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probdist

Hacker News has incredibly good long term retention of active users (commenters/submitters). I just published a blog post on the subject (https://probdist.com/2020/03/28/the-graying-of-hacker-news-u...).

Lots of users on HN are actively contributing for years after sign up. This to me is a good sign of health. The counter point is of course, the rapid drop off in engagement after the initial month. Where a large number of users each month never return to the site.

The average comment on Hacker News last month was written by a user with 5 years of tenure on the site. Depending on your perspective you could argue this is a good or a bad thing (new users aren't contributing as much as old users, or old users are continuing to contribute!).

Re:The Graying of Hacker News Users on Saturday March 28, 2020 @04:41PM (#22714167)
OP here: I'll keep checking in on the comments from time to time. If you are after the raw data in BigQuery it is available here: `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
Re:Google's Internal AGPL Policy on Tuesday March 10, 2020 @11:57PM (#22542833)
This is how RStudio and certain other great open source tools get bigcos to pay for licenses. They are allergic to AGPL and therefore will happily pay for alternative licenses for tools their employees demand.
Re:Delta Lake on Wednesday April 24, 2019 @01:24PM (#19740689)
This appears to be an open sourcing of the Databricks Delta technology which is fairly mature and I personally think very valuable.
Re:How the Kleiner Perkins Empire Fell on Tuesday April 23, 2019 @05:53PM (#19733325)
I'm a former early employee at a KP backed start up. Nothing but respect and good vibes from the folks I met with or presented to from KP.
This is a good move from Slack. Microsoft teams is an extremely high quality product already. Slack has to be wary of this competitive force nipping at their heels. I've seen teams make good penetration into large companies by starting as the alternative to sharepoint for new projects/working groups.

Team's live editing functionality of excel files is really really valuable for team collaboration. Slack closing the gap on O365 integration is important for enterprise sales.

Ask HN: How do you manage teleconferencing and what do you use?

Recently, I've been very frustrated with the quality of teleconferences I've been on. I've had calls in the last year on Skype/MSFT Teams/Webex/Zoom/Bluejeans/Gotomeeting/Various Webinar Products/POTS only conference numbers. Very few went flawlessly.One thing that always surprises me is how much background noise folks in conference rooms can generate. My office main conference room has a...

( Read More... | no comments | 7 points | on HN )
Azure Data Explorer/ Kusto is more of a database that is optimized for the log use case than a service. There is a front end tool and a lot of the use-cases are around log management, but it is database you can do general SQL or KQL things with. Time series is one of the core use-cases for it also but it has less marketing around it.
Seems positioned to compete with Azure Data Explorer (MSFT's log/time series optimized service). I know Azure runs a lot of services on top of Data Explorer (previously called Kusto) I wonder if this is a true internal battle tested product or a me-too offering.
Re:Facebook adding “fbclid” parameter to outbound links on Monday October 22, 2018 @01:33PM (#18276584)
I've seen a broken link from this url parameter already.
Re:Meet YC This Fall on Monday August 27, 2018 @02:08PM (#17853126)
Went to a similar event at Harvard some years ago. Was interesting but if you are a HN regular you probably get as much out of blog posts following happenings online as at the event.

YMMV if you are a better net-worker than I am.

Re:Microsoft makes Databricks a first-party service on Azure on Wednesday November 15, 2017 @11:24AM (#15704885)
Azure has already had a great spark experience available with HDInsight.
I've help sell software-as-a-service to large businesses for a few years and this is a good read. An interesting additional nugget is that when the stakes get big enough customers often are being guided by a consultant (Accenture etc) in crafting things beyond an internal purchasing/procurement/IT mashup. You need to make sure you help the customer and the consultant to get the sale.
Re:SQL Notebook on Tuesday May 09, 2017 @11:54AM (#14301071)
Looks pretty neat. Reminds me a bit of Linqpad, https://www.linqpad.net/ which I've also never used.
Re:XLA: linear algebra library for TensorFlow on Tuesday March 07, 2017 @11:21PM (#13817868)
Why does this support JIT but not AOT for NVIDIA GPUs?
They could have asked for George's middle name and the cost of compliance would be burdensome. It is not the rap but the ride that you can't beat.
Re:Toronto man found not guilty in Twitter harassment trial on Saturday January 23, 2016 @07:00PM (#10960746)
There are many of the substantive tweets preserved in the legal record of the case.
Re:Toronto man found not guilty in Twitter harassment trial on Saturday January 23, 2016 @06:59PM (#10960742)
Re:YC Open Office Hours on Thursday December 10, 2015 @04:58PM (#10713810)
How'd you decide what groups you wanted to focus on? Vets, Women, URM, International.

Any other demographic categories you think are important to especially reach out to?

Wow the complaint has some bombshells:

In particular I'd highlight this as pretty crazy: (screenshot from scribd because I don't have a plaintext copy) http://imgur.com/kaFSSzl

One of the Customer Support Staff Members on the Silk Road was a homeland security investigator. Wow.

Re:Oakland releases months’ worth of license plate reader data on Saturday November 28, 2015 @08:51PM (#10643406)
Oh I thought that these were all going to be street level data from toll booth type things.
Re:Oakland releases months’ worth of license plate reader data on Saturday November 28, 2015 @06:29PM (#10642991)
I'm missing where these records are present. I basically see plate numbers timestamps and coordinates no other columns on these datasets.
I'm interested in thinking through several examples on this subject.

One example that comes to mind with me is the campaign by many university student groups across the country to encourage endowments to divest from fossil fuel companies. For example: http://www.fossilfreeuc.org/ http://www.fossilfreemit.org/ . The the vocal minority on this subject is very strongly in favor of their opinion (divestment), whereas the larger mass of students mostly doesn't care about the issue or perhaps leans to not divesting but only slightly.

It is interesting to consider the more detailed results of this where people don't have 0 cost acquiescence, for example if people really wanted some non-kosher soda it would still exist in the marketplace.

It is also interesting how this phenomena occurs in voting schemes where you have a fixed number of voting points to distribute over all issues up for consideration. In such systems people can have their minority issues more strongly represented.

This is really nicely produced.

Can someone provide some background for the scene where Mission residents are opposing new luxury condo development? What has been the state of new high density development in SF? Last time I was in SF I didn't see a lot of construction cranes.

Re:Did the FBI Pay a University to Attack Tor Users? on Wednesday November 11, 2015 @06:47PM (#10550271)
I assume the CMU folks didn't break into any one elses nodes. It seems like one of the principles of Tor node operation is that you can run your nodes however you want. I don't think there is any binding agreement or even strong implication that someone operating a Tor node agrees to not be hostile to users.

Perhaps it was unethical by the standards of university research, but I wouldn't be bothered by the government doing this. If the government or a university researcher idled in your irc channel and logged the communications I would think that was okay. I kinda view this the same way.

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