skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As usual, read this as "what's popular in Computer Science" more than "what's worked"

I don't think so. By "worked" he means that the benefits have been very, very clearly demonstrated to be very significant and widely applicable. And "clearly demonstrated" means their impact has been shown in numerous production settings.

> Lots of things listed in the Maybe and No category (both the original table and in the article) do work but aren't super-popular

Not in the sense he means, which doesn't mean popular, but rather "clearly demonstrated to provide great benefits in the field with wide applicability".

> and some things listed as "Yes" like bitmaps and subtypes are bad but ubiquitous.

I don't know what you mean by "bad". If by bad you mean "have some serious drawbacks" or "can be possibly replaced by something better", then sure, but that doesn't mean they haven't worked. If by "bad" you mean that their benefits haven't been clearly demonstrated, then I'd disagree about your conclusion on bitmaps and subtypes.

> It's also magnified because there's a certain kind of personality that values pragmatism above all else and categorically opposes anything new, idealistic or academic.

Or is simply wary of incorporating ideas that haven't been sufficiently proven into products with billions of dollars on the line. OTOH, there is another kind of personality that confuses pure research with battle-tested ideas, and think that something that is shown to have benefits in research settings will surely have those benefits in the field without worse side-effects.

> decision makers tend to be so results-oriented

Shouldn't they be? Would you rather the people making the decisions on the software used to run your power stations, airports, banks and government be embrace "new" and be "idealistic or academic"?

Research is research, and the industry is the industry, and ideas have a very, very long maturation process of going from the research stage to the "demonstrably works at a large scale in the industry" phase. That's a good thing, and that's what it's like in all disciplines. Software is rather unique in that it has people who think this shouldn't be the case. Thank God they're not the decision makers.

> We even have our own name for it, or at least part of it: the IBM effect

And now, ironically, you're "spreading FUD" against an approach that is simply skeptical of things touted to be "the next big thing". Some of us have been in this industry long enough to know that most great ideas turn out not to be. That's not "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", but "let's not bet billions of dollars and possibly people's lives on the flavor of the week just yet until we gather more evidence".
Phuc Dat Bich reveals name a hoax
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Atari Telephone Directory 1983
The number of times I've seen what seems like the Hackers script got borrowed and applied to real life - people being banned from using computers for an arbitrary length of time - is just silly.
> The finance sites are all drop in replacements and better than yahoo finance.

I completely disagree with that. I tried for over a year to switch from Yahoo to Google for finance and found it completely lacking, despite the nicer UI. The only site that can match Yahoo finance in my opinion is the Motley Fool. I still use both.
That's a good point. Almost anybody who makes it through Google's hiring process for technical employees should be capable of handling most routine problems in computing. Given that, the team dynamics matter more than the technical ability.
He honestly could put more effort into his comment. It's give + take: if I write something honest and thoughtful, I expect something like that back.
The TPP connection is this:

> The WTO decided the label violated WTO rules slated for replication in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), [...] The ruling shows how so-called “trade” rules go far beyond trade and interfere with environmental policies that protect wildlife.

So basically, it's saying that if you think this WTO ruling is bad, you should think the TPP is even worse, because among all the other bad stuff in the TPP, it also will enforce anti-informed-consumer anti-environmental decisions like this.
From this article's list: "fancy" type systems, functional programming, RISC (!). Formal methods, albeit in specific domains. Security? (I'm not even sure how we can say whether "security works" or not.)

Erlang is a good specific example. Haskell and OCaml are others. (I've seen first hand just how incredibly well OCaml works at Jane Street, even if almost nobody else uses it.)

SMT solvers are another cool example. They're used by certain kinds of researchers (including "applied" research like at security companies), but most people haven't even heard of them. At the same time, they let you do some absurd things surprisingly easily that seem intractable. Everything from exhaustively verifying algorithms and invariants to automatically detecting and debugging bugs on the fly to running code backwards. And they make a whole bunch of less absurd but still useful constraint-based problems virtually trivial. Lots of people would benefit from them—if they knew about them and cared.

Another great example is the Nix package manager which does package manager magic, but hasn't caught on yet. This is partly a function of its limited ecosystem and documentation, but it does work and I know people using it in production.

Hell, for some definition of "widely used", Emacs and VIM fall under this banner. They're somewhat more popular than functional programming and the like, but, in the grand scheme of things, they're a narrow niche among everyday programmers.
That really depends on what the upheaval is. Apple didn't make a better version of a black berry, it made an iPhone. I think Google is probably safe for a while, but it's hard to see seismic shifts coming.
They don't need to kill it, but they need to create new businesses. And they can't just acquire them either, unless they let them completely independent, but continue to fund them.
1,000 True Fans (2008)
THANK YOU. WSJ is the one site I see regularly linked that has such an intrusive paywall, and I've previously avoided them entirely for this reason. No "10 free articles", no interstitials. Just blocked.
I say none of these.

* Too many "cloud" competitors, enough with trying to squeeze a margin.

* I wouldn't want to compete with Box, DropBox, GDrive, S3, OneDrive, or BitTorrent Sync. To support enterprise customer at this level, I think is something Yahoo! not too familiar with.

* Another Javascript framework to resurrect, probably time to rethink about how many JS developers you have to hire to to maintain the high visibility and demand from the community.

* Community was a good show, but Yahoo's UI for their video content is just bloat. Too much information, graphic wise not too appealing. They have a shot, but so few people in my circle know about Yahoo video. But I think it still has a shot.

* Why would Microsoft sell Xbox Music?

I think the best thing for Yahoo to do, is to do sports and finance. They can continue to build contents around it. Yes there is ESPNSport, MLB, NBA etc but Yahoo can probably do better if they focus on building a community. They already have a huge sport community, why not use it? They already have content makers so make finance more attractive, try to go after Bloomberg.

Social is dominated by Facebook and Twitter (and their acquired products like Instagram and Vine), but there is still much to explorer around social, not just adding friends.
Imagine a city in which five or six companies own most of the real estate. That already happened to banking.
Agile for Introverts: Re-Imagined Programmer Collaboration
Really? The thing is with stuff like SnapChat, Facebook and Tumblr, I find myself actually using less and less of any web search. The only thing I search for is programming related questions. Nowadays I go directly to Stackoverflow.
That, and I'd be disappointed that my email account would vanish, along with years worth of mail.
Immutable Delivery
Ohhhh, I just got it. I have a light bulb above my head and that could be my router as well. However, it still doesn't make sense when I move around with my device, which may essentially block it from receiving light.

And some of the arguments here is still not convincing enough for me or some of the people I've asked about on how they feel about li-fi: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10382195
It's a bummer to see all corporate support drop once they support one lawsuit against a corporation. Expected, but sad. I guess no one wants to fund an org that might sue them, or they don't want to sour ties with VMWare by supporting the legal action indirectly. But it does show how little backbone / how fair-weather the corporate sponsors are. It seems like if there were any time to invest with a high moral-to-dollar rate, now would be it.
Not even RedHat supported them? Or did they pull out as well?

This post lost the opportunity to bring up any controversy on them suing vmware.
Why write a bot? Doesn't yapache log such events? Just run a Hadoop job on the error logs.
Speaking as a former member of more than one low-performing team at Google, none of the exercises would have helped our performance very much. What would have helped:

1. Being co-located. We would have been more effective sitting and working together, but instead we were distributed across multiple time zones and countries.

2. Working on a project with a future, instead of one that was winding down. It's difficult to "harness the power of diverse ideas" or be "rated as effective" when our team's charter is maintaining a project to its EOL date, with no plans for a successor.

3. Avoiding morale-sapping demotions in responsibility. One of my teams had its responsibilities changed from supporting the system we built and deployed, to assisting one of Google's "partners" deploy an inferior replacement. More than one member left when that happened.

4. Reducing the technology churn. When our leadership changes the product every six months, which forces us to switch to a different technology, we're stuck coming up to speed instead of contributing out of our expertise.

5. Reducing the team member churn. Constantly leaving and replacing team members is both a symptom and a cause of low performance. Here Google's internal mobility works against it.

(These events were due to leadership shifts at the VP level, and had nothing to do with our team's output, which I think was better than it ought to be given our circumstances.)

The point is that a team's performance has more to do with the larger organization than the team's internals. Frankly this article feels like blame-shifting: if we teach them some exercises to do at meetings, maybe they won't notice all these institutional issues.
Things like this make compiler or jit optimizations a little scary to me. It might not matter to a CSS preprocessor, but if you write performance critical code, optimizations become a leaky abstraction. Suddenly you have to understand exactly which circumstances allow your compiler to, for example, use autovectorization and be wary of updating your compiler, lest these criteria change.

I think there is some opportunity here to improve compiler output. I know that GCC can already explain why it doesn't vectorize loops (-ftree-vectorizer-verbose=2), but many other optimizations without such output can still make or break the performance of your program.
Not so fast, it just means enterprise support prices have gone up for those organisations resisting change and still requiring security. For example, the entire country of South Korea.
There is : http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/cmp407-lambda-as... but I kinda dislike the whole complexity). This is a new feature.
And the food, telecommunications, and energy industries, off the top of my head.
> Shouldn't they be?

No. And the people who make nuclear powerplants and planes certainly don't engage in results-oriented thinking: you could easily take out half the safety features they build and not run into any catastrophes, but that's not an acceptable risk. Software companies, on the other hand, are perfectly happy taking on long-term and long-tail risk if it's more or less worked in the past, in large part because failure is far more forgivable. (Which, to be clear, is a good thing and and of itself, but does incentivize some unfortunate kinds of behavior.)

The whole point is that good decisions lead to bad outcomes and bad decisions lead to good outcomes all the time, but politics pushes people to react strongly to results, ignoring this fact. This is quite different from other fields in engineering which by necessity, tradition, culture or even regulation operate differently.

As I said, "results oriented thinking" is a terrible name which leads to confusion, but it's what we have. Unfortunately I can't think of a better one and if I did it probably wouldn't catch on. (Which, amusingly, is an example of [2] above :).)
I remember SVG being introduced way back when as the solution to some of our HTML problems, and only in recent times is it gaining some momentum.

That probably means that VRML will become a thing in 2020.
That article needed a little bit more massaging by the editors. Lots of sentences like this:

> " In the post-2008 period, much buying of buildings is to destroy them and replace them with far taller, far more corporate and luxurious types of buildings – basically, luxury offices and luxury apartments"

> "All of this cannot happen in a business park, regardless of its density – they are privately controlled spaces where low-wage workers can work, but not “make”. "

I mean, am I the only one reading this thing and shaking my head after each paragraph wondering what it was that I read, exactly?
Typo in the title "tough"
Vine mistakenly ships iOS app with debug mode enabled
I didn't know that McKinsey knows Tech.
SSAE16 Public Accounting Firm in New Jersey,usa – Yusufali Associates
It's pretty funny to describe dolphin-safe tuna as an informed-consumer measure. Consumers can see the dolphin-safe logo, but they have no idea what it means. They support it reflexively, out of blind moral panic; it survives specifically because consumers are near-totally uninformed.
Can't it be a simple case of being the first so widely distributed ?
A quick skimming on Wikipedia shows that of the main guides showed today [1], only one other guide started at the end of the of the 19th century [2]. So probably a good example of the "Land Grab" strategy (from Spolsky, [3]), being the first to grow fast in a new(ish) market. Then they were the reference and that's a easier position to maintain than to grab.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurant_rating
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cuisini%C3%A8re_Cordon_Bleu
[3]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
SVG is so much easier to update than GIF. We used it on MyMoustache.net, were able to localize and change text on the fly, change colors, etc.
Hands down, Yahoo Finance is a much better site than Marketwatch. I'm picking on Marketwatch since you say that it can replace Yahoo Finance.

Here are a few data points:

Interface - YF has all the three indices information (S&P, Dow and Nasdaq) right in front of you. MW has this in a small box on the right. While this may seem trivial, over a period of time - YF sticks but MW doesn't.

Content - All the content above the fold on YF is related to the markets. If you look at MW , for instance there is an article filling up which airline features you should pay for - totally unrelated to markets and in the main view of the fold. This is not a one time phenomenon, but happens all the time. One of the reasons I stopped using MW.

Quote lookup - The quotes are all on the left and the lookup bar is right below the quotes. Also if you look up a stock and revisit the home page, that information is stored - without requiring you to sign up. SO you can just build a portfolio of stocks without even signing up. (Of course, if you clear your cookies this will be lost). Try doing this on MW - The quote look up bar isn't even obvious ( you have to hit on the search button to make it visible).

I can go on and on about feature comparison but what I'm trying to get at is - Yahoo Finance is one of the most usable sites when it comes to market information for a vast majority of users interested in the markets. They have carried over the same interface to other geographies as well. For example yahoo finance India isn't drastically different from Yahoo Finance US. So it wouldn't be really wise for a company to just abandon that user base.
Their clients are paying them still. They are the advertisers, which I take you are not.

Doesn't the talk about "when you are not the consumer yada yada" does not apply for the convenience of your argument?
Well, a usable Freedom Box would indeed solve most problems. Can't wait.
Honestly, most review apps would do better to just use the Siskel and Ebert system: two thumbs down (avoid), one thumb/up one thumb down (it's okay but nothing special), two thumbs up (it's worth seeking out).
Firefox still supports Windows XP Service Pack 2. Mozilla has no immediate plans to retire XP SP2 support. In fact, Mozilla is adapting the mozilla.org website's SSL/TLS support so IE users on XP can still access the Firefox download page. :)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-no-longer-works...
Paying people in Papua New Guinea not to chop down their forest (as way of preventing global warming) is harder than it sounds.
Yahoo is the fifth most popular website in the world. People actually use it.
> In the US, you can't enforce an employment contract if it involves forcing someone to work for you.

Well kind of. Technically you can't force them to work, but you can force them to pay someone else to work in their place. Most teachers have this kind of contract. They are not at will employees. They can't be fired during the school year and they can't leave either. If they don't show up to work, they have to pay the school back for the part of their contract they did not fulfill to pay for the substitute teacher. (This has nothing to do with tenure, BTW, it's true for tenured and untenured teachers alike).
General United States Chat Website
Rump Kernel FAQ
In my experience, it is not particularly rare for 2-3 property management companies to represent a controlling percentage of the rental properties in a small city.
ChefSteps Announces Joule
Those were some of the things that they did first. In her first month she made the meals free and gave raises to the top folks. Then she authorized management to hire new people at top of market. I had a few friends leave Netflix for Yahoo because they actually got raises and believed in the vision.

Many have subsequently left when they realized the problems run deeper than that.
I think yes, though a lot smaller. Yahoo is used by millions in Asia because of how well it caters to the local languages, as opposed to google which is a distinctly foreign product with some translations skinned on top.

http://www.scmp.com/article/1007460/yahoo-still-hks-top-sear...
Javascript has a standard (or more accurately, current javascript is the implementation of a version of the standard). It's a much safer bet that either there will be backwards compatible implementations later or that you will have other options. To my knowlesde, IE's feature set was always "what's supported by the current release".

It's sort of like having a codebase which you can't change which makes use of a bunch of weird proprietary C extensions from some old compiler, and the compiler itself not only has the capability to introduce bugs and security flaws, but has a track-record of doing so. You know it's a ticking time bomb now, and you should have seen it in the beginning (although so many didn't :/ )
and the commenter also says in another thread:

"I run an entire data center of Slackware Linux on Dell servers."

so, definitely not apple. which leads me to think all that is BS and they just have too much time on their hands.
> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions.

It would be fun to watch, but the markets would rightly interpret it as "we have no idea what we're doing".
Your first sentence reminds me of this speech by Danny DeVito aka "Larry the Liquidator" in "Other People's Money": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62kxPyNZF3Q
Advertising/PR and marketing are not the same thing.
Well, SMIL does exactly that but has lost traction and has been deprecated in favor of CSS and JS animations. Support has actually been removed in Chrome or will be removed in the near future.
> Jobs or Musk in 2010 were tasked to turn Yahoo around

Assuming either of them was actually given the mandate to do so by the board of directors, etc, I imagine they'd fire like 50-80% of the staff, get rid of anything that's not profitable, and produce one highly refined product at a time, something that hasn't been done well before.

Source: Am both a Jobs and Musk fanboy and have done an unhealthy amount of reading about their histories and decision-making. I particular like this video of Jobs at NeXT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNfRgSlhIW0
Inkscape + snap.svg should cover a lot.
Well, the endangered species are endangered either because
1. human involvement
2. natural selection
So I don't see that as a valid argument for not protecting dolphins. It's not really their fault.

Also, we consistently overprotect one not endangered animal (humans) at the expense of all other species.
Never heard of her, thanks. Sounds interesting.

Seems like a basic rule that has impact on more ideas recently discussed on hacker news: in a market where there is a short supply of high demand items, more money will cause more inflation.

This will also impact ideas around basic income.
Problem is when corporation X uses RHEL, and RHEL supports lawyers going against corporation X.

So RedHat also can't support them.

Obviously, if the world was a better place, none of this would be necessary at all. But hey, if it makes money anything's acceptable.