jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The article mostly describes obvious, well documented limitations of GAE. It's really the story of a team that needed a saw, picked a hammer, and spent months trying to get it to cut wood.

This is a pretty common pattern in software, so it might be more interesting to write an article about why they chose the wrong technology and how they stuck with it even with it was clear it wasn't built to do what they needed.
Audiobook publisher GraphicAudio has cheesy tagline: "A Movie In Your Mind.". Well yeah, that's where all movies play. But there is a sense in which an audiobook is more movie than book. Especially with light reading while doing something else, like driving or gardening.

Maybe that loophole will work for your ADD.
> you can skip the chalice if you want now; I'm not sure if that was always the case pre-V2

IIRC from childhood, before Vatican II only the priest drank the consecrated wine; the congregation received the bread only.

In the Episcopal Church, all hands get both bread and wine — indeed, when the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, Article 30 of the C of E's Thirty Nine Articles of Religion (1571, and still in the Book of Common Prayer) included the following: "The Cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the Lay-people: for both the parts of the Lord's Sacrament, by Christ's ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike." [0]

[0] https://www.anglicancommunion.org/media/109014/Thirty-Nine-A...
Would be nice to have a decentralized HN . I m sure it exists
He pretty much answered that. If they were going for ‘perfect’ we’d ended up using some form of vb from ms instead of anything from Netscape
"We're secretly swapping their fresh brewed coffee with dark, sparkling Folger's Crystals."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CoLiyUZXW4
If you are scared to death in Thiruvananthapuram, then a grand world awaits you in the rest of the country! Some trucks with very dim lights think that it is a bright idea to drive in the opposite direction at night.

It is not entirely fair to blame them - the "U-turns" provided in the highway are so tight that it might cause the truck to overturn - so they think it is worth the risk to go 2km in the other direction and then merge with traffic going in the right way.
I agree with the concern, but we have had a very long time to refine our architecture. Some would call it an ideology lock-in, I would say we solved our problem domain in a deep and meaningful way and would prefer to stick with these proven approaches. Our entire codebase was rewritten approximately 4 times before we got to the point of being confident enough to push forward with a data-driven/configuration approach.

When you are writing the same business logic hundreds of times and only 10-20 discrete things are different between each implementation, it starts to make a hell of a lot of sense to expose those things as parameters to be configured. It's simple economies of scale at this point for us. Despite our small size, we are trying to get out of a "move fast & break things" startup mindset into a more stable "lets take this to 1k customers now" mindset (we provide a B2B application in a small market, so 1k is a huge target).

For us, our company doesn't become profitable until we can scale our operations by 5-10x without any more headcount. The only thing we could come up with that would allow for this is configuration-driven techniques in which entire customer implementations can be cloned as simple JSON contracts for purposes of bootstrapping the next customer. Developers are removed from most of the product implementation process, and can focus more on core product value which is now levered hundreds of times over due to being exposed as configuration contract.

I am NOT arguing that one should seek out to build a configuration-driven system from day one. That would probably be the biggest mistake you could make. You have to already have a mostly-functional product that people already want to buy/use before you can even consider this approach. Even then, you should probably expand your target market and inject a few more use cases & rewrites before you jump over that chasm. Having a squeaky-clean domain model that addresses all potential use cases is the bare minimum prerequisite, IMO.
I see this argument all the time. "Oh, Joe Schmo won't know how to do this! It'll frighten them!".

And this happens absolutely everywhere. And it's true. But this problem won't go away until we start FORCING people to adapt, by adopting stricter measures everywhere.
You may be right. I didn't read the book you mention, and when I used APUE I was already very familiar with the Unix world, so I used it mostly as a reference, a way to learn what was not exactly in the man pages.
Even at the FAANG end the gains are tiny compared to the ownership class.
> the "many eyes" theory is disproven

The way I see it, all those vulnerabilities prove the opposite. If there were no "many eyes", I doubt most of those vulnerabilities would have been exposed to the public at all. But I bet that malicious actors would still be using those.

That argument you made reads similar to "hospital theory is disproven, because whenever we get more hospitals and doctors, more people end up with a diagnosis".
This.

On a different language, but same mindset.

System is many years outdated and no one understands it.

Get a ticket. “Fix all the problems”

Me “Umm okay. Hire 20 people and give us 3 years.”

Them: you have a week by yourself.

14 months later their standpoint is it’s always one more week left.

I can’t tell if they even see the absurdity anymore.
It depends quite a bit on what it is you know, and what it pertains to, and how problematic it is.

If you guard the knowledge to the core application for how the company makes it's money, you're not going anywhere.

If you guard the knowledge to a component used in that core application, which while it's problematic to replace could be swapped out with a lot of effort, you are going to be walking a tightrope. As soon as it becomes more beneficial to replace that component than keep dealing with the problem of it being hard to deal with (because if it wasn't your knowledge would have little value), you're faced with the fact that a large chunk of your value to the company has just been obsoleted with it.

So when taking the hoarding info approach, just how irreplaceable is the thing you're guarding knowledge of? Often it's far more replaceable than people think, and often becomes more so as people hoard knowledge of how to deal with it. Unless you're that guy that's on call 24/7 to immediately deal with a problem, the fact that it all relies on you which is unsustainable will eventually come to light.
It should be obvious by now that signal is aiming for a different balance of user friendliness and privacy. At this point it seems unlikely that they'd change their minds on phone numbers.
There is no problem using raw pointers for non owning pointers. Also a lot of safe abstractions can be built on top of raw pointers (and smart pointers are obviously an example).

Pragmatism beats dogmatism in practice.
Indeed they do, and among the consequenses:

Escalation of what may be moderate violence to make the time worth it.

Disregard for the law due to perception of poor justice.

Failure to recognize all forces regulating behavior to focus on harsh law alone tends to amplify undesirable behavior.

There are more.
I am starting to wonder if perhaps there is something wrong with me, for I am not outraged as everyone else seems to be. So long as there's no groping etc going on, I'm inclined to just shrug and say to the agent, "well, you gotta do what you gotta do".

I am sorry HN, but I find myself lacking the desire to board this bandwagon.
> If github spent their time so that their site raised absolutely no basic questions, then they'd still be in beta by now.

Beta is the stage you reach AFTER you flip on transactions, institute and test quick restores, and separate dev from production.
I agree with your overall argument that less code = better. What I don't agree with is that that conclusively demonstrates good design. I think all of the scripting languages have design problems that were solved before the languages were ever written. For what it's worth, I don't consider Java well designed either. All of it's insights already existed elsewhere [1].

Lines of code is also a bad metric. You have to also count characters, etc. There was a study that did just this for C++, Java and Smalltalk. Java was 3 times more concise than C++ and Smalltalk 3 times more concise than Java.

[1] Interfaces would be the closest Java was to inventing something but Smalltalk had these informally (and some environments would let you work with them directly).
Yes, that's what I meant. Constructive criticism is fine and is much appreciated by most parties, but most of the comments I read (this story is a perfect example) are just proclaiming that something is stupid and will certainly fail.
I'm confused, why do I need to use pubsub to separate updating an item from requesting an item?
There is mature installable driver support in Windows. Things like mappings of locked frames to user space that persist after a kernel call were a flag on Windows, API/kernel changes had to be written on Linux.
thanks for explaining. Still seems a bit like having a golf course and only letting employees with a certain handicap play. Maybe they could balance this out by offering an area with less dangerous equipment and/or lessons/instructors/supervision for everyone else.
Thanks very much for the response.

No one expects free phone-based tech support for an open-source project.

That's true, but there are various reasons for that, one being that it's rarely needed. Now, offering it despite any demonstrated need is an interesting experiment, but it also suggests that the typical paths for learning and support are lacking.

I think your reply did not contribute much of use to the conversation, and I think that's why you got downvoted

I asked a question with an unflattering (albeit realistic) supposition.
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested

Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

I think a lot of folks who spent money on Apple products are going to be happy with this, and for that I'm glad.

But I didn't find this release adequate. Apple is not tracking me -- they are keeping a time-stamped list of nearby access points on my device, which effectively is a huge breadcrumb trail of everywhere I've been and when. Apple doesn't know it's me -- because the data is encrypted, which makes no sense at all. Whether data is encrypted or not is meaningless. Can I go to the Apple server logs and track incoming downloads and associate them with the data or not? I strongly suspect the answer is "yes". If not, that's great, but that wasn't described here.

The killer omission? That Apple has been doing all of this -- which is at the very least controversial -- without informing the users in a manner in which they clearly understood it. The response we see is simply a reaction. The "bug" here is getting caught.

I don't necessarily see anything nefarious at work, but I'm troubled with the idea that Apple was keeping a list of my whereabouts (the nearest access point, for those of you who are literally-minded) without my knowing it. That's a pretty serious breach of user trust, no matter how many times it was covered in the 47-page lawyered-up doc that nobody reads.

But like I said, folks are willing to cut Apple lots of slack, and they deserve it. But hell if I'd want to see something like this happen again, from any manufacturer. I'm not so sure that vendors are getting the point.
If it didn't get in the news, would Apple have ever fixed it?
A sad thing is that those are cities where bicycles are actually pretty common, but where they are becoming less common, because of the choices being made about development. The same is true in India and in Eastern Europe. Comfortable, mixed low-speed pedestrian/bicycle/scooter/animal traffic is getting replaced with dangerous high-speed car traffic, complete with traffic barriers. It's painful to watch a mistake get made, on a massive scale, in real time. The American Way is the wrong way, here.
The original iteration of Spotify scanned the local filesystem and shared content on the peer-to-peer network. That was enough to ban it from my work and home networks and personal devices. I am not interested in whatever Spotify is currently doing. They are not trustworthy as an organization.
Any examples of the display output of the radar device?
The photoshop file format is fine for what is. The format to explode your head is the MS Office .doc format.
The general decision seems to be at the point when vaccines are widely available.
Not the person you're asking, but I've been a Simple user since 2016.

When I started, I was diligenty using the savings goals. I had a goal for a car, a house down payment, cell phone upgrade, etc.

Eventually as my account and goals grew, I found it to be stupid to leave so much uninvested. I just kept a mental note to keep my balance at around $15-20k, transferred everything else to my brokerage.
It’s not just reductionist, it’s a misuse of the word in a way that is becoming more fashionable. Buying phones does not come under the meaning of privilege, unless perhaps you’re in prison (I struggle to think of an example that might occur and isn’t patently absurd). The rest of us can walk into a shop, those things that are open to the public.

Hopefully this misuse is just a fad and we can go back to a more sensible use.
Encrypting the SNI is probably a good idea. According to Wikipedia one Russian ISP and China has already blocked ESNI'ed connections, which is probably a good sign that it's doing something.

But still, it feels like such a hack throwing this into the DNS records. A mess for server operators to implement if you don't manage your DNS records via an API today (since they'll need to be changed when certs rotate). And I'm guessing that a wast majority of people use the ISP default DNS (or Google/Cloudflare), that brings plenty of privacy problems on its own...

Maybe ESNI/ECO is really worth the hassle in a future where the whole Oblivious DNS-thing[0] is widely spread.

[0] Someone like Apple would proxy your encrypted (DoH) DNS requests to Cloudflare, so neither Cloudflare nor Apple can see what a specific user is querying
Thanks so much sciencewolf! Cycnicism is OK - there have been a lot of crappy products in this space and devs are sick and tired of LinkedIn spam.

The plan is to become a trusted partner to engineers and technologists - helping to update their resume yearly, produce better resumes by having a deeper insight into their performance. That trust and that relationship will be super valuable and I'm sure we'll find the business model.

As mentioned in FAQs -- "In the future, we will offer additional upgraded services for purchase such as resume distribution, hosting, tracking, salary negotiation, vetted job opportunities, recruiter outreach and cover letter writing." -- but at this moment we don't really know.

The core product today is writing resumes and building that trust. I think if we do that very well, we'll have a lot of opportunities to make a successful business out of it. If we do that poorly, we'll have nothing.
> As a programming language person, I am quite convinced there will never, ever be an agreement on a common formal language (even if there was or is agreement on foundations it should be based upon) - it is the same as for programming languages. This is more due to human nature rather than technical factors, and if we conceive logic as a linguistic activity, then we can see how foundations and the corresponding ergonomic language logic are related, maybe two sides of the same coin. "Foundations" in the context of mathematics appear (to me at least) as something technical and interchangeable.

I strongly agree. The formalization of mathematics bears strong resemblances to programming (and is in deep theoretical senses the same endeavor) so it would be hardly surprising for the same social phenomena to show up. As an aside I think the relationship between the halting problem and real-world programming languages is a good heuristic for the effect that Godel's incompleteness theorems have on formalization of mathematics (e.g. very little in programming language development is directly attributable to the halting problem and its existence doesn't spell the doom of programming, but it's always there in the background).

> Is there a venue for discussions on logics like these outside of the occasional logic-related HN threads? : )

There's the Foundations of Mathematics (FOM) mailing list: https://cs.nyu.edu/mailman/listinfo/fom, but it's geared towards cutting edge and very technical research rather than more layman discussions of the sort found on HN.

Otherwise I don't know of one unfortunately.
At the risk of getting downvoted, and I'm not saying the oil spill isn't bad - it is (very) - but let's remember some context:

1) The area is large. But this is meaningless without knowledge of the density.

2) I can't find a reference, but a prof of marine biology was on the bbc a couple of days ago and apparently this oil spill doesn't even make it into the top 40 worst man-made disasters (e.g compare to bhopal, chernobyl, pacific gyre)

The Niger Delta sees this volume of oil spilled EVERY SINGLE YEAR and no-one gives a fuck. No-one is held to account, there's no press, there's no nothing. The culprits are all the major US/European oil firms.
Fascinating. I can't help but think of Ender's Game.
Also, the app costs a one time payment of $1.99.
In that case, it is already pretty remarkable that 3254 from a group of people who currently can't even use your product want it to be developed for them. If that happened to a product I were making, I sure as hell would begin targeting that platform.
I code in as3, php, and js as well. What's your opinion of PHP open source frameworks like CodeIgniter, Kohana, and Symfony? Or perhaps, to take a language that I don't code in but is often lauded, RoR? Or, on the JS side, have you seen this:

http://javascriptmvc.com/

I'm very curious what your opinion (as a C# dev) is on these. My dad loves .NET (and I think rightly so), but often has (what I think to be) a bit of an outdated stance on open source that is mostly borne of a lack of knowledge of the extant options.
I really like Reia and have been following it for sometime now, I hope to use it onces it makes into beta.
I have the same problem. The author and real-life raving loon are two different people in my head. Ender's Game is still one of the best books I've read and I have to keep this separation to avoid going out and donating the books of his I own.

I refuse to read any of his new stuff, but that's probably 50% politics and 50% taste.
When a patent establishes a claim, and then says something like "Claim 19: The process of claim 18 further comprising overlaying a route line", does that mean the patent is narrowed to only things that include route lines, or does it still apply to systems with/without route lines? If it's not narrowed by the additional claims, what purpose do the additional claims serve?
Oh, maybe you mean his extended fawning Hitler biography Ender's Game: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034
It seems the adverts have been superimposed? I wonder if they're the original adverts or they sold these "fake" adverts to cover the creation costs?
Primarily Google Ads (or equivalent).

If HN has reached some critical mass of readers I'd (in a craigslist-fashion) charge small fees for certain types of commercial posts (job postings, review my startup/webservice etc).
I'll stick with Damien Katz on this:

Erlang is based originally on Prolog, a logic programming
language that was briefly hot in the 80's. Surely you've
seen other languages based on Prolog, right? No? Why not?
Because Prolog sucks ass for building entire
applications. But that hasn't deterred Erlang from
stealing it's dynamite syntax.

cf. http://damienkatz.net/2008/03/what_sucks_abou.html
When you hear what anyone says do you always look at every single point that makes that makes that person look good and assume they made it up?

I mean, how paranoid do you have to be to think that fact that he is a reddit user is him "masterfully crafting a story" that "omits any semblance of objectivity". Even if the rest of your list had made sense (sorry, it doesn't), that first point would have made me ignore the rest.

It's quite possible that one or more aspects are exaggerated or made up, as with anything you ever get told, but none of your points are "well that seems unlikely to the point that we must assume it's not actually true", so I don't see why you'd question any of it.
Yes, you can. If you use a clean Nexus build then last time I tried it, the behaviour was that the first time I opened Chrome it asked me if I wanted to sign in to chrome to share my history and bookmarks between devices, and I had a simple yes/no choice. I don't think this needed any deep technical knowledge.

I'm not intimately familiar with the android chrome settings UI, so I apologise if I've missed an easier way, but in about 30 seconds of tapping I found the button to turn it off: main settings page, accounts, my google account, sync, uncheck chrome.
This is the unfortunate reality.
Until very recently, it's been hard to get FreeBSD to work well on EC2. When I started at Netflix 2.5 years ago, I asked them same thing. I think we're finally at a place where we might be able to start looking at making the move.

But to be honest, we're pretty heavily invested in the Linux ecosystem at this point.
RS needs work contribution from each Ruby to make it sustainable.

It would also show leadership from MRI to encourage a semi-independent Ruby self-test framework that can run on any Rubyish interpreter. (Granted RS has RBX bias, but it would show leadership to coordinate common infrastructure.)

Since RS exists, seems like a good idea to go with that for full up integration testing, but each Ruby should still unit test it's own, low-level bits. (Is MRI doing that at least?)
When talking about climate change, Jean Marc Jancovici (our local Al Gore) never fails to mention urban architecture takes time to reorganize. Given your petrol is so cheap (low tax and high foreign... let's not say it), US builds cities accordingly. In France, taxes more than double the petrol price [1], so you only see suburban designs in very rich places (namely, Sophia-Antipolis). Those areas where cars are mandatory are not kind to lower-income people, and the voting is accordingly very right-wing.

So the first step we should take for climate change is to organize our cities so that public transport is useful, where we can walk to work. In this matter, US has no chance of improving if they keep low taxes per gallon.

[1] http://www.connaissancedesenergies.org/fiche-pedagogique/str... (French, with charts)
I wonder if the government buried this until after the Ulbricht trial was over. The fact that two of the investigators were corrupt and stealing funds could have derailed the case.
This is the start of people being moved out of jobs to be replaced by robots. Think 50 years into the future.

> This is why I find redistribution of wealth so ridiculous

I don't think HN is the place for socialist vs capitalist debates. The loaded language you are using, such as 'stealing', completely ignores a massively complex debate. The correct balance of 'stealing' vs 'starving in the street' has eluded the world's smartest people for decades; I wouldn't expect to solve it in this comment box.