skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll offer a counter-thought to the carping about how stupid this is, the ad hominem attacks, etc.

The author is correct, at least for some ideas and some founders.

The author also points out several successful products that grew from decidedly low-tech, sub-optimal incarnations.

Technologists - and I consider myself a recovering technologist - are often distracted by the shiny, by the optimal, by the novel. Sometimes a product is a functional but ugly hack of adequate pieces assembled to prove whether or not an idea works, and, with a few very rare exceptions, is or should never be, at least not out of the gate, optimal.

Sometimes technologists have cool ideas they build out into eventual products that once in a while become the core of a business. That can be a very long cycle.

Business guys just keep doing business, much to the consternation of many of us tech guys.

Product people talk to users, spend money on surveys, hack shit together, and see if things work, if ideas stick.

Are we still fans of "fail fast" on HN? I haven't kept up. If you want to fail fast, do it for cheap, and do it low tech.

IM(NS)HO, of course. YMMV.
While the phrasing seems to be insulting to the demographic that this site cares too, I don't think he is wrong fundamentally. Also note that he is specifically talking about programmers doing actual work, not consulting/discussing ideas with programmers. Asking whether this platform idea could ever work is great, getting someone to write a website that gives you X, Y and Z features before you know whether those features are core is bad.

Put another way, he is saying to focus on prototyping in the most lean way possible. If Google spreadsheets can work to try out your idea, hiring a programmer is certainly not something to do before you have tried out your idea on the stable, free, always available platform.

And honestly the underlying idea might not be too far off for more technical minded problems. Figure out what your product is, then build stuff around it. More failures than can be counted are centered around technology that didn't work out and more importantly wasn't required for the core product.

It isn't that programming isn't important, it is the usual lean mindset, until you have a good idea of what your product is supposed to be, having a programmer working on structure for it is at best overly eager, at worst a complete waste of time.
For as long as I can remember, on mobile Safari, links to Google Groups pages redirect to Google Groups' main page. "request desktop site" doesn't work. So frustrating. Can't read this article--my apologies that I'm meta-commenting instead of commenting.

Even on desktop browser, Google Groups aggravates me. (I'm struggling now not to curse). At least 1/3 of my screen real estate is taken by empty space, top bars and side bars. Disabling JavaScript breaks the site. Why should it? Am I not merely viewing text, something we've done well since fucking Usenet?? Oops I swore. Does the back button work nowadays?

I hate Google Groups. Are there alternate viewers?
1985: “Oil Prices Will Go Up Forever”
What are you getting at? Neither of those pages mention the arsenic discussed by the article
Dr Frankenfunctor and the Monadster – F# for fun and profit
Ask HN: What are some purely distributed companies?
A line in the announcement of Compose joining IBM caught my attention:
> We love being a distributed company. Many of us work from our homes and like to occasionally relocate for weeks or months at a time to work in other parts of the world.

What are some companies you know which are completely distributed and/or very remote friendly?

Some companies I know of:

- Auttomattic

- Mozilla

- Scrapinghub (Scrapy)

- Buffer

- Github

- Stack Exchange

- 37Signals/Basecamp
>it doesn't seem like a NAS was even needed here.

The NAS offers a nice, portable and independent system. I could run a RAID off my desktop, but that makes the desktop bigger and heavier and creates a migration headache when I change processors.
(Author of the blog post here)

We use the scoring function published by Hsu et al[1], which most scientists seem to be using. This function takes into account both the number of mismatches and where they occur in the guide. There's a more readable version here: http://crispr.mit.edu/about .

[1] http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n9/full/nbt.2647.html
> The author also points out several successful products that grew from decidedly low-tech, sub-optimal incarnations.

I don't know if I would call Google spreadsheets low-tech and sub-optimal. It isn't very well optimized but it hits all of the important points for a prototype, cheap, scalable and high uptime.

I totally agree though, the idea that you shouldn't get distracted by the implementation you dream of is very solid and one that is purported as important here all the time (just phrased differently).
> I was surprised to see that we were using the actual airstrip of BER. The flight was supposed to go to SXF (Berlin Schönefeld), but instead we landed on the new airstrip, driving by the not-yet-finished new airport. Can anyone tell me why?

They repurposed the south airstrip of SXF as the north airstrip of BER. As the north airstrip of SXF was dismantled for a highway this is the only remaining airstrip at SXF. For BER they built another additional one.

Here's a map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Karte-_F...
Build a Blog Using Backbone and React, GitHub Gists
This looks fun; unfortunately I can't get it to work. Is too much traffic slowing it down? The arrows don't work and when I change the image number to 2 or 7 and click publish, I get a blank page...
It seems like UDP is probably a better protocol for this use case.
Working with classes in ES6 is such a relief. My only complaint is that if you save a method as a variable or pass it to another function, it'll just be a function with its own scope (`this` won't reference the class instance, but instead the method function).

Easily "fixed" if you remember to put `.bind(this)` everywhere, though.
You still need to pay damages for lying about other parts, though.
Bah, you're right, I've edited my post. You'd think after working with PostgreSQL for years I'd have my terminology straight.
I don't know why people do this. I guess it gives off the feeling of it being very important like they are rushed and HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS RIGHT NOW.

But it's not shareable unless you're going to retweet 40+ tweets (are people doing this?). You have to wait for someone else to collect your thoughts for you.

And at the same time it isn't as permanent as actually taking the time to write a blog post so it's easy to retract later.
At some point I prototyped a tool that used Ron Rivest's timelock puzzles (repeated squaring modulo the product of two large safe primes takes a long time and isn't parallelizable, but is quick to compute if you can factor the modulus) to encrypt compressed tarballs of zero-day disclosures.

The idea would be that if you found a vulnerability in a product whose vendor was likely to pour more money into gag orders and legal threats than into fixing the vulnerability, you would publish the vulnerability encrypted in such a way that it would take several years of continuous computation to get the decryption key. Legal threats and/or general foot dragging couldn't put the cat back in the bag.

Sometimes I regret not publishing the tool.
You know what I consider a distraction? Fucking electrons. Seriously. Half the time, they seem to be killing people. You know that people who do nothing wrong sometimes get killed by electricity that comes from the fucking sky, like out of nowhere? It's like these prima donna electrons want to obey fundamental forces instead of build products!

We should seriously consider an electron-free lifestyle. I don't mean that we swear off electricity. I'm saying that we get rid of all of fucking chemistry (which is dominated by interactions of outermost electrons of atoms). It's a fucking distraction. We don't need it. Sure, our brains will need to use a different fundamental particle for neurons to signal each other with, and we'll have to evolve an exotic chemistry to replace our current composition, but you hear about pentaquarks every day. It can't be that hard, with all the modern science... oh, wait.
it i kind of topologically clear - with linear growth of the number of nodes, the fabric network architectures have to grow more than linear (and you have to have fabric if you'd like to have performance growing linear with number of nodes - otherwise there wouldn't be any sense in adding nodes after some point)
Probably this concert hall in Hamburg... terribly over-budget and late https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbe_Philharmonic_Hall
The significance is this: it's very likely that there are a lot more such planets a lot nearer to us.
This is because Kepler can only detect planets which lie in the same plane as earth and the star so the planet occults the star.
Assuming random distribution, there's probably thousand fold amount of off plane planets.

There are 259 stars within about 30 light years.
Communication could be conceivable with such distances...

http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.posted.htm
I actually suggest imabi.net over Tae Kim depending on how you want to define "learning the language".

Tae Kim is a great introductory guide to Japanese and is something I often hand to beginners. But for anyone who wants to seriously study the language, imabi.net is on an entirely different level.

[0] http://imabi.net
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes: Gear VR
It's true that you shouldn't write any code before you have some sort of backing design planned. However, the role of a programmer is similarly important, even in the design phase. If you're making anything that has to do with computers, a programmer is usually the one who will tell you what is or isn't possible. That's important, no?

This piece of advice is either inadvisable or just poorly written. IMO: Design, prototype, clean up. If you can do that without a programmer, cool. But chances are that you'll need one, either to tell you that you're wrong, or to tell you how to do it better. Code isn't the only thing programmers produce.

This article was brought to you by "Tech Lead at SmartHires (YC S14)" apparently.
The EMV Deadline Creeps Closer
A weekly thread to discuss a TV show?

On Hacker News?

For fuck's sake, people.
Library falls short on I18N standards, doesn't use Unicode.
i'm so glad i wasn't born with the digital hoarder gene. apparently my absolute-zero proclivity to hang onto photographs and other media is extremely rare. i'm just not into it. i'll snap some stuff on my phone to share with my close friends, and then let it get deleted or whatever. i don't upload it to socialmedia. i just don't give a shit, to be honest.

we're surrounded by this stuff day in and day out on every screen we have, i make no effort to keep any of it longer than a few weeks. in fact i have a problem getting rid of old photos, somehow they seem to follow me around on device to device through no fault of my own! they're almost like viruses.
Thanks :) This stuff is coming together fast now. Android should be available soon as well. :)
C# does not compete with Python or Ruby. It competes with Java, which is already entrenched.
Original research has much better information:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

For example, the far simpler method of soaking and then just using more water and draining the rice.

> Traditional S.E. Asian methods of rice cooking involved extensive rinsing of the uncooked grain followed by cooking the rice in a large excess of water and discarding that water on cessation of cooking and this was found to reduce Asi content of food by up to 45% [10] and 57% [8] when Asi free water was used.
He's also listed as a "Fail Expert"
It's hard to tell where VR is overstated and where it's understated. The possibilities seem endless, but I wonder if the vast majority of them exist for tech-savvy people. It's a safe bet that there can be mainstream adoption for games, but outside of games, I'm not convinced your average consumer will desire to use VR for other things.
I think this is a great idea from the job seeker standpoint, but how did you validate that some companies want this?
Interview with Lukas Biewald, Founder and CEO of CrowdFlower [video]
Thanks. It's always nice to hear from satisfied users.

This is for the benefit of other users (since you have probably already found these resources):

- Release notes: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/magit/magit/master/Documen...

- Update instructions: http://magit.vc/manual/magit/Installation.html

- Homepage: http://magit.vc
Nowadays a lot of those flights between Santiago and Antofagasta stop in La Serena. When I was on it a few months ago, the flight was full both ways. I assume that flight is important for mining operations, and nowadays for tourism.
And which, even when they are not intended to be malicious will break your system in an unrecoverable way...
> It's simply people versus their various over-reaching governments.

If pretty much every liberal democracy of any significant size is doing it, maybe we should stop and think about why. Blaming "over-reaching governments" is too simplistic in my opinion. I have a hard time believing that the legislative process is so broken in every liberal democracy that such surveillance is happening contrary to the public will.
It is a shame. I'm constantly astounded and frustrated at how effective w3school's SEO is. Their content is not terrible by any means but it's simply not nearly as comprehensive or authoritative as MDN and others. And because of the name, quite often they even outrank w3.org when I'm trying to find the actual specifications themselves!
>working on at minimum a 105 year mission

Cathedral building in the middle-ages was a multi-generational 80+ year affair and some of the Pyramids took even longer IIRC. So societies were/are definitely capable of working on ~100 year missions :)
The other popular joke, after all these years and billions spent:
"Let's just move Berlin to a functioning airport"
> Why mention an SLA if it's 99%?

Because at least part of the target market for this product cares about quantifying the guarantee, whatever it is.

> To me, "SLA" is an enterprise oriented term,

I think that's excessively narrow in terms of who cares about it, but Nearline is clearly in large part an enterprise-targeted offering, so, even if it was a purely enterprise-oriented term, its appropriate.

> which a lot of folks (us) don't care about because we're scaling horizontally and architect with failure in mind.

Knowing expected failure characteristics can be an important input to intelligently architecting with failure in mind.

> 99% for a typical non-scaling enterprise app is crap.

Nearline isn't an app, its one of a set of closely related storage offerings that, by design, would usually be used in coordination with each other and possibly other storage systems by an app. For its role in that stack, 99% doesn't seem immediately unreasonable, to me.
Ethicists are people who try to push the boundaries of ethics, to change them from what people generally consider them to be—they essentially by definition are the least ethical people because they don't believe in reigning ethics at all, which one could absorb awareness of without much effort, but instead believe in reinventing and establishing new, and therefore deviant, standards.
AFAIK the smoke was pulled in at the ceiling of the floors. And then sent downwards and vented out somewhere on the side instead of on top of the building.

The original design was never tested, because the building as originally designed never existed.

Each addition ordered up by Schwarz required shifting passenger flows through the terminal. That meant rebuilding walls, exits, emergency lights, ventilation systems, windows, elevators, and staircases. At one point, in 2009, outside controllers urged Schwarz and his engineering chief to shut down construction for half a year to give the architects and contractors time to coordinate efforts.

That never happened, so there never was a complete design for the changed building, and the fire system wasn't properly replanned for the new situation. Which lead to issues like the collapsing pipes: They fitted stronger fans, but no-one realized that the pipes can't hold the higher pressure difference.
Berkeley ‘Corpse Flower’ Blooming Soon in All Its Disgusting Glory
Ohloh - now OpenHub - gives some great metrics on some of those aspects and even lets you compare projects : https://www.openhub.net/
The thing that kind of jumped out at me was the RAID5 configuration - I can't imagine doing that with 3TB drives unless he really does have everything on there also backed up to another location.
the problem with security updates is that they often include feature updates that are not security related... companies like Google appear to have too many engineers and implement changes that I would rather skip.
Datatypes were a very cool feature, not just a simple API. For an application to be able to support new format be it an image, video, spreadsheet, document or anything the application has to be updated to use a library or to add native support for that format.

Imagine if you could add a Datatype for an image format such as EXR and you would instantly be able to open it in Paint, embed it in Word and Powerpoint without having to update the apps. A DOCX Datatype would allow Wordpad to open Word documents. A new video format on the internet? No need to wait for browser support, just add the Datatype and it would work.

Another advantage of a system like this would be for security. If an serious exploit was found in a popular image decoding library then you could delete the offending Datatype and none of your apps could be exploited until the fault is fixed. May be inconvenient but at least it would be safe. Shared libraries could be used to handle this to an extent but most apps would probably crash if you deleted a required library and who knows if the app is using the shared library or a statically linked version?

There was a few nice features that were in the Amiga operating system but this was one that i wish had been implemented in other operating systems.
It should be noted that the contrarian article title ("Programmers are distraction for your startup") is deliberate, which is why there are so many comments in response. It's a linkbait title with plausible deniability.

Also a note to people who write blog article with such titles: HN has a flame war detector. It's not a smart idea.
Monitoring and alerting of what?
To blatantly toot my own horn here, but for visual exploratory data analysis, I just released Popily (http://popily.com).

It is meant as a no-code solution to get the layout of a dataset and do some fast EDA. Drag data in, then click around your data. It isn't a replacement to in-depth analysis, but it is a heck of a lot faster for EDA than making dozens of charts in Matplotlib.

Here are a bunch of examples (http://popily.com/examples/) of Popily in action. Personal favorite: Battles In The Game Of Thrones (http://popily.com/explore/notebook/battles-in-the-game-of-th...).
I find how well that works is directly related to how closely related English is to the language in question. The further you get from its Germanic and Latin roots, the proportionally less sense a rough translation makes.

Some of that is figures of speech, some of it is colloquialisms, some of it is just weird grammar. For example, Japanese tends to omit the subject, which is incredibly confusing when directly translated if you aren't expecting it.
That's assuming the EULA will fit on said toilet paper.
I have been it watching it since the first episode when it was launched and I am totally hooked to the show. Some of the tech/jargon they mention are highly accurate and I really enjoy that. The last episode even had Raspberry Pi and also Python [0]. Pretty cool!

[0] - http://i.imgur.com/cGN3FQw.jpg
If it had a pub and a windmill, I expect there was at least a jeep trail running through. Otherwise how would the pub have resupplied or farmers gotten grain to the mill? This would count as a "road" in the parts of North America and Asia you're talking about. Therefore the "three mile" claim is bogus.
We're still getting started, so - give it a spin, and we won't charge you until it's worth your while.
I am not very happy about it, but I have just installed a change that forces everybody to opt-in to the new push behavior.
I haven't been back home (Amsterdam) for most of this year, but I find that surprising — I usually have trouble coming up with more than three ice cream parlours off the top of my head. Where's all this great ice cream I've been missing out on?
Congratulations! Absolutely changed the Python game and great hosts of events as well.
There was an kind of on-topic post on imgur about that today:

[The Fermi paradox: We're pretty much screwed...](http://imgur.com/gallery/Wtog9)
I think looking at your gay marriage example exemplifies why your thinking is wrong.

Your interpretation reads the phrase "establishment of" completely out of the text. A perfectly reasonable interpretation of that text is that Congress isn't allowed to establish a national religion. And using your logic, we should fire all the judges who have interpreted the establishment clause to prohibit more than that.

Similarly, there is a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the 4th amendment that looks at the things protected in the enumerated list (person, house, papers, and effects) and concludes that it only prevents what would be a trespass to property if not done by the government. Judges who read in a "right to privacy" from that, according to your view, should be fired.

In fact, the whole "right to privacy" hiding in the "penumbras" of the Constitution can be discarded, and the judges who read that in should be fired too.

Alternatively, I think your problem is not with judges who don't uphold the Constitution, but rather your interpretation of it.
We use MongoDirector for our production Mongo instances and it's been great. No issues since we switched to them in September 2014.
I had not heard of Prometheus. Thanks. Any reason it would not run on Windows?
I prefer the Book of Sand, which collects an infinite selection of the most legible pages from the Library of Babel.
no redirect to https?
These are not even counting scanning negatives (can be massive) or digital backs for medium format cameras. Hasseblad had a 60+MP back 10 years ago just because the sensor was larger.
I've seen one of those bloom in Stuttgart. Fascinating.
Massive lawsuit filed against Uber in Toronto
Or use :

myMethod = (arg) => {return this.value + arg;}

With es7.classProperties in babel.
https://babeljs.io/docs/usage/experimental/
Sample code from just this afternoon:

const typeMap = {
'i-text': this.processText.bind(this),
'image': this.processImage.bind(this),
'rect': this.processRectangle.bind(this)
};

Really annoying if you ask me, though I understand why it had to be this way.
Interestingly enough, Borges decided to use the smallest possible alphabet for the library, not even including characters in the Spanish alphabet. Then again, this library is set in a completely separate universe... and it's the universe itself, so I don't think I18N is a problem there.
Show HN: EC-crypt – secure, file-based messaging protocol
Yeah. You can imagine uses for VR that aren't gaming -- lots of them, actually -- but are people actually going to go for it? I don't know. It may just be a bridge too far for people, or it may be that they don't think that the advantages of VR per se are sufficient to forsake their screens, or it may be that by the time the technology is finally there and content is created for it, some other shift has come into place.

(Oculus Rift feels like it's been right around the corner for like five years now. How long has it actually been? I guess only three years.)