skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like the idea of loser pays for certain classes of abuse but you need some mechanism to counter the innate tendency to deter the non-rich from filing a lawsuit in all but the most certain of cases. Some sort of a good faith exemption would be nice but it'd have to be very carefully constructed.

This becomes particularly obvious when you look at things which aren't extremely clear-cut cases. Say the company across the street is polluting. With a remotely-competent regulatory system, you can contact the local government and they [hopefully] have funding to investigate. With a lawsuit-driven system, you'd have to be prepared to pay for all of that out of pocket while trying to demonstrate direct losses for something which is rarely be more precise than a statistical likelihood in the hope that you'll eventually be compensated.

With loser pays, you now have the risk of having to pick up the tab for the company's top-notch legal team, too, which gives them powerful leverage to push you towards a settlement if the case isn't going 100% your way – after all, it's only your house that's on the line. If the company loses, it's not like the CEO has to pay for it personally.

The reason why we have the regulatory agencies we have is because we've already proven that the “do whatever you want and sue if it goes wrong” approach doesn't work well. The better question to debate is how to make those regulators more effective and responsive
OnlyOffice requires your SSH key or password to install
Unfortunately, doing TrueType hinting more-or-less requires FontLab. There are other alternatives that are being developed, but by and large FontLab remains the industry tool for building TT-hints. Part of this talk by Tal Leming (https://vimeo.com/album/3329572/video/123781570#t=457s) explains some of the interchange issues with TT-hint formats. Long story short, everyone has a slightly different hinting compiler, and they're all proprietary.
1040 is the name of the primary income tax reporting form in the US (and has variants like 1040A & 1040EZ).

(I can't comment on the rest of that rant though)
South bay Rubik's cube meetup
Obama Urges Senate to Renew Surveillance Programs
Funny. /usr/bin/chromium shows nothing like that.

I'm wondering why these launchers differ so much.
the US is a group of states that often times adopt completely different opinions, not sure your first point translates well.
Here's a NY Times article about Emmy Noether from 2012 [0] and the HN discussion [1]:

[0] The Mighty Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/science/emmy-noether-the-m...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3760447
It'll be interesting to see whether Kara and Walter get absorbed into TheVerge or continue existing as a separate entity. Personally, I hope it's the latter.
you're mixing your frames of reference....
The simulated 'moisture' would exist within the simulated universe using simulated water and simulated fabric (for example).
Within the simulation, that fabric would be just as moist as a piece of cloth left out in the rain in our universe.
you can't mix your frames of reference.
Jack Welch's promotion advice is out of date
Related to this is the question of any data migrations as part of those architectural decisions.

Especially if the "right" model in the end isn't really compatible with the first, wrong one and you can't afford to mess up the data.
Form 1040 is for US income tax return. It is what you fill out to file your taxes.
Cocoa is the name for the set of Objective-C frameworks that powers nearly every OS X and iOS app.
BloomingMenu: Menu Lib Inspired by Path.app and AwesomeMenu Obj-C, in JavaScript
You should have this on your iPhone?
jjinux had been a strong proponent of Python, but happy to see some Go love lately.
I found that model somewhat overkill. I would have cut some corners there: assume that the oldest person alive is 110 or older (reasonable, given a world population in the billions and the data we have) and compute his (more likely her) hazard rate from the curve you fitted.

For hazard rates at old age, taking life expectancy equal to 0.5/hazard rate isn't an extremely bad approximation (I have no education in actuarial science and gave that little thought; corrections welcome), so one gets:

age h(age) life expectancy
109 0.473 1.058
110 0.503 0.993
111 0.536 0.933
112 0.570 0.876
113 0.607 0.824
114 0.645 0.775
115 0.685 0.730
116 0.728 0.687

Again, we get in the range of that 2/3-ish.
In my years of experience (both in big corporate R&D as well as startups) I've never seen a project fail because of the end product being too simple or not having enough features.

However on the other hand I've seen countless projects suffering delays, staff departures, emotional team arguments and eventually bad end product because of too complicated software architecture that overwhelmed its creators and because of obscure features that well-meaning engineers built in because "it'll save time in the long run".

Btw this well known XKCD sums it up just perfectly: http://xkcd.com/974/
YAY (Yagni Ain't Yolo)?
Trust and Software
> It's a craft, not a science.

I feel exactly the same way. It turns out everything practical I do with software depends more on the "spider sense" part of it rather than some well-defined knowledge (which is easy to look up when needed, so maybe that has something to do with it). The spider sense is not something you can teach or memorize, and it takes a while to develop. Programming is exactly like a craft in that way.

But there is plenty of better understood theory and experiment out there which if anything is the science part. From the theory and experiment I've dabbled with it's very much a different thing.

And it has a lot to do with the existence of radically different schools of programming. There's a joke, the engineer is showing a laser pointer to the scientist. The scientist asks "why didn't you get an ultraviolet laser when those output far higher energies?" and the engineer says "it's for shining a dot on the wall."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_tax_forms#1040
I've always been partial to Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/
By the sounds of announcement on The Verge, Kara and Walt will be remaining at Re/code while also contributing to The Verge.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/26/8662905/the-verge-and-reco...
Not wholly sure why this was downvoted, it's a bit trite but accurate: Oculus the company no longer exists. For example, if you were to apply to the "Oculus company", you're taken to a Facebook career page for a position in the Oculus division.

In fact, I find it a bit duplicitous that they don't mention the whole acquisition by Facebook bit on their "About Oculus" company page.
Travel is a misleading outlier as it has historically terrible margins and a large portion of the market volume is in airlines which historically generally lose money. On the other hand the market cap from online dating is pretty much entirely captured in online dating and isn't dominated by companies that own airplanes or hotels. "Revenue" that includes directly passed on fees is highly misleading as an indicator of relative market size. I'd rather own a company that made 1/4 as much than a company that passed 90% of revenue to other companies.
U.S. Air Force Certifies Falcon 9 for Military Launches
also run the Screentendo.xcworkspace file. Still buggy on MBP Retina, as everything looks zoomed in.
Not saying I disagree but travel is the poster child of structurally disadvantaged startup ideas:

Travel planning software: The most common bad startup idea

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8419658

So maybe it is not surprising to find few investors in it?
Founders aren't children. They are typically post college graduates. And they typically must include one that has an engineering degree, hopefully with some pedigree to it.
Sales Engineer, Mountain View, CA
Treasure Data is also hiring a Sales Engineer with a strong background in data & technology (BS CS or similar) who has successfully sold and/or deployed data-oriented solutions in the recent past (DW, BI, ETL, Hadoop, etc).
Still doesn't work for me. Even in incognito mode.
the amount of cores makes no difference when javascript is single threaded. Infact its often detrimental especially on mobile because each individual core is significantly weaker.

Plenty of websites doing advanced html5 gunk bring top of the line systems to their knees.
I can't take a photo from nat geo and sell it. It's implied copyright. I'm pretty sure one of the original photographers could sue.
I think they're talking about things like WhatsApp, Instagram, and SnapChat.

If you had asked me about each of them before I'd heard of them, I would have told you that they are all solved problems. That SMS, email, and the existing photo-sharing apps are "good enough".

However, these companies are apparently solving people's problems (hence the large userbase for each), even if I personally don't use them and don't quite understand the value proposition that each provides.
The American war of independence also became an Indian war. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sullivan_Expedition
I think it goes to show you how important a brand can be. I wonder how much audience they lost moving from the AllThingsD to ReCode brand.

Seems like a good move for Vox to jump on this, too.
Ask HN: What apps/services does the Bitcoin ecosystem need?
Hey Hackers.

I am fairly new to Bitcoin and have done the research and finally opened my own wallet (pending funds transfer)!

I am curious to pick everyone's brains, from the casual user to the earliest adopters. What do you see the Bitcoin economy/ecosystem needing? What is it missing?

Happy to hear from you all!
> Why would some random software be able to make my pg 8 times faster or more?

Peter Boncz (creator of VectorWise, HyPer) says it best here:
http://www.tpc.org/tpctc/tpctc2013/slides_and_papers/005.pdf

Remember also that the postgres planner and execution machinery is ANCIENT. Plan scoring still assumes Disk I/O = 10 MemoryAccess = 100CPU instructions. Modern CPUs are SIMD and Vector processing, but PG planning/exec machinery isn't vector aware. There's a 200X difference between L1 cache and main memory access that the PG planner can't see. And what about SSDs and NVMe vs disk? Spark gains its speed through caching intermediate result sets along with the ability to reconstruct them. But postgres doesn't cache intermediate results or query plans last I checked. Plus a million other things.

Postgres is wonderful, but not because it has natively fast analytics. 8X is nothing. 180X is better, but not as fast as Vertica, Aster, Greenplum, et al. I say kudos to Citus and Vitesse for leading the way.
So just what is internet.org?
Yup. Android is still far more open than Windows Phone/mobile from that point of view, which is why it's possible for Microsoft to do many of these things with Android. Last I checked you couldn't even have another browser other than IE on Windows Phone, and I assume that won't change with Windows 10 mobile.

Also you can make Android apps work on Windows or another OS relatively easy but the reverse isn't true (not counting the very hacky WINE on Linux).

All of that still shows that at least for now Google is still much more "open" than Microsoft is.

The unfortunate thing is that these moves where Microsofts gets to integrate with "open" stuff from Google, and then gets all credit for doing that, is only going to force Google to become more closed to stop Microsoft from doing that. It's kind of a nash equilibrium.

When you open up a lot of stuff and your competitor uses it freely and gets credit for doing that, but you can't do the same with your competitors' products - what's the outcome?

It reminds me of when Gtalk was open right until Microsoft wanted to integrate it with Skype. Then Google shut down that API because it couldn't have done the same with Skype, and Microsoft would've been the one with the app that has "both Skype and Gtalk", and not Google.
Nor IE on any os apart from windows
4 REASONS WHY MOBILE MARKETING IS a MUST
Deals like this, the demise of Gigaom (yes, I know - but it won't work), and the general lack of runaway success of tech publications lately often get people lamenting how media is on a downward slide and the business model inherently broken. I'm starting to suspect, however, that tech media as a mass market idea is grossly overrated.

The typical "person on the street" doesn't care about "tech" as an individual topic, nor for publications like Gigaom, TechCrunch, or ReCode. They'll take tech flavored news in their stream as it comes whatever the source (and folks like the BBC, CNN, the NYT, etc, all do a good job of it anyway).

The people who work in and live and breathe "tech" (e.g. us) and who do really care aren't considered to be "enough" for a mass market site. It's ridiculous a newish site with 1.5 million uniques a month is classified as "struggled to draw significant traffic" in an industry that employs around 6.5 million Americans in all. The "genericization" of tech media as mass market media is horrid - look at how insipid the stories TechCrunch covers nowadays, for example.

I think people need to rework their assumptions about what "tech" is, how it relates to the media as a whole, and to get used to the idea that tech-specific media is (and should be) almost (but not quite) as niche as media aimed at medical professionals, lawyers, people in aviation, or similar groups.
So the thing is, yes, this hypothetical thing will affect your architecture. That's true. But what's also true is that a) this other thing over here you're not aware of will ALSO affect your architecture; and b) the thing you're planning ahead for might never happen.

Which is to say the really obvious: The future is unknowable.

Some people react to this by saying "okay, let's make everything as general as possible then, so we can be prepared for an unknowable future" and architect up a forest of abstractions.

Some people (the YAGNI crowd) react to this by saying "okay, let's making everything as simple as possible, so it's easy to change in the future when we know things" and rigorously eschew unnecessary abstraction.

In my experience (which includes creating, maintaining, and managing a single large application for a decade), the YAGNI crowd has the right of it. Complexity is a cost, and you should only incur it if you absolutely, no-question need it.
> Let's see what you're done....It may seem like just another dumb app to a lot of people here

It is just another dumb app with horrific usability issues. The fact that Evan Spiegel got lucky enough to have this go viral doesn't make him any smarter or a better person than anyone here. It makes him lucky.

One of the things I used to do was viral branded content. We would post the same thing for days and get no traction at all, then suddenly the magic combination of the right people would share it and we would have a $20K revenue day with almost no work or advertising expenditure. I wasn't any smarter on those great days than I was on the bad days. Just luckier. This is what happened to Snapchat but on an epic scale, and it's only valuable now because they got lucky in the beginning and now there are 100M users.
> empirically that's not true

Feel like expanding that point? I mean shrinking government and changing society so people depend on it less is literally part of the national GOP platform. Is your argument just that they're not willing to sabotage things for political advantage? (and, if so, how are we to explain the billions spent shutting down the federal government as a negotiating tactic?)
forms if "salary requirement" isn't one of the questions
Essentially, the US Solicitor General says that the lower court ruling in favor of Oracle should stand. And Google should pursue a "fair use" defense of their adoption of the Java standard library APIs.

Hypothetical worse case for Google and Android: the US Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, and then Google subsequently also loses a "fair use" defense. Oracle then is awarded big damages and the Android ecosystem is hurt bad.

Oracle wants smartphone vendors to use its version of Java.
And this is why a lot of software written by the agile teams in the companies I've worked for looks like a messy accumulation of ad hoc solutions, with too little shared code and too much duplication.

Even if you are not implementing a feature right now, you still need to have as much information as possible about what might be needed in the future and how it will fit in in your solution.
Automate targeted visits on Linkedin and get visits back to your profile
Schedule recurring AWS Lambda invocations with the Unreliable Town Clock
I bet they will remain separate and will leave Vox whenever they are contractually allowed to.
Also consider something like a Roku. I mentioned plex earlier, which plugs into the Roku as a "channel" - I use my Roku 3 with Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Plex, and a few other things here and there.

It's not a free replacement like Media Center but it works really really well, and is worth the price if you are a regular streaming media user.
> C++, Perl and Haskell have operator overloading and it gets abused something rotten to produce "concise" (a.k.a. line noise) code.

That's fairly funny coming from a discussion about a language that overloads '+' for strings and numerics, and overloads ==/!= similarly. Perl uses '.' for string concatenation and '+' for numeric addition, and uses eq/ne for string equality, and ==/!= for numeric equality. There's a reason for that.

Overloading is not necessarily used that often in Perl. It's a module that's part of the core, but it's fairly clunky and I rarely see it in the wild except for that spots that it really makes sense (DateTime object boolean comparison comes to mind).
This is an issue with the service not providing direct links to the video.

If you open an .mp4 file in Firefox you can set it to open in an application through your "Applications" settings. By default it prompts "Open with..." or "Save as..." in a dialogue.

If you open a direct link to a video you can open it to play in VLC (or player of your choice).
Besides having to transfer data to run the application in the browser, what limitations are inherit in a web-based application? (I acknowledged the data transfer limitation in my previous comment).

Browsers (especially mobile browsers) are unnecessarily limiting what can be done on the web. Adding additional permissions could enable browsers access to more system resources and components, especially on mobile.

Could you provide some examples of applications that don't require a lot of data that couldn't be run in a web-based environment, because of physical (and not current browser or software) limitations?
A public SNS Topic with a trigger event every quarter hour. Can be used to drive AWS Lambda functions, SQS queues, and email. Free service from an old hacker (me) giving back to the hacker community.
> ReCode will become part of Vox’s expanding digital empire, which includes the popular sports site SB Nation, as well as the technology site The Verge. ReCode also will gain access to Vox’s publishing platform, Chorus, which has been a key in luring marquee journalists including Ezra Klein.

Just goes to show how journalists (either the journalists described, or just the NYT author here) are charmed by the mystique of the CMS. I don't care if Chorus is made in Angular 5.0 [1], the robustness of a CMS is not one that makes much difference to the content producers, particularly writing-focused reporters...And the parts that need to be really nice UI/UX (such as slideshow/gallery/quiz creators) aren't necessarily intrinsic to a CMS. A CMS makes a huge deal in ease of publishing...but for most writers, they don't see much difference other than the rich-text editor. It's certainly at the far bottom of reasons to join an organization as a reporter.

[1] it's Rails 3.x IIRC, but perhaps Chorus also encompasses their suite of static publishing tools such as Middleman:

http://product.voxmedia.com/2014/5/29/5759244/vox-media-ruby...

https://source.opennews.org/en-US/learning/evolution-news-ap...
HiDb: A Haskell In-Memory Relational Database (2014) [pdf]
Being late to the thread, so probably nobody will read it. Anyway:

Looks like there are very few corporations out there, that are able and willing to buy such SaaS products. Remember how long 37Signals tried to get rid of their jobs-site and various non-Basecamp products? Nobody wanted to pay the price despite that the businesses were profitable.

Maybe the USP of those products is tied to extensive niche knowledge and networking. Both is very hard to transfer.
Potential acquirers usually know nothing about the market and also know, that they will need some very good developers and marketers to keep the revenue stream alive, because the previous owners really set a high benchmark for that.

In both cases I personally would have tried to transfer the business to current employees in exchange for a commission based on the future revenues paid over 5 years. Both parties involved know how the business works and can project the future success better than everyone else out there. There is usually also enough trust and communication culture in place.

However, this is not a "quick" exit and the seller is still connected to the business/people for a long time. That risk needs to be covered by the commission, of course.
The first thing I did when I learned python was to write a tetris game in it (using PyGame). So the first thing I did was look at the random piece generator in the go version. It just picks one at random:

g.piece = 1 + rand.Int()%numTypes

However, the official tetris guidelines say that the 7 types of pieces should all be selected in a random order, as if taken from a bag. After all 7 pieces are picked, you can put all of the pieces back in the bag and select again in a random order. [1]

Of course, you don't HAVE to follow the official guidelines. I just thought it would be fun to compare.

[1] http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator
Yes, Samuels' checkers program. First big success in machine learning. The basic concepts are all there. And then, as with most optimization-based systems, it hit a local optimum and got stuck.

Much of machine learning today works somewhat similarly, but has about 6 orders of magnitude more compute power behind it.
IRS requires you to authenticate yourself via one of two mechanisms if you efile (regardless of who you do your taxes with):

1) Prior year AGI

2) Electronic filing PIN

They can also issue a taxpayer a special Identity Protection PIN. If you're issued one of these you MUST use it.

There are two groups of people that don't need to "authenticate" at all:

1) Anyone who didn't file the previous tax year

2) Anyone filing by mail
Crazily, Allthingsd.com has been seeing traffic rise https://siteanalytics.compete.com/allthingsd.com/#.VWT26mRVh...
Color thief is actually credited in the vibrant.js source: https://github.com/jariz/vibrant.js/blob/master/src/Vibrant....
Ansible 101
> pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown

Not sure what this statement is about. It was British who abolished the slave trade, and pressured the rest of the world to follow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807
Seems the tech blog industry is not doing so well. First Gigaom shuts down and ReCode gets acquired by Vox Media. I think Vox are definitely the right buyers of the site though, they seem to have a decent track record and their current properties like TheVerge are doing quite well all things considering. As long as they keep Walt and Kara on with ReCode, the site will continue as normal.