skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not physics expert, but I think there may be a limit to what we can understand about the physical world. Especially when we get down to such small scales. However, I don't think this is because of limited lifespans.

I've heard it said that string theory could never be scientifically tested in a traditional sense. People sometimes compare it to a religious philosophy because of this quality of untestability.

Maybe the logic of the universe at the lowest levels are hidden from us. If the universe is a computer simulation then we almost certainly are not exposed to the underlying mechanisms of how it works at the lowest level.

The fluid in a fluid simulation doesn't have access to the knowledge of how the computer on which it is running functions. The fluid is just information. That information is manipulated by the running program, but the code of the simulation is not built into the information representing the fluid.

Maybe the matter in our universe exists in the same way, as information. Maybe the mechanics that drive the motion of the smallest particles are not exposed.

I'm sure I'm not the only person to postulate on this. People have probably written very scientific papers on this very topic. I honestly don't know, but it's what my programmer brain leads me to believe.
Even better than any penetrating oil you can buy: ATF + Acetone[1]. Also, having a rosebud torch with Oxygen + Acetylene is a must if you find yourself dealing with rusty bolts often.

[1] - http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/penetrating-oil-s...
Using Vagrant to Deploy to a Remote Hyper-V Host
If this actually works this is going to be awesome!!
Seems like this entire Pluto mission has opened up quite a few questions for Geologists. For such a small world so far from the sun, it sure has some very interesting features and characteristics. The recent mountain range photo/3D map was incredible.

We live in some exciting times. Every few months we have a new probe somewhere teaching us so much about our tiny corner of the universe.
Show HN: A mailing-list miner that posts messages to a subreddit
Fencing isn't quite that simple, unfortunately.

I've been doing database, and specifically PostgreSQL, administration and HA setups for a long time now. This stuff is a lot harder than people think it is. People who roll their own solutions, thinking "Oh, this will totes be good enough!" tend to find themselves very painfully surprised that it isn't.
newsflash: reddit attempting to suck the money out of their userbase by censoring discussions and charging more for the larger advertising pool
best of luck to the founders on their next venture
Google Hires Tech Team from Homejoy, Readies Leap into Home Services
Beme: Videosharing with a twist
You're mistakenly drawing a parallel between the two words. I am saying a cashier that is not passionate about their job is not _entitled_ to be uncourteous and therefore act unprofessionally.
A lesson to take away here is that a startup which faces legal/regulatory threats to their existence has to be small enough to be ignored or huge enough to change the rules.

Uber is probably the first company you think of, with their absurdly large investment rounds, or maybe PayPal, but don't forget YouTube. They went from a little video portal with everyone else's stuff on it to a protectorate of one of the world's largest businesses so quickly the copyright holders had no chance to deprive it of existence.

The danger zone is in the middle. Homejoy didn't expect to be in this kind of trouble, but once they were, it made finding a huge round of funding both necessary and impossible. So this is the rational decision.
Hey all,

I've created this to make it easier to digest the Bitcoin-development mailing list. You can see it in action at http://reddit.com/r/bitcoin_devlist . I'd love if people found it useful, and I'd love PR's.

Cheers.
5 Reasons Why Interior Design Is Moving Online
This post was heavily flagged by users, no doubt because of the controversial "Anti-Alzheimer's" in the title. I think that's a shame, since the site looks interesting and fun whether it prevents Alzheimer's or not. Feel free to try posting this again without that bit in the title.
In the case of using the "independent contractor" loophole to avoid paying UI, social sec tax, minimum wage, etc, it's an issue of making sure everyone plays by the same rules. Operators who abide by these rules should not be punished for doing so.
This week's headlines in machine intelligence
This reminds of Chicago's recent "cloud tax" [0]. It places a tax on anything related to the cloud, include AWS or Netflix. Most of the premises don't make any sense, and it just seems like another revenue stream for the Chicago government.

> Each one takes an existing tax law and extends it to levy an extra 9 percent tax on certain types of online services. The first ruling presumably covers streaming media services like Netflix and Spotify, while the second would cover remote database or computing platforms like Amazon Web Services or Lexis Nexis. Under the new law, what passes as $100 of server time in Springfield would cost $109 if you're conducting it from an office in Chicago.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/1/8876817/chicago-cloud-tax-o...
Why you should raise more than you need
They're owned by Disney, so it's not like the bills wouldn't be paid, but if (when) the bubble burst, it would have a ripple effect through sports and television.

Hypothetically, ESPN itself doesn't need to lose many viewers for this to happen. The ad revenues mostly just cover production costs. The bulk of their revenues come from the cable companies via cable subscriptions. Virtually all cable bundles include ESPN, so if cable subscriptions fell among non-ESPN watchers, it would still impact ESPN's bottom line.
How is this any different than: https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector
Give new customer priority to the contractors that have a high in-service retention rate, perhaps. If you have a history of customers who stop using the service after contracting with you, you stop getting customers.
We are making steps. For example, there is a nice exhibition in a Washington DC's Hirshhorn Art Museum called Facing History by Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat that talks about history of Iran and illustrates how heavy in propaganda news was in 1953 at giving justification for British intervention in toppling Mossadegh. I think the Museum in allowing such an exhibition to be shown in the US is in some sense admitting US made a mistake (with the CIA intervention). It also teaches future generations that whatever the media and the government says should be taken with a grain of salt.
Right. Then the FTC/BCP will swoop in with massive $$$ lawsuits over unsubstantiated claims.
There is no scenario that's rather optimistic of you.

Don't get me wrong there currently very popular and profitable so they don't need to worry about a Pets.com style crash. However, the barriers to entry are relatively low just look at Lyft. Eventually investors are going to want to get their money back, so they either start issuing dividends or face a hostile takeover.
to add subtitles in many languages and dialect is definitely in our plans :)
> There is a significant consumer safety element to the way Taxis are regulated.

Whatever those safety elements are, I've certainly never experienced them. Theoretically they're there, I guess, but my (admittedly anecdotal) experience has been that Uber is safer in every way than taxis are.
My worry is that as we split knowledge out, no one will understand the big picture as they're always focused on their specialty of their specialty.

Since we are teaching people less in depth stuff as they need to go very far into science, it seems like building knowledge with unstable foundation. The lack of branching out may also inhibit discovering certain connections between fields that may proved to be enlightening.
64 Network DO’s and DON’Ts for Multi-Player Game Developers. Part VIIa
What is the urge to hijack scrolling so high? Is it because people who those developers work for have shitty mouse/trackpad?
The open sourcing of C and C++ libraries in CG is awesome. But that is skewing the original point. Studios aren't going to replace their interfaces with blender and they aren't going to open source their own creation software. Most studios use a combination of maya, katana, 3ds, houdini and vray.

What you listed are mostly formats that are beneficial to everyone to share (and don't forget OpenExr). OpenSubdiv lets others match renderman's subdivision. Also Imageworks' open source push can largely be traced back to Rob Bredow I believe.
IMHO, very doubtful; Bluebird has a lot of (very useful) features that would be pretty burdensome to put into a specification.

On the other hand, there's really no reason not to use Bluebird. It's easy to ensure that a promise you receive is a Bluebird promise:

import Bluebird from 'bluebird';
const bluebirdPromise = Bluebird.resolve(promise);

If `promise` is a Bluebird promise that will be a no-op, and if it's a foreign promise or thennable you'll get a new Bluebird promise that will resolve/reject when the foreign one does. (This is standard behavior; see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...)

Since Bluebird promises are thennables, the reverse will be true if they're consumed by a different promise library.

Given Bluebird's speed, superior debuggability, and features, there's really no reason not to use it a this point.
Show HN: Unsuck Itsum
Stunning.

I expected just another dusty cratered rock.
If this sunk them I am shocked that no one saw this coming. I asked about this on HN over a year ago [0]. There are 2 things they could have done.

1. Hire and provide real value to the cleaners contract Uber to drive the cleaners to the houses, That would have solved the classification issue and the middle man issue

2. Charge the cleaners to be on the site, let verified purchasers leave reviews, and offer an optional payment gateway.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6855047
You could also summarize "trials, data, and more trials" not as regulatory requirements, but actually making sure your treatment works before we put it into human beings.
Interesting. Medical needs for FAST delivery may be one of driving forces for adopting drones quickly. I believe Matternet is also pioneering this in the developing world for vaccine deliveries and medical tests in rural field clinics.

My brain goes crazy thinking about all the ways drones could dramatically improve (and reduce the cost of) logistics and delivery.
Looks like Google may have picked up some of the team:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9904483

So not ALL that bad.
How to roll out a site migration
Trolley problem philosophical discussions notwithstanding, I still suspect that the default mode (as it is with humans under most circumstances) will be to lay on the brakes and hope for the best.

That said, there are certainly circumstances where swerving is the right decision and a vehicle with 360 degree sensors is potentially in a better position to make an optimal decision than a human making a snap judgement based on mostly what they see in front of them. Probably the closest I ever came to being in a really serious accident happened on a highway when someone slammed on their brakes to avoid rear-ending the car in front, ended up drifting into the next lane where another car had to swerve to avoid them. I ended up swerving into the breakdown lane. Amazingly with cars swerving and braking all over the road at 70 mph, no one collided but it was a very near thing.

I strongly suspect that, however many decades away true self-driving is, good assistive driving and collision avoidance systems especially on highways are going to be a pretty big near-term win.
Speaking of old diesel tech that just works and will be here forever, if you're in the U.S., it's still possible to pick up an M35A2 on the cheap (like ~$2000 cheap), and they'll run just about any fuel (multi-fuel Hercules diesel FTW), and are almost indestructible by normal means. They are also far less temperamental than many older trucks. You just need anchor arms to steer it and the ability to drive stick shift.
Ask HN: What's the mind hack?
How do you keep your mind from wandering off while you are reading a RFC/paper/spec or are coding (easy there since I am building) or learning through video? How do you keep going even after an hour or two or more ? After a while (short) my mind tells me it's enough & it wanders off. What's the hack here ?
The information that companies share with employees is becoming a bigger issue
Interesting racism on display here. You've assumed Afrostream is "obviously unsustainable", even though many people in the comments disagree. And because it's run by black people, you've assumed they couldn't have possibly gotten into YC on their own merit.

Had it been helmed by an Indian person, I doubt you'd have cast any aspersions about their talent or being a "diversity pawn".
You'd be surprised.

My Parents use AirBnb to rent out an in-law apartment they have at one of their houses (they each had a house prior to getting together). They're retired and they now treat it like their job, despite it only bringing in around $30k/year. I've recommended that they find a local cleaning person since I think they can find someone good who's willing to do it for the cleaning fee they charge ($50), but they're finicky about it being done perfectly and value their star rating (full 5 stars). So they do it themselves before every new renter arrives. Sometimes this involves driving 1.5 hours in each direction just to go up there and clean, but they insist on doing it anyways.

Similarly, I used to have a cleaning person come once a month. She was an immigrant single parent who had built up a large number of loyal, repeat clients and was making enough to send her daughter to college. Doing our dishes and vacuuming our floors probably didn't provide much enjoyment, but you can bet your ass she did it passionately because of the larger context in which she was working.

You're probably right about the actual act of cleaning...almost everyone won't have a passion for that. But your comment is incredibly myopic and shows a complete lack of understanding of human motivation.
Yeah, but complaining their cleaner wasn't "passionate" mostly comes off as being pissy your poorly-paid short-term menial labor didn't fluff your ego enough for being so awesome to pay him or her.

You can do a perfectly good job cleaning without pretending you're so passionate about cleaning you'd just love to do it for free! (I have similar complaints about development jobs, btw -- you can do a perfectly good job and be a great employee whilst not pretending it's anything but a job, and you're doing it because you get paid, and if you weren't getting paid, you'd be seeing family/friends/dog/beach/mountains/woods/recreation of choice / etc.)
> This isn't taxis where you can bank on regulatory arbitrage to take a cut.

If anything, the incumbents are better positioned to arbitrage the law/regulations in this case. An online service like this leaves a paper trail, which makes it much harder to use the "shortcuts" common in the cleaning industry: use of undocumented immigrants, underreporting of taxable income, etc. Much easier to do that in a pure cash business with informal booking.
I know Apple Watch oxidometer and some health related software were disabled because FDA was not able to approve them fast enough
As an insulin dependent diabetic I am consistently frustrated at how slow the medical device approval market moves. There is a reason that the most advanced insulin pump that I can buy 2015[0] looks like a pager from 1998, and it is not because the companies are moving too fast. I have been told that the reason all of the supporting software is so outdated is also because they are handcuffed by the FDA approval processes.

I can see the author's point of view, but this is a rare case (for me personally) that I am not in support of more government oversight.

[0] http://www.medtronicdiabetes.com/treatment-and-products/mini...
With postgresql synchronous replication, in order to lose writes that have been acknowledged to the postgresql client, you'd have to lose filesystem data on both the primary and the synchronous standby. (I believe the way postgresql uses the term "committed", you can lose data that's "committed", but not once postgresql has acknowledged it to the client.)

For many applications, consistency includes not losing acknowledged data. If I PUT data into an application and fetch it back and it's not there, that's not consistent.
Sounds like a relatively biased article.

"Breakthrough therapy" designation already exists for drugs. The FDA identifies those drugs that have shown promising results in early trials for diseases where there are few treatments.

The reason this is being done is because the choice isn't between an untested treatment and a tested treatment, it's a choice between an untested treatment and death. Why shouldn't physicians/patients be given an opportunity to try out a therapy when no alternatives exist?

Obviously (and the FDA already does this), the risk/benefit should be carefully analyzed. It makes no sense at all to allow a device on the market with little data if it doesn't provide a substantial benefit where none currently exists.

Concerning the follow-up trial that the FDA requires of manufacturers: I'd have no problem at all if the FDA provided "temporary approvals". You're device/drug looks promising, so we'll approve it now, but you need to run a full trial to provide the needed data. That trial will take 2 years to conduct and readout? Great, you now have a 2-year temporary approval and if the data doesn't show up, we pull your device/drug off the market.
I see, cool.
> ... so I really skipped over all of the details at the end. I'd like to give a better explanation of both the parsing step (to an understandable degree) and the interpreter itself, so that it is easier to follow along and implement the steps.

That pretty well describes the problem and the way to make it more digestible. Giving a step-by-step explanation of the parser will be very useful. Illustrating what the parser is doing with clear examples would be very helpful.

Reading it again, I think the "sticky" parts begin with discussion of the grammar. A couple of examples, then the reader encounters a blizzard of phrases, "<terminal>", "<non-terminal>", "<S>", etc., strewn through the explanatory paragraphs which rapidly become confusing. Readers may be wondering "what 'production' are we talking about now?" and so on. Once losing the thread it's impossible to follow the text all the way down.

True, HN attracts a more knowledgeable crowd. Even so I'm sure there are many here who are not that familiar with the intricacies of parsing but want to gain a better grasp of it. Condensing the article's preliminaries, while expanding the parsing (and subsequent) sections and slowing down the pace, would likely make it better for both author and the reader.

Edit: typos
Yea I get what you mean. I think that the system you describe would have a lot of friction in it, but if done right could be really useful.

On one side publishers get an easy to grok revenue stream and on the consumer side they get a better user experience.

I think it falls apart when you consider that adblock is becoming the norm and publishers are probably seeing pretty decent revenues from advertising.

Seems like it would have to be something where you pay $10 per month or whatever to see ad-free articles from publishers on the platform through a browser plugin. Seems too cumbersome though. Not sure - there could be a "disruptive" startup in there somewhere but I think it would have some pretty big challenges to overcome.
What a "Brilliant Marketing Stunt" and plan giving them the ability to do so much, and gather the results, so they will be optimized for the upcoming Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Holiday Shopping Season. Do you think performance issues in production, or perfectly planned execution in production?
so it's a fuse that costs $5k or $10k. is it made from 5oz-10oz of solid platinum? what am i missing here [1]?

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3D...
According to Recode article they were looking to raise more money.
Am curious how could they have burned $40mil in ~1.5 years..
I firmly believe this business model can work. I know of a local business that is going into its 6th year of operations. Cleaning houses is a large part of their revenues. They match house cleaners, handymen, grocery shoppers, cooks and assistants with professionals starved for time. The model is subscription-based and they have some large companies which give out these subscriptions as a bonus/perk to their employees.

Perhaps Homejoy expanded too fast? They overdosed on funding? Deadlines and progress meetings became too dreadful? Or maybe there are regulatory issues they could not resolve?

I think there is more to this than a shoddy business model imitating Pets.com.
Sender-initiated contact is an absolute necessity for a near-universal communication protocol. If you don't allow for it, then you require that all forms of social introduction be supported in the protocol itself, or you turn introduction protocols into a vehicle for spam.

It's also worth noting that not all spam is unsolicited--people give uninformed consent all the time. (This is part of the reason why legal remedies to spam have failed: it is actually very hard to give a robust, concrete definition to spam).
Same.. I thought it would be a super cold version of mercury but it's a living changing world, amazing stuff.
So you pay them even if you don't use those to pirate their content? That doesn't sound any better.

Otoh, you are given permission to copy since you are already paying for it.

And if they make you pay for it anyway, that doesn't give them the incentive to release better media. As long as they release something they get payed.

That sounds even worse.
My experience is the opposite: finding a good cleaner is harder than finding a taxi or a good hotel.

Sure, you can ask all your friends for recommendations for cleaners, but the good ones are always fully booked.
> There is no scenario where Uber becomes MySpace to a competitor.

Sure there is - the IRS says their drivers are employees and they need to provide multiple years worth of backpay/benefits. Any competitor that's been doing that already wins.
Why We All Need to Make the Internet Fun Again
Umm... if anything I'd say it's the other way around.
Amazing, that's as fast as the Lamborghini Aventador https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamborghini_Aventador
Zick Standard Lisp (https://github.com/zick/ZickStandardLisp) by "Zick" serves as a handy benchmark generator. The second round benchmark and the final round benchmark used in http://www.oki-osk.jp/esc/dart/lisp-en.html#6 were generated from it.
We’re determined to support you to keep your homes humming and business buzzing, so we will do our best to ensure partners and clients who want to continue to work together get a chance to do so independently of Homejoy.

Is this why they had to terminate their operations because clients and partners managed to cut them out of the loop and to do business independently of their platform?
No, I don't like it. The thing about welders is, thats all they do. They weld one piece of metal to another piece of metal in a way that is PREDETERMINED by a 'higher up' (usually the structural engineer on the project.) When I am looking for an engineer I want someone who is well rounded because I want them to be able to solve unknown problems. So having a Java person know the structure of an Angular project is good, especially if they are going to be working on a project that uses Angular as the front-end. Also I like to put people under the stress of explaining themselves because if they can't take that stress what kind of stress can they take? That is not to say that I don't like to do both styles of interviewing when I look for someone.