skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You may want to re-read site guidelines.

EDIT: Or re-read what a mod told you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10527121
"you want a software that is backwards compatible so third parties interacting with you will never have to rewrite your software, you want a software that runs with minimal maintenance, but is easy to extends, etc. And Agile is ill suited for that."

I really think you need to build a lot more software before you can make a claim like that. You're being fed lines from your professors.

The vast majority of software, period, is not backward compatible, has to be rewritten all the time, and costs billions to maintain, and is hard to maintain.

Agile vs. Waterfall is only one factor among many in such as discussion. The difference with Agile is in its ability to deal with uncertain requirements, something Waterfall cannot handle by its nature.
Heirloom tomatoes from a farmers market cost 3x as much as grocery store tomatoes, and they're worth every penny.
Sure computers can make such decisions, be it with /dev/random or some sophisticated classifier. But we'd want justifications, and it's difficult to define what that entails. Moreover, what does it mean for a computer to be "better" at this than humans? The whole problem is ill defined.
That is an almost unbelievably creepy thing to have written.
I live in upstate ny and get all of my seasonal vegetables from farms about 45m away.

Sunday we got rutabagas about 5x the size of the supermarket versions for 1/2 the price. Bushel of broccoli for $10. Bushel of spaghetti squash for $20. (75% savings vs retail)

So cheaper and it almost always of higher quality.
I don't disagree with your conclusion necessarily, especially given that I'm speaking from a position of ignorance with respect to Go, but I'm surprised by your statement about python and functional style. Coming from Ocaml, I found python to be one of the more accommodating languages in terms of maintaining the style I had built up in the former. (I do certainly acknowledge many examples for which this contradicts, immutability being a major point, but I can think of more situations where I was able to use similar design patterns than when I wasn't.) What in particular did you find lacking?

This all may be the ramblings of someone basing their opinions on "code I've written that has worked" and not on some higher standard of design patterns, so feel free to ignore if that's not productive :)

This ties into other thoughts I have rattling around about treating languages as specialty tools with well prescribed patterns, vs the trend to implement some subset of common lisp as the saying goes, but not well formulated enough to expound on them here. Broadly; I'm not sure which paradigm I prefer. (Having a big toolbox of specialty tools is nice, but if one tool can easily eat the functionality of another tool, I tend to side on considering that option.)
The issue is when other software is built upon those initial documentation of your system.

Third party services depending on you having a stable API, for example.

You can’t just break support for them, so what do you do in agile?
Peerspace Raises $5M Series A, Expands to New York City
Confluence is pretty cool, but they suck at bullet lists and indenting code blocks... so basically they suck at a couple of basic UI stuff. Apart from that it seems pretty great.
I use Gmail somewhat indirectly... I forward all gmail emails to a non-Google email address
Isn't optical scanning as hackable as if the votes were originally recorded electronically, though? Or are people performing random checks on the machine's count? (Honestly curious)

Don't get me wrong, running open source software is a plus for many reasons, if one is using software at all. But any automation in elections seems to carry a hard to bound amount of risk.
The LAY-trobe phenomenon is real and something that outsiders have picked up on in my speaking (as a fellow Latrobean) after I moved away. My theory is that Latrobe as an adjective is "LAY-trobe" and the noun pronunciation is "lah-TROBE"; not really sure if that holds up to scrutiny though.
That is an entirely different question, but the answer probably isn't that anyone can ignore inconvenient laws under the guise of "It's unjust"
For the cc declined customers, you may want to look into http://churnbuster.io/
Not if they pay twice what the average is (which they do, by most accounts).

You can have the best of the best, you just have to pay for it. Netflix does.
> It may not apply in this case, but it's absolutely a real thing.

No, it really isn't.

Here's the real backstory of "sealioning": Group A made some assertions. Group B refused to accept their assertions. Group A decided that what was called for was yet another in a long list of mechanisms for dismissing and invalidating criticism. And here we are.

You can't just wave a hand, or a rhetorical gimmick lifted from a webcomic, and make your critics go away. They will never go away. There are still people who think that the earth is flat or that vaccines cause autism or that GMOs are dangerous. If you hurl abuse at them and find tricks like the "sealioning" accusation to dismiss them, you're just sinking below their level and making them look like the rational ones. A better policy: let the fools ask their foolish questions. If you are right, you have nothing to fear, and all the fools will accomplish is inadvertently help you educate the onlookers.
Native Detroiter and I've heard all these pronunciations. But I must object to Don Cherry referred to as a blowhard but he is most definitely a character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7PzS1A08Wg
Yes, often the company will negotiate with the AG's office on a settlement. Being cooperative goes a long way.
Technology: Unicorns face end of the ‘steroid era’
Your code in Go almost certainly does use generics. Just not user defined ones. I don't particularly want to argue the generic point as I believe it is beat to death. But I could use a good concurrent map in Go in dozens if not hundreds of places.

I could use a lock free ring buffer in dozens of places. I could use promise/futures in dozens of places. I could use anything but the big honking lock that is channels in dozens of places.

I could use proper variance rules in the generics Go does provide in dozens of places. I could use monadic style errors and options in dozens of places.

Now, I agree that I generally don't need to write my own generic code very often, but if the blessed generic writers on the go lang compiler team don't write these things for me, I don't have a fall back option in Go (other than code gen, which people are starting to fall back on). It just seems unsustainable to me.
At the risk of derailing the post, I have a relevant question for the Hacker News hivemind: how would someone like me get this job? (i.e. Andy Rubin's former position)

I've got a Ph.D. in autonomous robotics from the best place in Australia to have earned one. I started a consumer robotics company that exploded rapidly in a cloud of useful lessons learned. I then moved into product development consulting in order to understand the full product development lifecycle. And I'm now also the CTO of a small startup building an OS for if-this-then-that (and more) control of hardware and software devices, initially targeting Escape Room developers.

On the other hand, I'm only 31, and given how long I spent in academia, my paid employment experience is only about five years, including a 20-month post-doc.

My experience isn't all that atypical. I've met plenty of equally ambitious and credentialled people, most of them entrepreneurs too. Imagining that this sort of role is the ideal end-game for people like me, what should we do now/next/later?

I spend a lot of time looking at the history of people I admire and might want to emulate, and in almost all cases there seems to be a launching point where they make an enormous leap into an amazing role. I can't help but assume someone noticed them and plucked them out of obscurity (e.g. I'd not heard of Danger, or even Android before it was acquired) and into a high-level role. So the big question then - how to get noticed? Paraphrasing Bill Watterson, how do I find the right place to hang-out so that I'm already there when the right time comes along?
FastMail under DDoS Attack
Well, if companies build their software depending on yours, before you have even written a single line of code, and if your software is supposed to run for decades, agile – which is better suited for constant change – is not ideal.

And this piece of software exists. Governmental projects interacting with lots of insurance companies, for example. Like the Elektronische Gesundheitskarte – a concept of giving every German an insurance card issued by the government, with all medical data stored in a cloud with insurances, doctors and pharmacies having access to it.

Before the software was even finished, PoS software was able to interact with the API and insurances had sent out millions of cards.

Breaking anything at that point costs millions.

EDIT: regarding your edit: Agile is far more suited for constantly changing environments, where you also can just break support for any third parties depending on your API. But obviously, that’s not really quality software when every software depending on yours has to be changed every few years.
Chamath Palihapitya Launches Rama Corp to compete with AT&T and Verizon
I think he meant "they should have supported offline maps a long time ago"
I've never seen a good way of dealing with nested directories in make. E.g., say you have the following directory layout:

/foo/a.js
/foo/b/c.js
/foo/d/e.js

And you want minified files to be written to:

/bar/a.js
/bar/b/c.js
/bar/d/e.js

I'm not a huge fan of Grunt/Gulp, but doing this is very easy using those tools.
Provided by the Feds in numerous cases too!
Exactly. And not to mention that we used elliptic curves (so the keys are shorter) and neutered ANY queries (so you can't aggregate records to generate a large DNS response). The net effect it using the CloudFlare DNSSEC implementation for DDoS gets you little to no amplification factor. And that's before the clever things we do around forcing TCP when we expect abuse, etc. Critcize us for many things, but for not thinking through how to mitigate the DDoS risk shouldn't be one of them.
> Many users are like me, and they tend to not want fancy-looking marketing emails, and just want basic rich-text features.

Oh god, yes! I, sometimes, get really offended when people are asking my email for sending the warranty on something I bought in real life. And then, extremely upset when they start sending their colorful marketing prospectus through this address. This inbox (or any other one) is carrying very valuable informations for me to remain organized and accurate; Therefore, it must stay sorted and categorized. I do not have time, nor attention to evaluate your christmas sales on stuffed donkeys.

Enough with the ads, and the blinking shit.
But wait, your build system is not stupidly tied to a library manager and
installer! How are we supposed to live with that? Like, you want us to
actually consider what's a necessary dependency for our projects to work?
Outrageous!
To be fair, Microsoft has gone some way in addressing the "scourge of Arial". For some time now, the default font in Office has been Calibri, not Arial.
I'm thinking not of industry, but of academia and research. It's not going to work to just give blanket subsidies (like say, 20k to all Postdoc researchers) - you need a system that allows in foreign researchers, and my point is it's hard to differentiate academic research from industry research. Also, everything discussed is "futzing" with the labor market - it's not like setting up a government run auction is some sort of pure free market.
Does the fact that you haven't read all the detailed technical specs for your car prevent you from using it? Do you know the detailed specs for the actually critical braking mechanism in your vehicle? Or is it impossible to use your car because you don't know the tolerances of every nut and bolt in the system?
In terms of total compensation are they really that much different from other big companies? I know a fair amount of folks making Netflix level money when you factor in stock. They just give it in cash. shrug
I've said this before, but how I wish software companies based on the cooperative model[1] were more of a thing. It's not healthy for people to be treated like worker bees. Corporations should be a collaborative effort, and the wealth and decision-making should be distributed proportionally.

In a way, the structure of our corporations both reflects and influences our society. A recent study has shown that the US is now more of an oligarchy than a representative democracy. Would we be happier and better off if "working for" was replaced by "working with"?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
Only the UI layer of Netflix is in Node.

Most of the cloud services are JVM-based (as is much of the NetflixOSS ecosystem [1]), and then the Node services connect to the JVM-based services via Prana. [2]

[1]: http://netflix.github.io/

[2]: http://ispyker.blogspot.com/2015/10/towards-being-better-abo...
Whole foods does have heirloom tomatoes for most of the year where I am... Also this is an extremely nitpicked example. With many things, especially fruit, organic options keep more poorly and are less satisfying. I'd much prefer my industry grown, GMO plums to organic options that aren't as sweet or crisp.
I don't see what's difficult here.
I'm all for technology, but this is just poorly written pro-agribusiness propaganda. It doesn't even address any of the most common criticisms of big agriculture, and instead is just attacking farmers markets for whatever reason.
Now I feel really badly about buying the local organic produce at one of the many farmers markets near me. Even though the produce is fresh, delicious, and my $$$ stay in my local community, I now realize that I should have been paying for the tomato transported 1000 miles with a smart chip in the carton. Thanks for the wake up call!
If you're going for GPU support then please do not use CUDA. It's non-portable (NVIDIA only), proprietary, clunky and it requires a huge SDK which is very awkward to install. I highly recommend OpenCL which is portable, requires no SDK, is open and for properly optimized code is just as fast as CUDA.
That isn't an answer to the question.

Your response is selection bias. Every project that you've seen is a ball of technical debt. There is no argument to how documentation alleviates technical debt. If you document a poorly designed and scoped piece of software it doesn't make it any easier to change.

If the software was impossible to change and that change was a requirement then the code bases you were working with did not represent "working software"

The agile manifesto says, "working software over documentation." It does not say "working software and an absence of documentation."

The fact that you needed to add features is exactly the reason agile exists. If the creators had a complete feature plan in the beginning and faithfully executed it without deviation from the plan then there would be no need to ever add features and the quality of the code in terms of "changability" would be moot.
It's a bit of both. I had no idea what this star stood for. I never understood why they didn't replace it with a "like" button
My experience with taking such classes at multiple schools was always that any CS class talking about Real World Software Development turned out to not be all that accurate. Which perhaps makes sense since computer science isn't really about software development, real or otherwise.

My favorite was being chided by a phd student teaching assistant that I needed to understand how things worked in industry if I wanted to pass. Problem was, I'd worked for multiple companies at that point and he'd worked at 0. What he was looking for (what it was exactly I don't recall) hadn't been my experience anywhere I'd worked.
The raw data comes in a fixed-width plain-text table.

http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/archives/157-Import-fi...
I keep checking my email for the invite link ;)

I think it'd be pretty interesting to expose it as a Windows filesystem with Dokan [0] and I'm sure Jeff from ExpanDrive [1] is looking at it too!

0: https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany

1: http://www.expandrive.com/
As a farmer I'm biased, but there's a lot to be said for eating fresh, in-season foods produced by people in your community. The human and environmental costs of making sure tomatoes can reach you from 1000 miles away is sickening. We run a 50-member CSA. Produce is picked fresh weekly or bi-weekly from the garden and available for pickup by 50 local families.

Are our yields as high as what we might get if robotic pickers and chemical fertilizers were used? No, but nobody is dying or being abused or getting cancer to make sure that a disgusting, mealy, colorless tomato can be on your cheeseburger.
Cheers, thanks for the insight! :)
Porting a formally proven Tetris to a Pebble smartwatch in Ada
If you're interested in submitting a question, WSJ is taking them here:

https://www.facebook.com/wsj/videos/10153814553423128/
Your question reduces to: why is gambling illegal? And the answer is that lots of people don't like it, and people are entitled to make things they don't like illegal.

A recent poll found that 55% of people think sports betting should be legal, while 33% think it should be illegal: https://www13.shu.edu/academics/business/sports-polling/uplo.... But if you read closely, support drops off dramatically in the 45+ age group, which is heavily over-represented at the polls, especially in local elections.

One study found that the median age of voters in mayoral elections in four cities was 60: http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2015/7/28/p....
It's just not physically possible to ship a tomato that's been fully vine ripened for a thousand miles. Once they're fully ripe, they're too fragile to ship an appreciable distance. So, the big producers pick them hard and unripe and ship them. Yes, they'll continue to ripen off the vine, but once they've been cut off from their source of nutrients and water they're not going to get any more. It's the trade off necessary to have produce outside of the local season. (Greenhouses in upstate with grow lights would be a better alternative way to get tomatoes in New York City in January though.)
Random manual recounts are done on a statistically significant portion of paper ballots. Additionally, paper ballots allow for manual recounts in contested contests (e.g. a legal challenge).

E.g. see https://twitter.com/SFElections/status/534405668258594816 and https://twitter.com/SFElections/status/535541022915186688
At the same time, many stories have been of people who have done it horribly wrong, to the point where you really cannot say anything but, "You did it wrong."
Straying away from any consideration of "how well agile was implemented", I've never been at a shop that seemed to get any real advantage by saying they are "agile". Although my experience is only 4 shops on that matter.

I would argue that since the method is deliberately left unclear, in reality it mostly profits to whoever wants to game it to his/her advantage.
And if everybody wants the project to succeed as their respective primary goal, then you do not need such methodology anyway.

Do whatever seems to work best for the team, and don't name it. Don't waste time writing blog posts about how you found a new groundbreaking way to work, as these matters are subjective.

For example, now I work by asking whatever needs most attention right now, getting it done, and then asking again. No backlog, no notes anywhere, nothing. If we forget about something and it is important, it will come back up. It has no name and it works perfectly for us!
I must say that iOS 9 feels a bit like that. There is a constant nagging for using apple services. And every update to the iOS resets everything. iOS will want me to use icloud, I refuse, are you sure you really don't want to use icloud, yes I just told you! But you certainly want to use apple pay. No. Really? Yes. But let's set up apple music. Don't want that either. Are you sure, etc etc.

In fact the music player regularly redirects to the apple music tab while I just want to listen to my own playlist.

It feels really really cheap.
>>> I would imagine violates at least some free speech law:

>> Which "free speech law" would that be which is being violated here?

> Freedom of speech and expression can exist as a concept outside the limited bounds of codified law.

I didn't downvote it, but it's pretty obvious why it got downvoted.
You might have missed the fact that the motherboard they use has built-in dual 10G Ethernet: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9S...

Once you account for the cost of a 10G NIC and the fact that having it integrated frees up another expansion slot, I'd say it's a pretty good deal.

Also, I'm not sure if there are any non-Xeon processors that support ECC.
50 years of progress indeed.

In addition, the biological sciences have almost completely traced a series of natural occurrences which lead from inanimate molecules to elementary living viruses.

This statement reflects a certain naiveté about the complexity of living organisms. The Miller-Urey experiment may be what he's alluding to. But now their assumptions about the atmosphere have been disproven and there still hasn't been a major breakthrough in describing an evolutionary pathway from molecules to cells.
What if the company is in the Midwest where I am assuming the market salary would be much lower than SF, so they cannot get the talent they need.
And I can guarantee you that the software controlling the switches for the high speed rail and commuter rail networks in my state was written with waterfall.

The requirements were pretty clear, as there was a legacy system to be replaced and the changes to be made were not too hard to be found, the design was done in a DSL specifically written for the task of representing this project, the software was implemented, verified, and by now is under maintenance.

The requirements for a railway system rarely change, so agile is not really useful there.

Regarding "centuries": Some German companies stopped using the original Zuse pre-war computers in 2011. That’s over 70 years of software running constantly. Some banks still run code from the days before C. In the future, we’ll have more and more situations like that. And just like washing machines are sold with a lifetime guarantee, we’ll expect the same from the smart washing machine we’ll buy in 2025, too.
Thanks! It's from a cheap 1980s era camera I got off of ebay, the Fuji GW690. Things were simpler back then. I like it.
If it's not harmful to any competitive advantages you have, it would be lovely if you could do a blog post of all the open data sources you know of (or, are there any directories that maintain up to date lists of open data sources?)
Many enjoy locally produced food and desire the freshness or access to heirloom varieties.

But it's important to recognize that this isn't an environmentally friendly or especially sustainable pattern of consumption. Indeed these modes of production are less efficient and likely to be more damaging to the environment.

Local and/or organic is a luxury consumption option. Much like buying a choice cut of meat or premium food brands. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it's also more "green."
That's a fair point: the fact that Go seems to have a few hardcoded generics is one of the uglier bits of the language.

I don't think Go is a great language, as I'm fond of saying, I just think it's a very useful tool.
Don't break support for them?

There are still requirements, there is still design. If you have a customer depending on your API, that is a requirement. Agile doesn't mean requirements go away.