skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It looks like this is an alternative to homebrew, with pkgsrc providing all binaries and brew doing compilations for many packages (I know homebrew can do binaries using "Cask").

Is one obviously better than the other for a typical dev? Pkgsrc certainly has a long history, but I haven't worked with a *BSD in about 15 years.

The web site makes it sound pretty good[1].

Edit: pkgsrc, no surprise, also let's you build from source.

[1] https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/
Homejoy was (at least at one point) the fastest growing company in YC history according to PG[1], and if you go back and read the press, particularly around its funding, it was treated like it was already a success.

Its rapid demise is a good reminder that growth isn't profit, and funding from top tier investors doesn't actually signal that you are building a sustainable business.

Incidentally, I have pointed out the employee misclassification issue numerous times[2][3], and wrote last year[4]:

> It's going to be very interesting in the coming years to see which of these on-demand companies continue to thrive because I personally think it's inevitable that many of them are going to be forced to reclassify their workers as employees. I suspect some investors aren't giving this enough consideration in their due diligence.

If investors are now doing their due diligence (gasp) and realizing that many of these portfolio companies are not going to be able to effectively defend against misclassifcation class actions, Homejoy is not going to be the last of these highly-funded on-demand companies to literally hit a wall.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1uyr6...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8489834

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8468863

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709632
When did the Guardian become the big bad? Just because someone disagrees with you does not mean they are naive, credulous, and open to manipulation. Most people are just trying to get through the day and you should give them the benefit of the doubt. Or at least except that you are as dumb as the rest of us.
I think one of the issues with Homejoy and disintermediation is that cleaning inside the home is well up the intimacy scale. It's different from say a commercial cleaning service. The risk for the customer is that next time they will send someone different. The new person will be more of an unknown quantity whereas the current cleaner, if they are good, is exactly who the customer wants sent out next time. When this happens, the customer benefits more from coordinating their schedule with the individual cleaner than from the on-demand scheduling via Homejoy.

For Homejoy, saying "we are bonded and insured" reduces reluctance for a first you or when on-demand service is the primary consideration. But for recurring service, having trust with an individual beats the crap out of being able to point to the contract or collect against a bonding agency if something goes wrong.

[aside: I found Adora Cheung's presentation for How to Start a Startup thought provoking: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ ]
Add that to the fact there is no global dependency tree of "What we need to discover to make this practical technology possible", how can we be sure that existing/future research funds are focused in the areas needed to make the most valuable technologies available?
I haven't look at the code, but the failover should ensure that the HAproxy isolates the failed master ("fencing" in HA terminology).
I see this a bit differently.

Uber and AirBnB caters to immediate needs for a short term engagement, so the dispatching capabilities are the real value (find me someone who can do X right now).

Homejoy is dispatching for a long term relationship, so it has a hard time staying engaged in the relationship as it progresses.

I think the skill is less important than the duration of the engagement for a dispatching service like this.
Defaults can change really quickly. Unlike Facebook Uber has basically zero network effect between cities. So, a competitor can win one or two small cities and just keep growing.

Consider there are only 40,000 taxi drivers in New York.

All it takes is for a company to find the top 5-50% of Uber/Lift drivers in a city offer them a minimum income of a few k/month assuming they take A% of rides and work y hours and boom instant driver network. Sure, doing it now when Uber is flush with cash is a bad idea, but after it pop’s there is no way they can stay competitive without paper thin margins long term.
There is a patchwork of law and regulations that all need to be aligned to allow internet streaming of broadcasts. Copyright Office regulations, FCC regulations and the Communications Act. Today they (a) are not all aligned and (b) need interpreting by the courts to see how they apply to the internet.

What we're seeing is that being worked out in court cases, Congress, FCC proceedings and Copyright Office proceedings.

It will get worked out but my opinion is that it will need Congress to intervene eventually.
You can use one password, hashed uniquely for each site: https://www.pwdhash.com/ . But if example.com is hacked and your cleartext password is retrieved, it's not impossible to reverse the hash (for example.com).

Or just write them down?
The First Light of Trinity
Fascinating. Much like South America, large parts of the country are dominated by the remaining natives. An estimated 75% of non-Indigenous Canadians live within 100 miles of the U.S. border.
Benedict Evans: Google Now, Maps and Apple Music
Call-Me-Dave had to backtrack after making out he wanted to ban encryption and a bunch of smart computer scientists and cryptographers made him look foolish. I guess there in lies why Call-Me-Dave couldn't.
Exactly, you've got Hobson's choice here: Pay for the content again on a new platform, or don't have the content.

I think implicit in Hobson's choice is that you can knock Hobson over the head and have your pick of any damn horse you like... which is the route you're proposing.
You really have to take the long view to understand Iran. For 500 years, Iran had a monarchy, until after WW2 when the "Shah of Iran" took over. In order to modernize his country, he formed a parliament like England, which appointed Mossadegh as PM. Unfortunately, Mossadegh exiled the Shah, nationalized the oil industry, and suspended elections. The British were the main oil industry, there, so they fought back with the help of the US. The US gave opposition groups money since we were fighting the cold war and Mossadegh was pro-communist. The money was to be used in a campaign for democratic elections. However, the Iranians could not agree on the rules for the elections. There as a large bloc that wanted to return to a monarchy who brought back the Shah. The Shah then took control of the country. Later, the Islamist took over the country by revolution, much as ISIS is doing today. They have been in power ever since enforcing radical Sharia law. The narrative that America overthrew a democratically elected government in a coup is just false.
> You don't want someone who is doing it as a past time to make some extra cash. That might work with Uber/driving

Until your Uber driver takes a left turn onto Shoreline Boulevard without looking, and nearly kills you.
Interpersonal Trust on Jihadi Internet Forums [pdf]
Happy World Emoji Day on Social Media
Perhaps the gp meant this case?

something().then(function(){
setTimeout(function(){
whoops_not_a_function();
}, 1000);
}).catch(function(){
// nope, nothing to catch
});
I see those questions as somewhat irrelevant.

Suppose for a minute what you're hinting at is the truth: Iran ripped off British oil companies (hah!) in a strange case of reverse-colonialism, and it was totally unfair, and this even affected British civilians.

This still is in no way justification for toppling a democratically elected government and supporting a dictatorship. No matter what, commercial interests do not trump a country's rights. Even if Iran's oil nationalization had been completely unfair, Britain and the US would still be directly responsible for installing a dictatorship and indirectly responsible for Iran's "fall out with the West".
What a horrible domain name!
Traditionally I consider SPAM only unsolicited emails, any double opt-in that is too high of volume that the user could be able to opt-out. Users marking as SPAM and decreasing reputation because of that seems like the wrong target.
That's a good thing in my book. It takes you longer to get productive, of course, but, when you DO get there, you're on much more solid footing
Exactly man. I do the same thing.

If you really want to help music artists in particular, attend their shows, they make most of their money off gate.

Also, buy a copy or two of their albums, and whatever else they have. All that money goes right to the band. I always buy a CD and vinyl (if they have it) and then give away the CD if I already have more than one copy.
This medical device startup just raised cash and is heading to Rwanda
Your analogy breaks down though, because the big three channels could only air one show at a time. Netflix can license (or make) as many shows as they want without hurting their popular appeal.

Basically, if you're successful, there's nothing stopping Netflix from licensing the same shows as you. Since they're Netflix, they'll probably negotiate better content deals, have better recommendations, better mobile apps, more supported devices, etc.

Another danger is that Netflix has experience making their own shows. If your target audience looks enticing enough, Netflix can produce exclusive content to woo them over. They've already started doing this with anime (Knights of Sidonia).

All-in-all, this seems like a really tricky business to be in. I wish you luck.
US Servers Being Used by Chinese Hackers for CyberAttacks
Silicons Dark Rival: Black Arsenic Phosphorus
I have an ex who LOVED to clean. She got a lot of satisfaction from improving peoples' living space and she was awesome at it. Anytime something was dirty, she would have a natural compulsion to clean it and you had to drag her away if she got distracted while she was supposed to be doing something else. Maid work would be a dream job for her.
Those laws are usually based on the size of the company. FMLA (not CA, but relevant) only applies to companies of over 50 employeees, and if you've been there for more than a year. You can get around a lot of those laws with using contractors.

Regarding Obamacare, one of the criticisms of the law was that companies promptly began offering employees one hour fewer a week than would meet the health care requirement.
Agree and that's a great point about human failover. It can become a challenge for distributed databases running on a large number of instances (like bigtable) but if we're talking only about master HA, then yes, that can still do with human intervention though automation is still preferable. For smaller db setups, much easier to just let a human/dba intervene.
And the recode story (http://recode.net/2015/07/17/cleaning-services-startup-homej...) which has a bit more clarity. Trying to fund raise a sharing economy business just after Uber gets a bad court decision on the employee/contractor question is hard. It is almost like having your company go back to being a 'seed round' level risk for some investors.

It also lends credibility to the 'not a bubble' discussions if stage C investors are showing restraint but that is a different discussion.
Fallout Shelter for Android release date: 15 August
I literally just had my place cleaned yesterday by HomeJoy. I have a small studio apartment in SF, and it cost $110 total. While it was expensive, the cleaner actually did a really great job, though it was a bit difficult communicating (she is Chineese, and not fluent in English).

I honestly never saw this coming, as I assumed HomeJoy was doing awesome. It will be interesting to see how Exec/Handy handle things moving forward.

The startup game is tough!
You're interpreting it too literally. "Passion" in this case simply means "actually gives a fuck and tries to do a good job" as opposed to "doing the bare minimum."

So yeah, you don't have to have passion for your job, or even like it, but if you're not going to try to do it well, just quit and let someone else take over.
As happy customers & friends of the company I'm sad to hear this news today. I wish everyone on the team all the best.

I'm curious to one day read a post mortem on the company, and especially about these last few months.

Our last appointment is scheduled for Monday.

Thank you Homejoy.
Easy recurring payments, payment processing, scheduling, job details (customer A gets the whole 9 yards, customer B only needs X, Y and Z), easy customer communication, etc. But I'm not a cleaner so I have no idea if those are worth it.
Um, I sort of doubt it. Unreal Engine 4, while I haven't dug around with it, is presumably still C++ and low-level stuff.

The way the game industry is moving is still along the same path. With a lot of amature and professional developers moving towards platforms like Unity, it's sort of a backslide in my opinion. Then again, it's almost as if the target platforms have become too powerful for people to really care what they're developing on.

(My opinion, not trying to be controversial.)
> We need to sharpen our understanding of both intelligence and mechanical behaviour: what is smart behaviour, and who says so?

And also: is there a simpler or better theory that accounts for all of the evidence, that is more plausible than intelligence?
Was Amazon Prime Day intended as a performance test in production?
Exactly this. I always felt that this was just another doomed startup that couldn't possibly survive. Curious how we'll revise our views on the company and Adora.

I guess this is the playbook, right? Doesn't matter if you build a sustainable company or not. As long as you raise crazy amounts of VC $ you're considered a success.
All fair points!

From your username, would you happen to be Marcos or someone else from Solid Angle? If so, big fan of Arnold. :)
"Precisely no one will ever be charged for ripping a CD or DVD in the UK."

I wouldn't be so sure. The U.S. Government got Al Capone on tax evasion.

If it can be used as a means to further punish somebody, or the only means to punish somebody, it will be used.
What are you responding to? What you're saying doesn't contradict what the article claims, just provides more background. Calling the article propaganda is uncalled for, it doesn't exactly put the US in a favorable light.
Most startup accelerators fail
The real neoliberalism came along a lot earlier. The 1970s were the time when the meaning of the word "neoliberalism" got warped.
I have talked to a number of people in the University of Washington's graduate program for statistics (typically rated #1/#2 in the world) and the consensus is that people almost always overestimate how well they understand statistics.
That's a much more complex issue, which involves how many people simply give up trying to find work after six months or so, as well as companies replacing employees with automated robots and such. I would be much more in favor of Homejoy using contractors if they also allowed them to become a full time employee if they desired to, after meeting some requirement (like working there for 3 months).
The World According to Spire's CEO
What the On-Demand Worker Debate Really Means
I would argue that it was because, because there is no such thing, to my knowledge, as capital and lowercase seconds.

In this way the only dangers from accidental capitalization would be capitonyms* and possibly someone thinking you were shouting depending on the level of your capital letter abuse. <sarcasm> In the latter case I think we can all agree they deserve to be stabbed, right? </sarcasm>

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitonym
Yes the US initially supported the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They didn't have a lot of choice, ISO/IEC 8859-3 had already established the wrong behavior by reusing i/I, and only adding ı and İ. It's all been doomed from that point on.
> Brain size is not that great a proxy for intelligence.

Oh certainly, agreed. But larger brains can be easier to work with, such as for slicing studies where you examine the different areas of the brain to look for evidence of changes that you might want to keep for the next generation. Smaller brains have less matter to work with, and therefore have less of a chance of developing novel features that strike your fancy while you attempt to select the ones that might have a higher probability of developing impressive cognitive ability. Having said this, I am very interested in trying to take something already rather clever (like a dog) and seeing how small we can get the brain before it loses all of its interesting behavior. For whatever reason society has already developed a fascination with really small dogs with small heads anyway.....
Upwork/oDesk connects people with long-term providers and are more or less able to avoid disintermediation by providing services that the providers want to take advantage of, like time tracking, payment processing, and tax documents. Companies like HomeJoy need to figure out what services their providers really crave and make those contingent upon using their platform. Maybe there isn't anything lacking like that in the home cleaning business.
Different group and location, but yes, we backed the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the soviets.

The enemy of my enemy etc...
Right there with you. Just like all those people that wanted to start 'Pinterest for Men', when you could...just use Pinterest.
The site was created from a paper book. See about section- http://www.howacarworks.com/about/making
Business high school
Applied OCR: Create Pinyin Subtitles for Chinese Movies on the Fly
Did something change between this one and the one posted yesterday? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9894748
Resistive heating is 100% efficient, yes, but the electricity required to power the element is rarely above 40% efficient for most combustion powered sources (combustion turbines, combined cycle, etc.).
It never occurred to me to try hiring my HJ cleaner directly... If i have to travel and reschedule, i can just push a button on my phone and reschedule. I never have to worry about writing checks or tipping (thinking about it in hindsight.. does that make me a jerk?). The time I had an issue, their support made the experience "magical"

Also if a cleaner ever started to get lazy and cut corners, i have the option to just chose another one... that gives me a lot of influential power even if i never have to use it.

Those benefits are what made the service worthwhile for me... If I wanted to find a cleaner at the lowest rate and handle all the overhead myself i could just look on craigslist...
> So yeah, you don't have to have passion for your job, or even like it, but if you're not going to try to do it well, just quit and let someone else take over.

I don't disagree, but I'm in the privileged position of being an in-demand tech professional who could have another job the same day I quit my current one.

The inherent problem with the "sharing economy" is that its built on using people (primary) who are economically disadvantaged who need the job (I concede that someone people who drive for Uber don't require the job, but do it do to the flexible schedule or extra income it provides). Its hard to always do a shitty job well, constantly.
The real question to ask in this case is whether those regulations should be there in the first place.
I read all the answers and they're very good. I'd just add something very important: keep track of how many days you go without doing exercise, eating healthy etc.
All this advice is great, but it's very easy to have a 'bad period' where you just don't realize you're going back to your old patterns.
Being more specific: implement some remainder in front of you that shows your progress over time. E.g.: a piece of paper showing you the dates you exercised in green, and the ones you didn't in red. Make it your first priority to complete that piece of paper. You can go fancier with web apps or even fit-bands, but the idea is the same: track yourself everyday. And be aware of when you stop doing what you need to be doing.
Here's a 24 minute highlight reel of the actual demo from '68 of NLS: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCGFadV4FqU2yAqCzKaxn...
I can very confidently say that Handy is headed in the same direction Homejoy. Handy is facing a myriad of class action suits in Boston and is facing a number of legal battles with exempt and non-exempt employee suits. I've seen the cash burn in the space and it is very unfortunate senior leadership doesn't pay attention to it. It's all about making it look like hockey stick growth to investors. The cleaning professionals working on the platform are all very unhappy too.
> Part of the machinery that drives their intelligence seems to be in their limbs.

I wouldn't worry about that; their limbs are welcome along for the ride.
Paved roads are expensive. Cost per mile for a 12 foot wide country road,(O(64K000 ft2), seems to be O($100000) including road preparation and asphalt (base plus top). Asphalt is O($1.50)/ft*2. Roads which need more preparation work (drainage is often a problem) might cost significantly more.
Yes, that is a good point. I had an adviser in college who specialized in garbage collection algorithms and I unfortunately didn't have the chance to take his course or learn from him, but there are definitely tradeoffs to all of the methods out there.
> this also touches ext4 driver so that it always handles ext3 filesystems

So, not nearly the news you'd expect it to be.
Show HN: We've Launched a VR Video Camera – Spherical, 4K, 60FPS, Global Shutter
Hi HN, Three of us have conceived, designed, and launched Sphericam 2 on Kickstarter. We're now halfway through the campaign and have raised over $220K with backers paying $1299 and up for a camera that will be shipping in December.

Our Pitch: VR is awesome but there's no content. Shooting 360 video currently is a total nightmare. We want to make it easy and fun. Our camera makes "native resolution" in Gear VR or Google Cardboard.

This project follows Sphericam 1 which I launched on Kickstarter in late 2012 - we did ok, sold 100 of them, but the tech wasn't there and the market wasn't nearly there (Oculus hadn't happened yet).

As a hardware startup we are working with lots of constraints, bottlenecks, and pain points around going from prototype to production, but we all have some experience with that.

Our next tasks are to ship in December, while scaling our sales model and manufacturing, and of course, keeping the product refreshed as the resolution of VR goes up year after year ;-)

Our Kickstarter is here:
http://kickstarter.com/projects/1996234044/sphericam-2-the-4k-360o-video-camera-for-virtual-r

cheers,
Jeffrey Martin