skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is it weird? The app is launching on Android, web and iOS - why wouldn't all three platforms be shown?
Thanks for sharing. My wife is a big photography enthusiast, and I think we may have both applied to work for Photojojo in the past. :) Anyway, I wanted to say that I am incredibly impressed by this. It's not every day that I hear the story of someone setting out to build a sustainable company^; and, from what limited perspective I have, you seem to have succeeded.

Bravo, sir; bravo. I wish you all the best.

^edit: So I'm not misinterpreted here, by "sustainable company" I mean one whose goal is to grow slowly and profitably on its own, not quickly in hopes of an IPO or acquisition. Those companies have their place, and it's a good place. I just like to hear the other stories too.
Hi! Author here. I wasn't expecting this post to get so much readership when I mentioned my workflow automation service. I don't think it's ready to get Hacker Newsed at this point, but insofar as technical detail is concerned, it's a single Rails app right now. It's a service for integrating different web services without having to write all the OAuth and synchronization code.

When it's demo-able I'll definitely post a Show HN. In the meantime, if you'd like more details I'd love talk one-on-one. Feel free to contact me via my email (at the bottom of OP), or @zacstewart anywhere else.
Looks interesting. They should get rid of this though: "...Due to high demand, we currently have a waitlist...".

Wtf? are they selling hardware? or their computers cannot keep up with high demand?

I call marketing BS.
To take the paranoid view, Google will know where you've been at any point during basically your entire photographed life.
Google tracks what physical retail stores you visit[1][2] on Android phones and iPhones(if you use Google Maps app). People don't care about that, do you think really think they will care about photos? Actually, scratch that, most people don't even know that Google tracks your phone location for store visits if you use location services or Google Now.

>Google cited two case studies of retailers that have been testing this metric. PetSmart’s estimated store visits data showed that 10 to 18 percent of clicks on search ads lead to a store visit.

[1] http://digiday.com/platforms/google-tracking/

[2] http://searchengineland.com/google-store-visits-estimated-co...
One thing I'd love to see one day would be a timeline/lineage graph of (silicon valley) tech companies. It is pretty colorful how the companies have variously both spun off and merged while still maintaining relatively strong history that usually can be traced to few key places (e.g. Fairchild)
PS: Kudos for them to list data-gathering apps which is useful.
I don't think double-entry is going anywhere, but guidance certainly is. I pay a lot of attention to this stuff, specifically the convergence of financial accounting guidance. It's not happening at a blistering pace, but things are moving. More and more US companies are reporting under IFRS. FASB and IASB have both done a lot of rewriting in the past 5 years, which is aligning GAAP and IFRS.

APAC is really churning. Japan GAAP takes more hints from US GAAP, but many Japanese companies have opted for IFRS. Australia GAAP has some very strange principles, especially around equity compensation, but is beginning to align with IFRS. China, well, I don't
really know, but I'm definitely on the lookout for it...

I think it's one of the most interesting of uninteresting things.
Well, it's an 18 month guarantee. After that, Google is happy to abandon you.

I like many many things about Android. But they really need to sort this out, at least for their flagship phones.
It makes me sick when things like this happen and they have happened on a smaller scale to me. I've tried to go through proper channels for support and get either no response or no help (Form letters and the like) and with 1 tweet I'm talking with a real human. I have no problem using Twitter as a bitching/calling-out platform because it's apparently the only way to get some companies attention.
They'll have absolutely no problem with it.

Avago is an American company masquerading as a Singapore company. It's controlled by US money, and it also has a joint HQ in San Jose.

1) "The company was founded in 1961 as a semiconductor products division of HP. The division separated as Agilent Technologies in 1999"

2) "KKR and Silver Lake Partners acquired the division of Agilent Technologies in 2005 for $2.6 billion and formed Avago Technologies"

3) Major shareholders: JP Morgan, FMR, Blackrock, Capital Group, Vanguard, etc. - it's almost entirely controlled by US money interests.
As longtime Prime member and a resident of a metro area that doesn't make the cut (and is almost certainly not in the next round), I can't help feeling like I'm subsidizing this service for those who live in the right place.

In fact, every time Amazon adds a new benefit for Prime members that I can't use or don't want, it reminds me that I must be overpaying for Prime if I'm only using the two day shipping.
I don't think I claim that's the only metric that matters. If I did, that was a mistake. Money is a big influencing factor in-terms of saying what kinds of resources a child has access to for their education, because it's simple to turn money into tutoring or other life experiences. But obviously, for example, having parents who themselves are well-educated and understand how to educate children is a resource that can be more valuable than just having parents with money. There are, of course, many many other examples of non-monetary resources that are accessible by some children and not other, though.
The problem is this. Using compass and ruler constructions there is a set of angles you can construct, and you can calculate sin and cos for those angles. You can even write the values for those out explicitly. However no part of this construction sheds light on how to find sin and cos for angles that you don't know how to construct. Or even gives good intuition that no matter how you do it, you can define it in a way that makes sense for all angles.

In fact we draw a picture, people look at it, and their intuition tells them that things will work out. Very few students will notice the logical gaps.

But to close the logical gaps, you need to start with Calculus first, and then derive trig formulas from that.

(Yes, I'm aware of the history here. Euclid presented trig reasonably rigorously a very long time before Calculus. Newton invented Calculus in the 1600s, and then used it as a heuristic to figure out answers that he then rederived using trig in The Principia. Leibniz reinvented Calculus in part based on inspiration from Newton's work. None of this was made formally correct until the late 1800s.)

(I have no opinion on pedagogical arguments about which is best to present first. I believe that we present trig first as a holdover from a curriculum where The Elements was the standard textbook until very recently.)
We don't need them. Only 1-2 of these will actually survive.
>The main reason why I'm interested is that it might lead to a different level of work. More strategic, architectural or advisory than just the coding, perhaps, and that might be interesting, and I would like to taste a bit of that.

Sounds like you're struggling to decide if that experience is worth your time. Seems a personal decision, so I'm not sure how much other people can help.
Microservices are Real, the Cloud not so Much
That's also this tricky issue with C that's often ignored. If you have a nested array and take a pointer &foo[0][0], the only in bounds pointers are the pointers into the 0th subarray.
This is pretty much what I try to do. I avoid people taking photographs of me altogether or if they do, I request them to not put them on Facebook or anywhere on the Internet. It usually works if you ask kindly.
What do you make of NFG, as mentioned in another comment below?
Your Telegraph article makes the argument that the fees paid by all students allow the universities in England to offer more money in bursaries to the truly disadvantaged. Which contradicts your argument that money isn't important.
> Why would I hand over my photos to a third party, that, quite ostensibly, is capable of indexing and tagging it by face- and location-recognition and store on their storage

Many people consider all of those to be features: cloud storage means you don't lose things when your phone is stolen or your laptop dies and most people have far more photos than they have the tools or time to organize. Intelligently clustering them based on location, faces, content type, etc. benefits from lots of CPU time and a big training corpus, which is exactly what Google excels at.

That's not to say that there aren't valid concerns about privacy but look at how many people use Gmail or Facebook to estimate what percentage of the computer using public considers that a reasonable deal for a free service.
Have you factored in all the free samples and the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo? That might change your calculus. :)
I used to live on the same continent as these people, and even then I would live a life parallel to some of these family members. Now I know what they're up to, am reminded of their birthdays, and get photographic proof of their successful reproduction. Social obligations fulfilled.

As for Facebook being a "hostile platform", that's not quite true, is it? When they park a self-driving car they bought off Google outside your house and broadcast your life to everyone you know, that's when they're hostile.
..That would just be Tumblr
Concur completely.
I've found myself more interested in Stripe's UI/UX than the product itself.

Not that the product isn't anything less than mint, it's just that their front-end developers are so amazing.
> No it isn't, because no payment is required to view the page in question.

The "payment" is the implicit agreement to view the ads.

> How it works is that your browser downloads a page. That page contains scripts and links.

Thanks for the lesson on how Web browsers work. I wish I knew all of that when I worked at Netscape; maybe it would still be around.
FOUR DRINKING BUDDIES came up with this CRAZY, UNLIKELY PLAN to STOP INFLATION INSTANTLY!
Thanks for sharing. Looked over the code, looks solid, and very well organized.

Perhaps would like to see some benchmarks and comparisons with other brokers (including RabbitMQ plugin).

In general with MQTT I was always wondering about its QoS level 2 -- "Once and one once delivery". How well does that work with distributed systems. That would seem a bit hard to implement. (I can see at least once, at most once. Exactly once would be tricky. Thinking about network partitions, disconnects and other such distributed systems shenanigans).
Scaling Our Talent Marketplace Through Automation
How have I not seen his work before?! I love it.
Ello recently tried this, and they're still making good progress
Can't say I did. This is the first I've ever heard of it. Thanks for sharing.
You may like this:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/resona...
I don't see why profit incentive is obviously a worse way to get reliability than the incentives of politicians and FDA employees.
Show HN: A live Twitter feed in email
Check out my live Twitter feed working inside of email. It uses an iframe to render on webkit-based email clients (Mac Mail and iOS Mail), and then falls back to a dynamically generated image.
Back when I was learning Go, I was astounded to learn that GOMAXPROCS was set to 1 by default. It didn't seem to make any sense to me given the nature of the claims of the language. Of course when I investigated why the default was 1 I learned the reasons why (which this article talks about), but it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

I'm glad that Go has matured to the point where this can be a historical footnote! Good work, Go team.
Yeah... As a college student with student loans, rent, utilities, and $30 a week for food, there's not much more room in my budget for books. If I read a medicore free textbook and learn something, that's more than I learned from the $50 textbook that I couldn't buy.
Congrats, and good read.

Off-topic: referring to the business as "she" comes across as very weird to me. Is this common? I know some women can find that offensive.
What I noticed for the first time is not the cool new shiny things, but the absence of Hangouts and Google+ features

I'm curious about Google Photos but if Google had proclaimed "you must be a Google+ user to get this" then I wouldn't even give it a try.

I could see it being a hook into Google+ at some later point in time if/when there's momentum.
Billions of photos are on Facebook. Maybe trillions.
Don't do that. Other things happen to it besides the data loss potential.

Or, stash it in the trunk. Gets hot in there too, but not so hot as the cab.
Ask HN: Would you use a network capture analysis service?
Hello HN,

Would you pay for a network capture analysis service?

You provide us with the network captures and the issue you'd like us to troubleshoot and we send you back a report with our findings and how to check those on the captures.
Hmm... networking + Weave, where have I seen that before? Ah, http://weave.works . Google did the same with Go as a language, didn't they?
Its mostly d3.js
PRIVACYSCAN BY SECUREMAC REVIEW
Nice article. Thanks for sharing!
Given past experience with both Avago and Broadcom, I don't think I would hold your hopes too high; I would bet money that the current attitude you get from Broadcom about drivers will continue if not get worse. Most vendors in the hardware sphere tend to be rather protective of everything they do (fairly or unfairly), and pretty old school,and that sort of attitude doesn't really play well with our open source/libre desires for more transparency in things like drives.
A simple study of debt reduction strategies
But why bother with a fixed width 128 bit encoding? We have perfectly fine variable-width encodings, that take up 8 bits per character for the most common set of characters encoded, the ASCII range (even for CJK text, the fact that most markup languages like HTML and XML use ASCII means that actually, the bulk of documents fall within the ASCII range), and can handle arbitrarily complex stacks of diacritics.

How would it be helpful to waste a huge amount of space for the vast majority of text, impose additional limitations on the number of combining characters, just for the benefit of fixed-width encoding of graphemes, which even in itself is not all that helpful since for most applications, you are either going to need to scan through the text linearly, or you could use byte offsets in the variable width encoding just as well as you could use grapheme offsets in a fixed width encoding?
the NDK support in Studio will end the use of eclipse for Android development.
On that basis, I agree. Seems like there might be a bias there, or the prof is a visual type...

Anytime you can get away from formal, do it! I've learned to ratchet those expectations way down, and when I do, and it's relaxed, everybody gets more out of it.
The form highlight animation is sexy!
When you're developer-focused processor that integrates tightly with a website (Stripe) instead of providing a platform (like PayPal), your fraud protection can only go so far.

Stripe has taken steps to improve their fraud protection, but as someone in the field of protection, I can say that I'd happily take PayPal's over Stripe's.
If you use something like jwt-ruby, you get signature verification out of the box.
Google Android Nanodegree
Google to personalize Play Store
It's possible that any jobs that no one would do under these conditions are jobs that are not necessary. If the jobs are necessary and still no one is willing to do them then they're probably currently vastly undervalued.
I think the percentages make a lot of sense. I think there could be a fair amount of, "I think this is wrong, but nobody is really saying it's wrong, so, maybe it's not as wrong as I think it is." And that police officer basically does nothing or rough up a suspect with a colleague who's more aggressive every now and then.
Meh, that seems a bit like complaining the guy who lives next to the post office gets his mail earlier. Amazon already had to build distribution centers near major markets - might as well deliver faster if it's possible anyways.
This article mentions that the rejection rate for China and Mexico was 21% and 22% but fails to give the total amount of petitions that was submitted by these countries.

India submitted 25,296 and 14,104 were accepted. Fine. Now how many did China and Mexico submitted? Twice that? Half that? If there was only 5000 petitions from China isn't it reason enough to explain the difference in acceptance rate?

"Given that India is globally known for its specialized knowledge pool" I have never heard that about India. Knowledge of what? Indian workers are used for cheap outsourcing.
As one commenter noted, employing XSS to steal the token out of localStorage is a risk.
Used to intern for them in the summer of 2008. Always felt the good times had passed (early 2000s) with Qualcomm as their arch nemesis.
Entire quantum physics is a mathematical model of physical things by definition. Quantum wave function is a physical object as are all the other fundamental fields we know about. Photons behave in very physical ways, just not in classical ways like you would expect them based on experience with macroscopic objects we face every day. Likewise, bosons are physical objects that have physical and measurable/observable properties (but they don't have volume) etc.

So now you are getting a bit confused here.
Strangely, on my computer, Firefox reports a security error on the site. No error in Chrome.

An error occurred during a connection to golang.org.
security library: DER encoded incorrectly formatted
message. (Error code: sec_error_bad_der)

I didn't have this the last time I went on golang.org.
> when you control for educational achievement (i.e. how well students achieve in pre-uni schooling), income level is a much weaker predictor of whether someone attends university. The primary driver of low university enrolment is educational achievement.

The Times reported the exact opposite finding a year ago:

> whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make. ... About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.

> ... ability turns out to be a relatively minor factor behind this divide. If you compare college students with the same standardized-test scores who come from different family backgrounds, you find that their educational outcomes reflect their parents’ income, not their test scores. Take students like Vanessa, who do moderately well on standardized tests — scoring between 1,000 and 1,200 out of 1,600 on the SAT. If those students come from families in the top-income quartile, they have a 2 in 3 chance of graduating with a four-year degree. If they come from families in the bottom quartile, they have just a 1 in 6 chance of making it to graduation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-gradu...
One other thing struck me.

Since you lean verbal, consider light, concept type visuals as much as you can. These kinds of presentations tend to do very well, and you've got a strength that favors them. These days, talks are often available to view later, and or we can distribute files, meaning you can include text for people to read without having to prep so much visual clutter in the form of text, and other difficult to manage things on the slides.
Same here. If you go to the link without ssl it'll load for you though.
Like you, I was also initially confused about the default value of GOMAXPROCS - for the same reason.

Great to see they have changed this to something that, without any other context, makes more sense.
The Interview X2 Method: How to Get More Traffic with Repurposed Content
What would be the acceptable time frame for supporting existing devices? I agree that 18 months is a bit on the short side, but the Galaxy Nexus is way beyond that. By the time M hits the street, the Galaxy Nexus will be a four year old model.
I disagree they will have no problem with it. Maybe NSA but not Senators.

This deal is basically a form of tax inversion. Or is Avago paying all US tax because of the joint HQ in San Jose?
I read somewhere that the max number of sustainable human pop on earth is around one billion ...

And unlimited resources, you have to be ready to wait about 500 millions years to get oil to renew !
Ask HN: What are some unknown “ugly” facts about famous and well-liked people?
I mostly mean historical figures or people we would all recognize and generally the public are not well aware?
This discussion is about what encoding is best to choose for the low-level string types in languages and libraries, as that's what the original article was about.

If your language already uses a Unicode-compatible string type, you should probably use that.

If you are designing a new language, rewriting a language's basic string primitives, or writing an API or application in a language that doesn't have a well-standardized Unicode string type like C or C++, then it is probably better to pick UTF-8; if your app is necessarily single platform and tied to a platform API, choose that API's encoding, but for anything cross platform, the encoding is going to differ between the platforms so choosing UTF-8 and then transcoding at the API boundaries on the different platforms is fine.

By the way, most languages do have the concept of a byte array, and you can provide UTF-8 string operations on top of that; but as I said, in general, you should be using the language's native string type unless you have a very good reason not to.

The original article that we're discussing does mention one of those very good reasons; in Python, it uses an 8-bit Latin-1 encoding if the characters can fit, upgrades to 16-bit UCS-2 if they can fit in that range, and finally upgrades to 32-bit UTF-32 if they don't fit in the UCS-2 range. But that means that if you're appending strings, and one of them contains an emoji (for instance, in a web templating system that encounters an emoji in a comment), that can mean that all of a sudden your string has to grow to four times its original size, which can cause serious problems; so one workaround for that may be to actually write everything out to a UTF-8 encoded string (which in Python can be represented as a byte array) rather than trying to append strings together and hitting that behavior.

Furthermore, several languages already do use UTF-8 as their internal string type; Rust, Go, and Ruby all use UTF-8 as their default or only string type.

And by the way, Rust and Go both use slices to handle the use case you describe; a slice is represented as a pointer to the first byte of interest, and a number representing how many bytes it extends. I don't know about in Go, but in Rust the API guarantees that all string slices created from a string begin and end on proper codepoint boundaries. Go: https://blog.golang.org/slices, Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/primitive.str.html.
That's actually not true anymore http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/528226/neurosc...
Ask HN: Why doesn't Amazon have 2 Step for Consumers?
They have it on the web services side of the business but not for consumers. Seems like a huge oversight.

This was brought to my attention by a friend who is being attacked by a cyber criminal. The hackers keep calling into Amazon and getting his password reset. He can't enable 2 step to do anything about it.