skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of these "startups" are boring; they are not STARTUPS, they are small businesses doing what others are doing (or have done).

They seem to lack the OMG spark of insight into how technology can be used to do something exciting. IMHO, a web site or an App (is there really much difference) is not a STARTUP--but it can be a business that generates income.
So instead of giving these positions to the people most qualified and capable of making the most out of them based on the metrics we have chosen to measure success. We should give them to people because of their upbringing or gonads? Regardless if they are the most qualified person to fill that position?

So the student (let's call them Sally) was afforded a better education, and using their superior knowledge are more qualified for a position. So Sally should be told "Sorry, this spot is being given to Sam because they are an ethnic minority."?

Remind me how that is fair for Sally and not benevolent racism towards Sam?
Well these technologies are there to help bring Google type infrastructure for businesses that need it. If you're running a CRUD app just fine on Heroku you don't need to do any of this and you shouldn't.

When your availability starts having problems or your data is getting too much for one machine, you start having problems of scale. Where you are in terms of scaling issues should lead you to the next iteration of technology required to keep your service up.

Starting out of the gates with that one idea you're not sure anyone will be interested in? Just stick to deploying something fast and not worry about Google style scaling solutions.
I've just been playing with it some in the last couple of weeks. I get the impression that they're still iterating pretty rapidly on it - at least partly because the official practice repo uses trait all over the place, which they apparently deprecated and changed to interface.

I will say that it It looks very promising so far, and seems to have the best of C# and Ruby, assuming you're sticking with compile-time type checking, plus a few more tricks besides. I'm not that up on JVM languages though, so I'm not sure that it's definitively better than any of the other choices.
Darpa Robotics Challenge leaves brilliant PR legacy
Production workflow and inventory management are totally greenfield. No one has ever written apps for that stuff before, nope.
1. OK - I agree.

2. So - did you get mint.com to tell you how they integrated with your bank(s) ? Did your local bank tell you, for that matter, how they did background searches on their staff ?

3. You clearly don't manage a company with issues like COBRA, insurance, or payroll.

I almost didn't get past #1, but #2 and #3 were non-issues. Why? Because when you manage a business, you have to focus on your core business: So either pay to outsource HR (6K month, thats a salary right there), risk noncompliance with a broker, or go with Zenefits and worry about under-the-bed monsters that do not exist under #2-#3.
An introduction to immutable infrastructure
For those interested in learning about Coq (and computer science in general), I'd highly recommend http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/current/index.html. Aside from being incredibly enlightening, it's also quite fun.

Set it up in emacs with Proof General and you get instant validation that you're correctly doing all the exercises as you go; it's like playing a game that teaches you type theory, proof automation, typed lambda calculus, Hoare logic and more.
But what if the process uses a timer to update an animation? (I.e., the state of the timer determines the frame in the animation).

In that case, after unpausing, the animation would just skip ahead.

As a remedy, the pause button could also stop the system clock as seen by the process.
ReadMe.io (YC W15) Is Hiring Node/Angular Developers
ReadMe.io is looking for our first hire! We're looking for product-focused, Node/Angular developers to help us redefine what "good documentation" means.

Remember the first time you used Stripe or Twilio? Our mission is to bring a magical feeling of simplicity to even the most onerous of APIs and code libraries. Documentation is the interface we all use to interact with them, yet it is still stuck in the dark ages.

ReadMe is a profitable, venture-backed startup that graduated from Y Combinator's W2015 batch. We're already powering the developer experience for thousands of projects, from companies like Box and Microsoft to open source projects like Mozilla and Apache.

Are you passionate about making products people love, and spend way too much time focusing on the "little big details"? You'll fit right in! Join us in building something every developer relies on.

Email jobs@readme.io or check out the full job listing:

https://jobs.lever.co/readme/f22d10ca-53ca-4189-b88c-571cdc8...

(Full time in SF only)
You two are conflating scientific discoveries with products. Gravity existed before Newton discovered it. He didn't create it. Likewise, it is fine to consider the theory of relativity without going into Einstein's childhood or upbringing or other personal traits of his.

It is, however, absolutely essential to take into account the person behind a product when evaluating a product. You would never write an essay on the film stylings of Stanley Kubrick or Roman Polanski without fully considering their backgrounds and personality quirks. You would certainly never write about a work of classic literature without first taking into account the context of when the book was written, what life experiences the author had, or what inspired the author to write such a book.

Products like TempleOS should be treated the same.
> or do you mean what today is labeled capitalism but is characterized by coercive force and cronyism?

That's what has always been labeled capitalism, starting with the socialist critiques of the dominant system (filled, as it was, with coercive force and cronyism) in the developed world in the mid-to-late 19th century who invented the term "capitalism" as a label for that system.

Outside of incoherent, fantasies the neither exist in the real world or stand up to much examination even in theory -- fantasies constructed largely as a propaganda to defend that coercive, cronyistic system from its critics -- nothing else but coercive, cronyism-dominated systems has ever been referred to with the label "capitalism".
If people are talking about breaking up a simple web application and saddling it with all sorts of crazy complexity, then this is the correct reaction and you should feel bad.

If people actually have a legitimate need for really high availability and really high scalability and are willing to pay through the nose for the software development necessary to make a straightforward system into a distributed system... well, you should still feel just bad about all the complexity, but you're basically stuck with it :)
Yes, doing hard crypto for all users has costs. Welcome to the real world. :-)
Reading this made my brain feel itchy.

Because it's too close to some conversations I've had.
Also unlimited horizontal scalability if your app isn't DB bound, nice.
I like to think its more akin to the Jettsons but I digress...
New, new hotness is React Native (or whenever FB decides to make it also available on Android) and JSBlocks.
So is there a placebo button that supports "force touch" yet? ;)
Seems to be the problem with a lot of technologies. If you're a HN reader, you can start to get the feeling that you're falling behind if you're not doing these things. Even though they are totally inappropriate for the majority of us who are working on smaller systems.
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries
Vietnamese farmers make solar-powered boat
Does anyone know the actual purpose of the LightSail?

The article doesn't seem to mention it, just the details of this successful mission.
Not sure if you have a better method for getting feedback. First sentence in 12.6 has a minor typo: "“Subscripts allow you *do define a way of allowing your class”
Thanks once more. I guess I'm not buying his beliefs, just his advice on getting stronger.. :)

Will check that again one of the upcoming nights.
In a highly competitive market, profits for production are driven to zero. The only thing that remains profitable is rent, for ownership of otherwise unshareable resources like land.

We are seeing a shift toward a more idealized, libertarian market. The problem is, in such a market, the only people getting richer are the owner class.
I know it's not technically correct but I'm guessing that "no one" was meant to suggest "a very small percentage" which is likely accurate.
> -1°C and +1°C mean pretty different conditions outside

They really don't, though. Temperature varies over an area, varies by hour, melting and freezing can take days when you're close to the limit...

It can snow when the surface is above freezing. It can rain when the surface is below freezing.

I can show you two days in any winter, -1C and 1C, and they'll look exactly the same.

And while 100 is convenient for boiling, 200 is roughly just as convenient.
It's good that you lead with risk as #1. You know this, but many don't follow so closely. So here's a Wiki entry of a recent spectacular failure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

The first sentence:

The Knight Capital Group was an American
global financial services firm

The key word is: was
Can we make it cheaper than we can buy it? Is their purchase price more expensive than my hourly wage for a few months?
As the other guy who replied said, there's nothing explicitly wrong with it. But it's not to be ornery. I think it only appears that way to people who haven't thought it through. I don't owe GVR or the core dev team anything. Certainly not thousands of man-hours to make their new, unnecessarily breaking version of Python3 to be successful.
It's that going from Python2, it's mere technical churn. Python3 has zero technical innovation. It's just a different way of doing certain things, nothing more. Unicode was supported in Python since 2.6. Print was a statement rather than a function. Std lib cleanups. So what? Bigger fish to fry in the world than that. All of the new features, can, and do work on Python2 in the form of backports.

It breaks everything I've ever written, for no good reason. I also end up with a much smaller pool of libraries to choose from for new projects.

It makes no sense. In a microcosm of the universe where Python was the only game in town, Python3 would have worked out. Instead of moving to 3 and losing many advantages for churn, I can just go spend time with something else. Swift is pretty what I'd design if I could pick and choose features, so it's perfect for me- excited I'll be able to use it serverside while simultaneously learning the language for iOS.

Also, people frequently cite that moving from 2->3 is easy. It is. But they somehow forget that testing old, large projects is extremely labor intensive and always results in breakage. Unless you have 100% test coverage, which I know no one who does.
Your question presupposes that there would be no recourse.

I never advocated such a position.

It was a strawman.
Love this. I'm happy to say I just talked to Bill Nye on Friday (LS was still AWOL) about this and a recent science competition for kids and I love his enthusiasm for everything. He thinks of it as carrying on work that Carl Sagan started. Just gonna hijack this thread to share a couple quotes from my notes that didn't make it into my article[1], since you guys might appreciate them:

"for me it's [lightsail is] really personal. i had carl sagan for one class, and it changed my life. and so i'm really excited to get this thing working. if not this mission, the next mission. oh god, the concept is just cool, to just be sailing around the solar system essentially for free. It's elegant."

"there are two questions we all ask, and if you meet somebody who claims they've never asked these questions they're lying and that's all there is to it: where did we come from and are we alone in the universe? if you want to answer those questions, you have to look at the past and the future. You have to look at paleontological evidence, and you have to explore space."

"talk to younger people. they expect great things from technology. that expectation i believe will carry over to every aspect of life - that we can do technological things to prevent climate change. that for any problem there's a technological solution."

"this is what we talk about all the time in science ed. we want science every day in every grade. this is obvious to me and my colleagues in science ed. what's amazing is it's not amazing to everybody. science is as important a topic as writing and reading and arithmetic. if you want to have innovation, if you want to have the engineers of tomorrow, you have to have science."

"kids have no trouble understanding climate change - it's grown-ups that are confused. climate change denial is almost entirely a generational issue."

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/bill-nye-boosts-...
It's an experiment to build a spacecraft that sails through space powered by solar winds.
> Achieving those things was always in the future, at some relatively well-moneyed point that I was expecting would roll around— until I realized the future had dawned and the financial stability hadn’t appeared

Well gosh, maybe you have to actually do something to make financial stability happen instead of just expecting that it will magically materialize one day when you hit a certain age.
As an engineer I feel an obligation to know about these things and how they work. It might be appropriate for my work. For my own projects I am just going to start out with a Django or Meteor app and if I'm lucky enough to have to worry about scale I'll have some idea of what to do next.
This is one of my favorite blog posts of all time.

I love it.

Thank you, CircleCI, for posting this!
They're testing a solar sail concept with the idea of using it as an ultra-lightweight way to move around the solar system. It's been theorized for decades and this is the first attempt to actually put it up there in space. Lots more info here:

http://sail.planetary.org/

edit: as others point out, this isn't quite the first time. but it is the first time in a long time!
They will when it conflicts with their business model. Witness protected access to media keys and the Notification Center.
Sumcoin: A Practical Decentralized Blockchain; Compact Confidential Transactions [pdf]
CDNperf – Find Fast and Reliable JavaScript CDNs
Material Design: Another Face of Flat Design
As the great Jules Winnfield (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Fiction) once said, "Well, allow me to retort."

> I think the author would have been better suited without mentioning HFT, maybe algo trading model?, as its a lighting rod for controversy.

Don't be so quick... in a world where keeping score is simple and the odds are tilted for many, any publicity is good publicity.

> 4) Back testing, no HFT trade idea's go into production without backtesting, Every HFT firm is different but I think they'd all adhere to this rule.

I'm sure the majority do. But I really didn't. The problem with backtesting low latency (by which I mean switch-to-switch roundtrips of < ~ 50us) is there are so many sources of jitter the data is basically "mean of x, st dev of 6x^3". Too much noise to signal to make it worth it.

So I would run something "in sim" for a while on live market data but simulated execution. I never looked for profitability--I looked for predictability. If you know the knobs on your system, you can make it work in any market. If you don't know the knobs, you have no business trading it. After a run of a week or so with no major problems I'd go into production. BUT:

> before you write anything else, you write hte risk system.

Oh Dear Lord yes. Not counting life-supporting, military, etc. tech, these are some of the sharpest tools you can imagine. Knight lost $440mm in less than an hour. And they were decidedly not of average expertise. That failure was a much bigger deal than most realize. Luckily smart people noticed and a lot of risk stuff changed after that (imo that was when people finally started to say "fast enough, I need to generate smarter orders").

> 2) The system has no rate limiter, what do you do when the quotes come in too fast for you to deal with?

I've been out of the guts for ~2 years, but by universal unforgiving law, the volume of quotes has got to be ridiculous now. People talk about "low latency" when they're talking about serving static HTML at 1000/s. So few people have actually seen the nuts and bolts of feed handlers--it's not their fault, this isn't widely available stuff--but the traffic spikes are mind-boggling. Good adapters combined with a tuned network stack will translate signal into "book" data, meaning usable basically, in ~ 5us. Meaning they do that 200 times per MILLIsecond. And it's not enough sometimes. And you and your rival firms are spending a lot trying to make that number 4us. Blah blah blah, I kinda miss it.
The Placebo Effect in Animals (1999) [pdf]
I use an Ergotron Workfit-S: http://www.ergotron.com/ProductsDetails/tabid/65/PRDID/378/D...

It's very quick to move up and down, and the keyboard tray and monitor are independent. Not much adjustibility on the monitors, but otherwise I have no complaints.
Or maybe it's a clever ploy by their sysadmins to avoid being ground up into Soylent themselves
Ughhh this.

I just want to give my project to a PaaS and let them figure out everything.

I was looking into Google App Engine, but they didn't support some language features I wanted (e.g. Java 1.8, Servlet 3.X["I know, programming in Java? You're stuck in the past"]). So I looked into their new Container Engine. But like this article points out, it makes deployment 500000000 times more complicated than it should be.
Related, this was just published today: http://voxelsoft.com/dev/sumcoin.pdf
> A bold claim coming from someone who thinks "It's not a bug, it's a feature" is successful marketing rather than a punchline.

Thanks for confirming my suspicion; the fact that "it's a feature not a bug" is pretty unethical has nothing to do with whether it can successful or not. It's a useful logical tool to learn to distinguish "is" from "ought"; whether or not you think that Smart TVs are better than dumb TVs or not has no bearing on whether or not they're marketed as such and most importantly believed as such by the majority of consumers.

Hell it's not even one of the worst heuristics in play: (higher) price and popularity of a product as a heuristic for quality may be even worse than "more features" as a heuristic, and these two are extremely prevalent. And yet just because I don't like them doesn't mean I pretend that these tendencies simply don't exist.
> They really don't, though.

They roughly do. It's just a mental marker (i.e. 0°), which I find to be nicer than 32°.
I haven't seen a formal analysis, but I can tell you for sure that it is highly skill-based until everyone plays optimally at the game. Then it becomes luck-based.

Best example was a tournament for Settlers. In the early stages one player dominated each table. But in one of the last stages it was only the top players. The game ended with one person getting their 10th VP and everyone else at the table had their 10th VP in their hands.
You both could be right as that is a bit of a conspiracy http://www.visualnews.com/2013/07/16/flintstones-living-with...

// feature request: poster flag's own posts as tangents that start new topics leaving only a graphic (arrow leaving square) in original thread
As somebody who spent a lot of time and effort to figure out how to do Flash-style complex animations fully in SVG SMIL including reversed time loops, hierarchical time modelling via easings and to make authoring available for free in an online animation tool, I am very sad to see abrupt Google's decision to deprecate SMIL in Chrome without having a full replacement available. SVG + CSS can be used only for simple things, SVG + JavaScript competes with canvas + JavaScript and more efficient geometry formats, and in addition in both cases the declarative approach is lost. The goal of having Web Animations to take place of SMIL makes sense, especially with advanced time modelling, however there are still many cases where the current proposal can't do what SMIL does and it would take some time until Web Animations will become usable in all browsers at the expected level for professional animation. SMIL has its share of problems but it was more-less working on all relevant mobile browsers. Now we are basically left with nothing that can do the job.
In case anyone wonders, this is the "cuban" clone of craigslist. http://www.revolico.com

You cab buy/sell almost anything on the black market.

For reference, 1 CUC = 1.10 USD
I wonder how hard it would be to modify this to a different assembly language?
Not that you're wrong -- you're correct -- but I want to bring up that this was likely true at the time this was written. LispyScript has been around for a while.
LifeHack: How to Get FREE AMC/Regal Movies
Any time you read words like this:

"We’re a generation in which children were empowered by promises that they could grow up to be anything they wanted to be."

You should remember that, since 1973, wages have been declining for the majority of men in the USA:

http://www.smashcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Scree...

Women have seen some modest improvement in wages, but for the most part, the era since 1973 has been a very bad one for American workers.

For young men, the problems started as early as the recession of 1958. That was the year that the ratio of average wage to average rent hit its all time best, making it easy for a young couple to set themselves up with their own place. For that reason, this was also the peak of the Baby Boom.
It's a solar sail, or rather a test thereof.

Long story short, photons (and solar wind) impart a small amount of momentum on the sail. This can be used instead of rockets - as long as you don't mind it taking an absurd amount of time to get you anywhere, that is. And its a whole lot lighter.
Getting a 502 error when trying to add fpco.key. Guessing servers are overloaded?
As a friend of mine in academia is discovering...it can be quite hard to tell if it is broke.
Clojurescript has to be compiled by the google closure compiler on the server side. The closure compiler doesn't work out of the box with other libraries, you need some kind of bridge.

Lispyscript has the very nice advantage of being able to run directly in the browser. Since it's translated directly to javascript, I expect it won't have problems using other javascript libraries.
Ask HN: How do you market your mobile app?
Just curious if people have any neat tricks to share to get their mobile apps awareness.
CloudKit is BaaS (like Parse), and here I meant PaaS (like AppEngine).
The thing is, "pretty good results" are competing against any number of eateries where we can get "delicious." Cooking together is fun, but scrapping or choking down a failed meal is not.

I've screwed up easy recipes plenty of times in the past. The promise that I can get a good result despite my lack of skill is what's appealing.
Japan’s next big neutrino project
Can you guarantee success at development? And even if you can, is it a good idea?

The coolest software project I've ever been on was also the dumbest. We were trying to build a bios in-house - something that can be bought off-the-shelf for a buck. In theory, it could have saved us millions in the long run. In the short run, we were wasting man-months of engineering on something that was not our business, when the clock was ticking loudly. Fun as heck, but if I caught my own employees doing such a thing today, I'd at least threaten to fire them if they even thought about it again.

Likewise, Soylent is not in the inventory management business. Why should they be writing inventory management software? Buy that stuff. Focus development money on the core business.
I've done that. It's the equivalent of "I love my wife". Guess whose idea it was? :)