skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's awesome. Would love to know more. I was (only tangentially, really it was my manager) involved with (one of many) LIMS evaluations at CSIRO. I'm under the impression that "Generic" LIMS have awful track records in Australia at universities and research orgs like CSIRO: despite custom software projects also having poor cost/performance outcomes generally, historically it seems there aren't any great examples of LIMS aimed at diverse multidisciplinary research environments which have delivered better outcomes at less cost than even the most horribly expensive over-budget bespoke systems places like this churn out. There is a trail of train wrecks that is failed LIMS projects in this sector, largely from manufacturing/forensics sector thinking their LIMS fits all...

The most inspiring thing I saw was work on automated high-throughput materials discovery (I believe the examples at the time were polymers). Instrument operation, experiment design and results capture was done with OWL/RDF... And off it goes: repeatable results where the software drives experiment parameters until a goal or properties are reached. Semantic web tech has a lot of failed promises to answer for but those guys really seemed to make this stuff sing. Seeing what they're modeling/capturing, graph data models might not be such a bad fit, after seeing the contortions we went through in genetic studies trying to capture every facet of every piece of data and its provenance and the provenance of its methods and materials and specimens and specimen preparation and specimen identification and splitting and cloning and so on ad nauseum

Better stop ranting. I do software defined radio at dayjob and some silly osint graph-db driven thing I'm playing with at home to help security audit all packages, binaries and hopefully one day in-memory processes in linux/containers :)
The only point that I agree with is this one:

"Margin compression": A lot of tech businesses sell things, and because the market is good there isn't much price competition. My unicorn sees a lot of companies that appear to be dependent on customers paying what they're told to pay. These companies have yet to experience, or survive, a price war with their rivals.

All the other ones are BS.

> Entire generation of entrepreneurs under age 30 have no memory of 2000 or 2008.

Lol wut? I'm 29. I remember both in vivid detail. I worked in tech in 1999. Sure I was young, but I had been seriously programming for already 4 years. Let alone 2008, that was the year I graduated university. I remember barely landing a job just as things went sideways.

Gen Y knows things can go wrong. Maybe some current 17 or 18 year olds don't.

> Interest rates: Central banks currently have interest rates [...]

Find me a bank that will lend me money so that I can invest in startups. It's impossible. Interest rates going up will depress assets prices that are frequently purchased with debt: Housing and Education.

> Valuations. [Specifically Uber]

If Uber wins it wins logistics as a whole. This is like talking about Amazon. Back then Amazon realized that books were the only thing that made sense to sell online because of the markups and the fact that customers don't need to touch a book to want to buy it. Then once customers got used to buying stuff online and Amazon worked out their distribution model they expanded to more and more things. Read "ecommerce is a bear".

For other companies, sure there are some winners and some losers. But Facebook, for example, has data on every person on earth that has real spending power. Super, super valuable.

In the 90s only us nerds were online. Today tweens sext. Completely different markets.

> Private valuations not matching public ones

1. Sarbanes Oxley.
2. Investors dump stocks that have no real growth left in them onto the public. The only exception was Tesla, and that was out of desperation, and look how well they are doing.

> Tech startups offering stock at a discount

This doesn't usually materially effect the valuations of a stock. 20% discount, 50% tops.

> Burn rates

If you aren't burning money then it is a huge red flag to investors. There is a very real risk that your money machine doesn't scale or that you can't recruit talent in the same numbers as before.

> Too many business models are dependent on "one thing not happening"

This would be a factor if there actually were a bubble about to pop. There isn't, so this will naturally work its way out. Also, it isn't like 1999 where all money flowed through Yahoo or Microsoft. The world has more real world businesses like arms contractors, that don't overlap business cycles.

I've been saying that there isn't a bubble for over 7 years. There still isn't a bubble. There will be one that starts to form soon when crowd investing starts to get underway world wide, but until retail investors invest in startups in a large and meaningful way, there isn't a bubble.
yeah, It will report the underlying textnode (if you are lucky). It's really inconsistent across browsers: some report the h1 tag, some the underlying node. Depends also how far you go and if you mark over the tag (without highlighting another node). Chrome is doing the best job in my experience.
And at some point your only option is Vinny, who hangs out all day at the bar over on 4th. His deals can be...problematic, but he'll give them to anyone.
Z80s are still available new and in IP core form for integration into SoCs... as is the 6502, 8051, and several other "classic" MCUs designed in the late 70s/early 80s.

As I'm typing this my keyboard's controller is an 8051 variant, the touchscreen of my phone also uses an 8051, the mouse has a 6502, and the monitors in front of me have an 80186 core in them.

They are fast enough for the task, cheap, and development tools widely available, so they really don't need to be replaced.
Any reason you don't have SSL / HTTPS on the registration page? Feels a little risky entering details on a form without SSL these days.
I'm a bit confused: are you saying that the system was running Scala for 25 years? Thought Scala was just a few years ago.

And was the genlock card a Video Toaster by any chance?
Once Google Maps reached sufficiently high-resolution satellite images to actually see all of the gravel roads, I was actually a bit awestruck. The majority of the state of Iowa looks like a sheet of graph paper.

I grew up a in the region and spent plenty of time driving around endless country roads. It's just so weird to see it from above, all at once. Makes one appreciate the skill of surveying without the modern aid of gps.
Why do pollen counts increase every year? Global temperatures don't rise every year.
* HSTS requires HTTPS connections
* Internet.org (currently) requires HTTP only [1]
* But Wikipedia is a member of Internet.org [2]

I'm curious how Wikipedia will handle this. Perhaps allowing Facebook to MITM?

Or maybe the security mentioned in the original article isn't intended for those who can't afford it[3].

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-technical-guidelines
[2] https://internet.org/press/introducing-the-internet-dot-org-app
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero
If this is true, I predict Microsoft will backtrack because of the ensuing backlash.

No every country has cheap, fast internet without bandwidth limits.

I will be very angry if Windows 10 zaps my expensive & limited bandwidth with no way to turn it off. Auto updating chrome is entirely different because its just a few MBs.

Let's even assume I can get fast, free internet somewhere. How would the OS determine when I'm on a bandwidth limited network and when I'm not?

Windows 8 had a feature to mark certain networks as limited. But their implementation was a complete joke. It required modem manufacturers to rewrite their drivers and this surely would not happen.

Windows 10 was looking great till now. I use two Windows phones and have always thought of how better their browsing experience would be if Microsoft's engineers left their Seattle castles for a few months to undeveloped places like Monrovia, Bangladesh, Ghana...

If they did, they wouldn't make moronic decisions like blocking app sharing on WP. They may not know it but that singular decision effectively botched their chances of gaining high market shares in undeveloped markets. I can't count how many times I've heard, "But it can't collect apps from other phones right?" People would marvel at my phones but...

Windows 10 supposedly would fix the aforementioned issue. Yet, they would benefit from living with their non-USA customers. The company is too USA-centric for the own good.
I love his remarks on the New Age movement. Spirituality without some form of sacrifice has always struck me as unauthentic.
As described in plenty of comments in that thread, that experiment was not in basic income. Minimal income and basic income are different in fundamental ways, and could potentially lead to fundamentally different behaviours.
Not Bawls? Not valid.
I do not think we are in tech bubble at least for another 5 years. We have real new products coming one after another across multiple domains like AR, VR, self driving cars, drones and what not.
Sure it is a different thing; but if its all about the caffeine then the tea is loads cheaper :)
I hope you aren't implying a comic strip glossed over some details in an effort to reduce the message to a small, easily consumed and memorably sequence of events, just so they could fit within the limits of the form. I hold the medium in far to high a regard to consider that a possibility! ;)

Joking aside, I think you were primed to interpret the comic in a specific way which may not have been the intent. I don't think it was saying much about the state of surveillance using computer vision as much as it was showing the absurdity, at this point, of using a method that prevents computer vision from working but also makes you uniquely and easily identifiable. Eventually, if enough of the populace takes up a similar method of obfuscating their identity, then it's useful, as you are again anonymized as one among many, but until then you are an anonymous member of a very small group (possibly containing only you), which itself isn't very hard to identify. Not all that useful.
Thanks for this. All you have to do is look at the "Deaf Culture" folks to see where attempts to normalize a disease state leads.

The lack of ability to hear is not a difference to be celebrated, and anyone who does celebrate it is a sad, pathetic individual spreading harm and--very often--hate.

It is possible to gracefully accept who we are and the things about us that can't yet be fixed, while at the same time striving to fix them.

Our diseases are not our identities.

Deaf Culture and other similar movements start off by accepting the lie that collectivist bigots have imposed on them--that our diseases are our identities--and then simply declare that that identity is good. Accepting the identity that hostile collectivists want to impose on you is rarely a good thing. In the case of disease states it really does end in opposing any attempt to cure the disease, and if there's a purer kind of evil than that--cloaked in the brightly shining garb of rights and defense of the oppressed--I'm not sure what it is.
Very likely it's Bell 202 AFSK. This is specifically designed to run at audio frequencies with 1200 Hz and 2200 Hz tones. You'd have to figure out how the higher protocol levels are implemented but it's probably going to fall within the realm of what is done with AX.25.
"In 1999 you could get a billion dollar valuation with not much more than a domain name and an idea. Most of those never ended up making any money at all."

Well, kind of. Having been there, the biggest problem I remember is not that these companies didn't have any revenue, it's that they didn't have any profit. Webvan, Kozmo, Pets.com, etc. had customers. They just lost money on every sale. The problem came when investors stopped funding them to do so, and many of them went out of business literally overnight (like Chuck's comment elsewhere in this thread mentioned.)

I would be more worried if Uber, Airbnb, etc. lost money on every sale. It is relatively easier to turn the marketing knob down to $0 spent, if your customers will still continue using your service at that point. I think the fundamentals are better this time around, though I still strongly feel Valley VC's overweight "getting 100% of the available market" and underweight "making money on each sale."
This is a case of Something.js if I've ever seen one:

http://www.developingandstuff.com/2015/03/somethingjs.html
Show HN: A Repo of JavaScript Coding Challenges
There is a payphone within view of my job and until a year or two ago there were one close to my apartment. They are rare, but not as rare as you might think.
Doesn't matter what I like; if we flagged every article somebody didn't like, there'd be no HN.
"Was dagegen?" would better be translated as "Got a problem?"
Current best practice [and perhaps state regulations for public schools] require commissioning the controls. And RFQ's, RFP's, sealed bids, etc. The project requirements are discontinuous with a homeowner thermostat replacement in the same way that database cluster requirements are discontinuous with a Comcast residential gateway.
Most of my credit cards will not update the balance immediately after I make a payment. It takes a day (sometimes more, depending on timing). Clearly batch processes are involved.

There's nothing wrong with batch processes. They are often easier to reason about than having a system where everything can change in real time.

Sometimes you want real time. Sometimes (many times) a daily batch is just fine.
http://dota2.prizetrac.kr/international2015
We are definitely in a bubble.

The question is whether, when and how bad it will burst.

Predicting market events like bursts is extremely hard, even for experts - so hard you can make a lot of money from it - remember that economists too said that the housing market was a bubble and wrote posts to mock how, for four years people kept repeating the claims.

If billion dollar valuations for buttons that text 'Yo' isn't a speculation bubble on the one area of US industrial growth, an area that gets a lot of cash influx to keep it going (much of it taxpayer), I don't know what we could call a bubble.

Not all bubbles burst. But how much confidence do you have that the market will remain the way it is today after another series of Snowden revelations, a housing crises (or water crisis) in the Valley, the release of financial information that makes people lose faith, a shocking event like Alibaba beating out Amazon or something, etc?

If you think something like that could seriously damage the industry then you have to admit that the demand for the good and services is highly elastic - or at least fragile.

Fragility of a market + overvaluation and overspeculation implies a bubble.
I'm from Argentina. In my opinion Club Mate taste pretty good: it feels like a "more natural" soda and it's softer than any other soda I know. I think it taste more like mate cocido, which is an alternative preparation of the mate tea. I remember that back in 2003 the Coca-Cola Company made a similar drink called Nativa: it was ok but too sweet for me. On the other hand, Club Mate is perfectly balanced in sweetness.
I know a lot about Lua and LuaJIT, but never heard of Dis until today. After reading a bit about Dis, it sounds like the two have very different designs.

Dis is defined by its instruction set. The instruction set is typed, so the programming language pretty much needs to by statically typed (Lua is dynamically typed). It appears to only support interpreted or fully-compiled modes; ie. it doesn't appear to support a hybrid interpreted/compiled mode where hotspots get compiled (I can't be 100% sure about this from what I read though).

LuaJIT is defined by the Lua programming language -- it has bytecode internally, but this is not really designed to be targeted by other code generators, and the bytecode is heavily biased towards Lua language semantics (some smart people tried compiling JavaScript to LuaJIT and made a lot of progress, but ultimately found that even the slight incompatibilities between JavaScript and Lua made life very difficult: https://tessel.io/blog/112888410737/moving-faster-with-io-js).

LuaJIT is built on a fast interpreter written in assembly language, and uses trace compiling to identify hot traces and JIT-compiles only those. Its compiler is pretty sophisticated, using a SSA internal representation and many optimizations (http://wiki.luajit.org/Optimizations). I suspect this is far beyond what the Dis VM does in its JIT compiler -- the Dis VM emphasizes how many Dis VM instructions can be translated directly into CPU instructions. It seems to expect that most optimization will happen at byte-code generation time, which is a more practical assumption with statically-typed languages.

Overall I expect that LuaJIT is as fast or faster than Dis, despite Lua being a dynamically-typed language. LuaJIT is one of the fastest VMs out there. But it's not a multi-language VM like Dis could potentially be.
Yeah, the effect you describe is very real. It's because the demand price curve for houses is set by the monthly payment, not by the total price, and the monthly payment depends on both the price and the interest rate.

So what you ideally would like to do is buy when the interest rates are high (and prices low), then refinance as the rates drop, and get both lower payments and increased total value.

But rates aren't going to drop for quite a while, so now what do you do? It seems to me that prices are low for how low the rates are, so buying is still (to me) a reasonable decision.

> * Note, I'm not an expert, I might be wrong. This is not a investment advise.

Ditto. Also note that I already own a house, so I'm not taking my own advice, either.
What's the realistic life expectancy of modern hardware?

I ran a Ras. Pi system for monitoring my sprinklers and such but after about 9 months it has had some funkiness, I suspect power related and then the flash has had a couple little glitches. I couldn't see it lasting 5 years. I have an odroid-c1 that seems to be more robust in terms of power and such (it has a dedicated transformer, not some cheap USB that seems to "work") I do worry about the flash crapping out... Although if the policy is to burn a few flashes and just keep some spares, you should have quick recovery.

Maybe some good server grade hardware, in a data center, you can expect some decent life.
I can't do much, but I can take 3 seconds to tap this up. I hope everyone does the same. Thus community should reflect a moment on the downside cost of all this electronics we have.
>and then used whatever tools I wanted to get it done, then email in the completed exercise.

This is a much more realistic way of testing someone's skills. Asking someone to write code while they watch is not.

I am personally horrible at coding while someone is looking over my shoulder. I am just too preoccupied with their presence and the fact that they are watching. And, unless a company is still into pair programming (is anyone these days?), it's not a valid test.

Give me a real problem, reasonable time to solve it, and the tools I'd have in the real world. Then, I can show you what I can do in that same real world vs. how well I interview in some contrived format.
> March 7, 2014

What was the name of this doc? There is some date incongruity here, unless Ed got his old job back.
Facebook expands its news feed shopping experiment
I've always found 1-10 choices to be a frustrating scale for things are subjective.

Rate your week, 1-10. I dunno, what is 1 even like? Are you asking me to compare to the worst possible week? Yeah, my week sucked, but I'm not in work camp or anything.

This has been the most straightforward way of asking this kind of question I've seen.
EF solves a real problem in the UK.

Our universities don't exhibit anywhere near the same 'entrepreneurial culture' vs the US equivalents (although this is slowly improving - thankfully). We also don't have the big tech companies (google/fb etc) with the means to compete with banks/hedge-funds for the highest quality engineers/PMs. In the US, these institutions serve as natural breeding grounds for startups. Without these environments, it becomes much more difficult to find like-minded people to develop ideas and raises the time/cost associated with doing so.

I joined EF on the current cohort for this reason and have been surprised (to the upside) with my fellow cohort members. They have managed to recruit some exceptionally talented and motivated people who would be difficult to find otherwise. Also, apart from the cash investment (which just serves to pay your living costs), they have a great network of industry contacts, alumni and investors.

The jury is out on whether the EF model will succeed in producing valuable companies. However, given the level of technical talent it is attracting, they are definitely solving a real problem and I believe it will outperform the YC-style accelerators who have been struggling in Europe. Hopefully they will open the investment fund up to alumni in the near future :)

Message me if you have any questions - would be happy to answer.
$22 billion / 55 employees SO $.35 billion / employee
How common are remote radio controllers in historical or modern systems?

I think the most interesting part of this article is the use of radio for a wide-area network, even if it only got a passing mention in the article.

Some questions I'd love to know: What kind of protocol was used? Are computer uses of walkie-talkie radio bands allowed by the FCC? How do the receivers work? If they don't run on their own microprocessor, how were they designed?
Search for the right house begins with the right neighborhood. Get neighborhood premium scores
In theory, you might be right. In practice it is absolute different. Those courts where mostly installed in the past to protect the interests of bigger countries against smaller countries. Of course, in some cases it was necessary, but in practice it was used to protect the interests of big corporations against the smaller countries. And that is the reason, we got such frivolous acting of corporations. They just knew, that the courts acted on their side.

An exception in direction "health/safety" will not help either, since bad countries will label everything "health/safety" further on and the other way around there are still enough possibilities for frivolous movements of corporations.

Secret courts will never be the solution!
He writes for Joe Frank and McSweeney's, it will take some work but worth the effort.
You can make pseudonyms by letting people carry a public key to be signed by the same kind of organization that currently oversees voting (around here, 5 randomly chosen people per urn).

That'd be completely useless for preventing people from proving how they voted, but is sufficient obfuscation for preventing the votes from becoming public.
> tech stocks are at an all-time high

The stock market has a positive return on average. Which means that on average stocks (not just tech stocks) are at an all-time high all the time, no?
If the rising pollen counts are part of a process that is driven by the overall global temperature trend but which is relatively insensitive to annual variation around that trend, such that the output is smoothed compared to the input, that would produce the pollen counts rising every year with a rising global temperature trend, even if global temperatures don't rise every year.

One particular reason this might be the case is if the process driving the increased pollen count is a reaction to global temperature (or some other more direct product of global temperature) that moves to slowly compared to the average rate of global temperature change to ever reach an equilibrium point with the current global temperature, so that its always trailing well below what it would be at the current global temperature if that temperature were a long-term sustained average.
50 degrees - recons the video author