I used to work on tile rendering at Google and considerable effort was spent on this. Thank you!
Unfortunately there isn't a Jetbrains IDE that works pretty well with big codebases...
At least Antarctica is practically uninhabited.

http://worldmapswithout.nz/ on the other hand...
I don't think so. I used it since it was DTS, not SSIS and whilst Informatica is better at all things ETL, SSIS is great for what it can do out of the box. Besides, if it can't, you can always do it via custom C#or VB extension.

Just finished a multi-terabyte data warehouse project where all data is loaded using SSIS and ControlM and it works great! The dev process was also easy and trouble-free.
I still prefer Geohash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geohash

It's already implemented in mongo, elastic, solr, etc, supports arbitrary length/precision codes, adjacent cells have similar hashes. http://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/geohash.html http://mapzen.github.io/leaflet-spatial-prefix-tree/
Vitadis recepten: Griekse Kip met tijm en oregano – Leef Nu Gezonder
Ubuntu security vulnerabilities
When O'Sullivan is on form, he has an ease and fluency that no other player can match. His maximum breaks are rightfully legendary, and give a glimpse of his immense talent. O'Sullivan doesn't really compete against other players, but against his own psyche; For this reason, he is both the most exciting and the most frustrating player to watch.
Ask HN: If I learn one programming language, what should it be?
I want to dedicate a few months to learning a programming language (part time) in order to achieve the following two goals:

1) Be better prepared, as a founder, to understand engineers.
2) Add a "hard" skill I can use to earn money on the side (e.g., while bootstrapping).

To clarify, I'm not a founder yet, but that may change soon. I have very basic knowledge of programming: a semester of C++ (15 years ago) and some dabbling in AppleScript, shell scripts, and html/php/css.

Of course, I realize that I won't master anything with only a few months of study. Nevertheless, I'd like to do what I can to improve my chops in the time I have.

If you were in my shoes, what language would you invest in?
Can you recommend any resources to help me learn it (e.g., books, online resources)?

I'd really appreciate advice from the HN community.
It hasn't been announced anywhere unless you count random tweets. I should post something on the PowerShell team blog one of these days.
Popular Science Monthly, July 1900 – MIT Electrical Engineering
I have always seen the inverse: Stallman and followers treating anything done by Microsoft as an abomination.
Back in the day when Google Maps first came out, I got a bit.. obsessed with it. I wrote a bit of code to download map tiles (they had an interesting, recursive spiral indexing scheme) and stitch them into large images, and printed poster-sized satellite imagery on a 4' plotter I should not have had access to at work. Such beautiful imagery..
This is no different from the situation in Linux, BSD etc, where executables and libraries are simply mapped into the process with mmap() - they're backed by the files and the system is free to discard those clean memory pages as it sees fit.

When you install(1) a new version of a file, the old one is deleted and the new one written in its place. The file handle in existing processes continues to point to the original, and the filesystem will wait until everything's closed it before actually discarding the file data.
Fair point. For concurrency, you have lwt and Core.Async. Lwt is fairly nice, haven't tried Core.Async. I'll point out that "there is no parallelism" is one of the traditional complaints about OCaml, not "there is no solution for concurrency".
Transparency International publishes this thing so we don't need to go by gut feelings re. corruption as judged by the public:

http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results

Spoiler: Big differences across Europe
In some creative professions, "daydreaming" fuels work output. Richard Branson has written about his dyslexia and how his business empire is built on his creative and strategic strengths, while operational weaknesses are delegated.
Just tried Codenvy with a trivial C++ "hello world" project, and couldn't figure it out. When I run it, this is what I see in the console:

[INFO] Preparing environment to run application codejam on…
[INFO] Starting Runner @ Thu Apr 30 13:41:36 UTC 2015
[DOCKER] Step 0 : FROM codenvy/php56_apache2
[DOCKER] ---> 432686a10598
[DOCKER] Step 1 : ENV CODENVY_APP_BIND_DIR /var/www/html
[DOCKER] ---> Using cache
[DOCKER] ---> 4d541163106e
[DOCKER] Step 2 : VOLUME /var/www/html
[DOCKER] ---> Using cache
[DOCKER] ---> d5c4065956b6
[DOCKER] Successfully built d5c4065956b6
[INFO] Environment preparation done. Application codejam starting up…
[STDOUT] Starting web server: apache2.
[STDOUT] ==> /var/log/apache2/access.log <==
[STDOUT]
[STDOUT] ==> /var/log/apache2/error.log <==
[STDOUT] [Thu Apr 30 13:41:39.272766 2015] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 500] AH00163: Apache/2.4.10 (Debian) configured -- resuming normal operations
[STDOUT] [Thu Apr 30 13:41:39.272825 2015] [core:notice] [pid 500] AH00094: Command line: '/usr/sbin/apache2'
[INFO] Application codejam booted and reachable.
[STDOUT]
[STDOUT] ==> /var/log/apache2/access.log <==
[STDOUT] 10.13.176.166 - - [30/Apr/2015:13:41:40 +0000] "HEAD / HTTP/1.1" 200 183 "-" "Java/1.7.0_71"

No program output.
If you just need to move data from A 2 B than no. If your transformations are complex and will grow overtime than yes, the time and learning curve are justified IMO.
Agreed on Navicat. pgAdmin doesn't quite cut it just yet.

Which sometimes made me wonder if, with Postgres becoming more popular by the day, there would be a market for a management tool cheaper than Navicat.
> We will be releasing the source code by the time we release the RTM version of Visual Studio 2015.

Not to be confused with the RC that got released today, which isn't actually a Release Candidate.
Definetly ingenious. How did it got to that, pure coincidence ? or something more ?
If people are consensually engaging in an activity and it is not harmful in anyway to others, it is perfectly fine.
That's quite interesting. As a nearly pure desktop user Canonical is everywhere, even making painful decisions in the community that others can't fight due to size differences, and only once or twice a year I'm reading Red Hat. Never thought of it as the big guy in the room.
Linux Commands Crossword
Does this handle management of SSH keys?
Personally, I use a tablet for media (ebooks, tv, movies, etc), but as a programmer I need a real physical keyboard and acces to the programmer stack (vim, git, ssh, grep/awk, etc)... But honestly unless you're a student or business doing data entry I don't see the need for a full blown computer, though recent instability in the Android OS has made me wish linux tablets would get to the US market sooner rather than later.
When I started reading I thought it was going to be "Uber for Masseuses" but it turned out to be more interesting than that. I hope it works out.
This is really cool looking, and I have no idea what you'd use it for.

And this is just the neatest thing to play with:
https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/hammer-retroazimuthal/
The US constitution binds the Government ( Politicians ) ... not the people.
Sigh. It's about as profound as writing an article on whether Linux vs Windows -- which one is a better OS?
I skimmed the article for some reason and it is full of questionable statements. One thing that jumped out at me is the part about using multiple cores to run a query. We are in 2015 ladies and gentlemen. A RDBMS must be able to parallelize queries. Argument about never being CPU bound is laughable. I am, as we speak, running a performance test on a 36 core box and I already know the result: I NEED MORE CORES. Analytics is moving into SSD world, where data processing will be CPU bound once again.
Thank you. This article was way too long to get such a simple thing across.
I am inclined to think that you should use an RDBMS for doing what it does best - things like storing and retrieving data efficiently, facilitating the integrity of data while serving multiple users, and enforcing relational constraints. If you're serious about doing analytics and you try to do it in the db you are going to quickly find yourself hampered by the expressive limitations of SQL.

I think it's better to skip that and interface with the database using something more powerful - let the database handle getting the data that you want the best way possible, then process it using something better suited to the job.
The subject is ambiguous since headlines often use "to" in place of "is to" (as in "Smith to resign").
What is this recent instability in the Android OS that you speak of?
Fun fact: the Rust compiler was originally written in OCaml.
The part that needs the most optimism is the provision of the connectivity to the section in South Africa, which is unfortunately a political challenge instead of an engineering challenge.
You are correct, they are not interchangeable. I didn't suggest that they were. I was offering CIs as an alternative for examining effects in general (e.g., comparing two groups); however, your choice of data representation will always depend on the question that you're asking. Nonetheless, p-values in and of themselves provide no information about the magnitude of an effect. Why not show the actual data?