skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not familiar with Twitter, but I've been in this situation before elsewhere. An independent developer can bang out a good enough clone for the app that works in 85% of the use cases. Most users would never know the parts that are broken.

An internal developer can't ship that app. The 15% of the cases where it doesn't match the desired business intent torpedo shipping it. Keep in mind the alternative option to the native app is using the web app which likely works in 99% of cases. It's unacceptable to whatever section of the company doesn't have their feature in the native app (but do in the web app) to 'lose' users.

Of course that last 15% of the features leads to a doubling of complexity.
The nice thing about Twitter apps is you can actually say "I'm pretty sure if just one person who cared got put on it, it could be WAY better than what we have today", because unlike other apps that we all "couch architect", we actually have the proof of this being the case. We have numerous case studies of 1 person or very small teams making really great Twitter apps (apps that actually influenced iOS design!).

Twitter has a ton of employees. Unless you actively believe the Mac app will hurt your business there should just be one full time engineer on it, someone who loves ObjC and UI design, who can use Twitter as a testbed for crazy UX ideas. If its not important, than whats the worst that can happen, you generate a ton of developer respect?
> I suppose it depends on how much faith you have in the community, particularly in its worst elements.

On that note, do you want to reconsider your post about the person who argued with Ian (who was awfully insensitive, but really doesn't deserve an HN witch hunt) elsewhere in this thread?

---

Edit: replying to your post below, due to rate limit:

Your post was flagged because you're mentioning both the full name and online handle of someone arguing with Ian about whether Ian should have spoken to the police or remained silent and sued them, in a thread about Ian's death.

The person was arguing for Ian's best interests, but even if they weren't, you can help the cause of online harassment by not harassing people online.

---

Edit 2, to reply to your recent edits: posting their handle because they argued with Ian in this thread is enough, but you posted a screenshot with the persons first name and last name in post #10814825.
No need to junk your server, just regenerate the affected key. Instructions are on their wiki here: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Ed25519
Yeah but say you own a house and write some hit software that brings in $1m a year. At the moment either you or your company pay income tax on the $1m. With zero corp tax you leave all the money in the company, the company buys a corporate yacht and jet, for spending money you pay yourself minimum wage and borrow a bit against the house. Result millionaire lifestyle, zero tax. I see your point in principle but in practice it makes the above kind of avoidance too easy. Unless you are some place that doesn't need to raise income tax because it has another source of money eg, Dubai with oil or Monaco with real estate.
Don't forget that many of these large companies paid off the politicians to ensure there were these loopholes to exploit in the first place.
This is pretty lazy reasoning. This argument is so general it could apply to any company doing anything people don't like.
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The logical conclusion of all this is probably a FuckEmAll extension that uses an ADsafe-style subset of HTML/CSS/JS, automatically transforms anything to it, performs checks that focuses on attackers' goals rather than tactics, and thereby prevents "all types of fuckry." [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCIjukbIIWc
Yeah. Except he doesn't mention Win32 in this context. Does Win32 have to be sane/stable before Linux should have something adopted?
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I just don't think a company the size of Twitter would worry about a $5-$15 million expenditure to get access to the talent they want/need right then. Then have the rest of the company, which I am assuming (quite ignorantly) isn't that many people, finish out the rest of their contracts before giving 'em some golden handcuffs.

I could definitely be wrong, and perhaps the app just doesn't require that level of expertise. If you have any data, I'd be happy to look at it-- knowledge is power.
coincidentally

For irony they would need to be named something like FailDeficiency.
I have to disagree with the formulation of your advice. I totally agree that you should give yourself permission to fail, but I think it's important that this is only in the short term. In the long term, you can never give up (this does not mean that you shouldn't be flexible and pivot). As PG says, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich." (http://paulgraham.com/die.html)
Well... I mean, it depends on how you do reputation.

Passengers do not by-and-large want to page through a list of cabbies and try to trade off the reputation of the person versus how far away they are or whatever.

Uber gives its reputation system some bite by just delisting drivers who fall below some rating system (and probably by threatening to do so considerably before they actually do so), and that's more-or-less what we did at Flywheel as well. But how does a decentralized system do that? For that matter, how does a decentralized system prevent the driver from just giving themselves a good rating by creating some dummy passenger accounts and upvoting themselves?

The reputation system also sort of implicitly depends on you having a working system that gets a substantial volume of rides. But the most vulnerable time for a TNC is right when you're starting out. You need to gain your users' trust, and that means getting them rides promptly the first few times they use you.

I'm not saying that it's impossible, and for the record I don't think that Uber has a "natural monopoly." I actually wouldn't invest in Uber precisely because I don't think they have any way to protect any profit margin they have. But mostly because I kind of expect that if Uber ever really demonstrates that they can actually make a decent margin, Amazon will come in and clone the service, not because you can do it with OSS.
I don't understand the aversion to the "annoying glue code" (which is perfectly straightforward and readable, and in my experience, you don't end up writing that much of it), and I definitely don't understand the desire to replace it with a ball of magic.
Since you asked for code improvement suggestions, a few notes. Just what I could think of right now, some are debatable if they apply for such a small one-off script, but I'd say you should at least have seen them. If you have questions later feel free to shoot me an email (address in my user profile), in case I miss a comment here.

* I would get rid of the is_connected function. If you are not connected, downloading the file will fail, and you are not doing terribly expensive functions that you'd want to avoid before. And you still have to deal with download errors, because reaching google doesn't mean the server you pull images from is reachable and working. Add error handling for the main download and you are fine.

* Don't put code on module level, but add a "main guard" [0]

* Look at string formatting methods, they might make your URL-building nicer [1][2]

* The removing of the logo would also work with ImageDraw[3] from PIL, no need for numpy

* look into urllib2 (also in the standard library), with urllib2.urlopen you can avoid creating a temporary file on disk (+ it is generally the recommended interface in the stdlib) [4]

* look at os.path.join [5] to combine file path components

* in the loop in Line 45 you are overwriting the name file, which is the inbuild file datatype. If you tried to use that later in the function it wouldn't work anymore...

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/a/19578335

[1] https://docs.python.org/2.7/tutorial/inputoutput.html#fancie...

[2] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3101/

[3] http://omz-software.com/pythonista/docs/ios/ImageDraw.html

[4] https://docs.python.org/2/library/urllib2.html

[5] https://docs.python.org/2/library/os.path.html#os.path.join

There is also a newer PIL fork, having ones code work with that also is IMHO good form (haven't checked if yours does): https://pillow.readthedocs.org/en/3.0.x/
> What she is really saying is that she has permission to fail the customers who trusted her.

No she really isn't.

> She is unilaterally demanding the right to betray that trust in order to have both the benefits of success, and also the easy lifestyle of someone who is just a worker bee.

This is baseless. She is giving herself permission to not be wracked with guilt, beat herself up about it endlessly, and put herself through self-imposed torture if she fails. It makes sense not to snowball over and compound your failures by piling on. Nobody is advocating screwing customers over by default.

> This idea that everyone deserves an easy lifestyle, regardless of their position, is one that needs to die.

Kind of extreme?

> Marissa Mayer and her ultra short maternity leaves gets it. This lady does not.

...
>I want a currency that's built on trust. I want every commitment and promises to be tracked and evaluated. I want fairness, and it starts with understanding reality.

I'm working this exact problem right now and would love your input. Email me at sunny.gonna at google's mail service.
Ask HN: Will HN put black bar for the death of Ian?
The death of Ian was just a sad event striking the software and Open Source community, and i strangely believe that this man deserves black bar on HN for all his contributions and help of the technology, do you have an idea if it will happen ?
I haven't tested but I suspect there is still a distro issue - I haven't had any hardware compatibility problems on Ubuntu, but there are plenty of groanworthy desktop distro recommendations on the net.
I'm imagining sorting "kilograms of bank notes" in Sierra Leone during the midst of the Ebola outbreak. Yikes.

I hope they had some good physical security (but I suspect that they didn't...)
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The original Twitter Mac app wasn't made by Twitter either. It was made by Loren Brichter and sold as Tweetie, until Twitter bought it and just renamed it to Twitter for Mac with I think literally 0 changes.
Regarding (3) -- To grasp someone else's approach or point of view is inherently difficult. Thus we are all arrogant by default.

Even though every person has their own way of expressing this, i believe in this sense arrogance is pretty much a given, and overcoming it to some level (which is never completely) is the challenge. In other words, you don't become arrogant, you're born this way, but you can change.

To listen is something you can learn. You can practice. It might not seem so at first sight.
assuming they offer precisely identical services...
You can (in principle) do this anyway - the jet and the yacht are expenses, and you only pay corporate income tax on the profit ($1M - cost of yacht - cost of house ~= $0).

In practice the IRS will treat use of the yacht as taxable income paid to the user.
So it seems Moldova offers a lesson for startups on how to disrupt corruption industry. It's time for the dinosaurs of military-industrial complex to shake in fear as the agile lean Bribe-as-a-Service companies take their marketshare. ;).
Yep vivado HLS.
Good. About time some of these people paid their fair share instead of exploiting loopholes that they can access because they have so much wealth.
> What's there to protect that they work so hard to guard it?

A talking point is that closed systems make piracy harder which makes for a more captive group of buyers. Again, just a talking point, we don't have enough comparable data to study.
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The Fall of Perl, the Web's Most Promising Language (2014)
That's apparently in between junior and senior. Some companies use it.
Has any reporter done a story about Anker? It would be awesome to read about its beginnings and how it's become such a popular name on Amazon.
The HDD is the only user-serviceable part in the PS4, perhaps USB was chosen over PCIe SATA to make theoretical DMA attacks on the system more difficult?
What update frequency is required?
Besides, our system of corporate loans and bankruptcy works so well to encourage innovation precisely because it minimizes the personal cost of failure. If you weren't allowed to fail, nobody would take risks.
It happens all the time, though, especially when it's an off-label channel (Windows Phone, for example). It's not unusual for a company to decide that it's cheaper to fund CAPEX for a product than to spin up the managerial infrastructure necessary to handle what they see as a less-important area of development. Just fund the project and bring the vendor back in to keep it updated. (Other reasons: internal politics; belief that an outside vendor can innovate more effectively; multiple failed internal attempts; have some EOFY cash to burn; really really like the vendor's logo.) When the project works out, no one's (usually) the wiser. When it doesn't, you throw the vendor under the bus and let the media back over them -- part of their job is to be a flak jacket for the client.

Black Pixel is a very good studio, and it's too bad they have to take their lumps on this. Everyone has a bad project: political infighting, technical constraints, lowballed estimates, unfunded scope creep, failure to vet or make explicit all the necessary assumptions. Or maybe their architect got religion, decamped to a Moldovan monastary, and now refuses to communicate except by illustrated vellum attached to a carrier pigeon. All sorts of stuff can go wrong, but it's still your baby.
Wow, he's really good with misdirections.
It would be interesting to compare these yearly figures with movement of capital between US and other international markets.

For example, how connected is this late raise in effective tax rate with the fact that US seemed (at least, from what I seen) increasingly interesting for investors compared to other markets in this period, especially with the slowing growth of China?

Could it be that when the capital flows in, US decides to get a bigger cut, but when investment is slowing down, US tries to slow the process by making capital taxes lower? The article mentions that Bush's tax cuts happenned in 2001, right in the recession and after dot-com burst, when growth stopped and investors started to pay more attention to China.

This is just a thought; I honestly don't know enough to understand if I'm right about it.
Not exactly answering the question, but: Many times "You're so arrogant!" is just a way to stop an argument. It is a way to derail the topic into some unmeasurable subjective trait. And some times the part doing the accusation is the one who does not want to negotiate.
I don't think a company is started by suddenly hiring 150 people.
Also, Google's search results were profoundly better than Alta Vista, which had no real quality score as far as I could tell. I think it took me about 5 searches to switch permanently.
head over to iotasecurity.com, and lets talk.
> As others have said, you test inputs and outputs (and maybe you need to test some failure modes depending on the complexity of the situation). When you're working on a parser, or lexical analyzer of any sort, wouldn't it be nice to know that it is capable of parsing what you thought it should?

That would be a system test. Nobody would write a parser in one function, so it's full functionality can't be tested in a unit test. This is also exactly the sort of test I'm advocating. The thing I'll guarantee you though : it won't provide 100% code coverage.

Unit tests are this kind of crap, testing trivial things 100 times. You immediately see why they provide 100% code coverage : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_testing#Design

> the more brittle and difficult you make it to track down the cause of test failures

Yes ! This of course happens because they find ever-more subtle bugs, not because there's something wrong with the test.
This would seem worthy of black banner on hn.
I completely agree. The federal judge did in fact rule that "drinking tea and shopping at a gardening store amounts to probable cause" when he made this ruling. First of all, there is no reason for these police to be relying on field tests when conducting a SWAT raid which was planned and calculated weeks in advance. Secondly, as you pointed out, the judge ruled that these police are in no way responsible for ensuring that there's any reason to believe these tests work at all. A user in the other thread pointed out that problems with these tests have been known about for years. What evidence did these police have these tests actually detect drugs, as opposed to air? What is to prevent the police from using dowsing sticks to determine who should be raided?
Personally I can't type properly when I'm really pissed off. I'm sure other people have the same issue.
There are <a href="http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80875">comments on</a> one of the Amiga communities most popular forums by a Olaf Barthel, a developer who modernised a more complete version of the 3.x source code. He relates that you need several different C compilers for different parts of the OS, from one that needs to run on a Sun OS to various Amiga-based compilers (Aztec/Manx).
I also blame Amazon. I only have 15mbps down, but Netflix never has a problem after it initially buffers. Amazon almost always has a few buffering periods throughout a video.
For me, it's less about the throughput than the total experience given the services I use.

I have a less than stellar connection for the US (~25/5-ish?), and getting my voip to work took some real tuning in PFsense. The move to PFsense was basically motivated by the fact that I couldn't even do the things I wanted to prioritize voip via the gui provided by the mainstream combo wifi/router I had before. Without tuning (firewall, qos settings), it would frequently sound terrible as soon as someone fired up something bandwidth intensive.

I wonder how much is HW vs. SW, since the router I'm using these days is a low-end single core (2x hyper thread) atom box from Soekris that rarely has >10% cpu load. There appear to be much faster HW options available from various vendors these days at a lower price point than I paid for the soekris when it was new, but PFsense wasn't available on my cheap MIPS wifi-router.
I don't believe that having a Delaware or Nevada corp affects your taxes at all, actually.
No one is saying she should compound her failures. I'm saying she should either be willing to do what it takes to fix them or she should step aside for someone who is willing.

The idea of screwing customers "by default" is exactly what she advocates doing. By default services will break and she is giving herself permission to leave them broken.
Ooh, that's insidious and has the ring of truth to it. I've never thought about that before.
I understand including the family so explicitly may have overstepped boundaries that could be deemed inappropriate. That was wrong of me and I apologize for being so explicit with my feelings. I only meant to explain the other side, which includes myself, that I feel is being wrongly demonized. I promise that it was poorfully and thoughtlessly phrased rather than having any malicious intentions behind my words.

I'm asking, with good intentions, if the statement were a more implicit explanation of "the other side of the coin" without so wrongly speaking of the family - would it still have overstepped the boundaries by such an extent? Or was it my thoughtless inclusion of the family that was so uncalled for?

"Ian asked for noise and got silence. I can see why people are frustrated."

That would likely have been a more tactful way of saying what I had wanted to say without including the attack against the family. Again, I apologize for my previous statement and can see why it was deemed unwarranted.

It won't happen again and I'll keep your warning in mind for the future. Although I ask you please try to understand that the loss of Ian means as much to me as I'm sure it does to many others on HN. Many people in the thread, myself included, see honoring the wishes of the deceased as the ultimate form of respect - and ignoring those wishes as the largest sign of disrespect. As I'm sure you are aware, there was quite a bit of back & forward discussions being had around which group were being the disrespectful ones. It can get very heated when two groups think the others are being extremely disrespectful while they, themselves, are trying to show respect.

I do not ask that you do not hold my previous statement against me - feel free to continue to do so. But I hope this explanation can better explain where I was coming from when I said it. I sincerely hope that my trying to clarify does not break part (b) of your ultimatum.
Which operator are you using? We've found L-band to be very reliable and does not suffer from any of the attenuation issues found in Ku. And heavy spreading on the return path provides for an even more resilient link.

Disclosure: We'll be offering an L-band satellite gateway for IoT this summer.
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> The monolithic Linux kernel is just too big. What is it now, 20,000,000 lines? There's no hope of debugging that. It shows.

That makes no sense. Most of that are drivers and platforms you won't ever use. And some forms of symbolic checkers exists for Linux (maybe not that advanced as for the Windows kernelspace, though, I don't know -- although even simple local heuristic checks are quite useful to check automatically in their ability to find real bugs -- sometimes even more than very complex solvers)
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Here is a "competitor" which I have found extremely useful when choosing drivetrain parts: http://www.gear-calculator.com

These are really helpful if you have a bike you mostly like and want to upgrade the gears, or if your current bike doesn't have the gears you need. It has become especially important during the recent trends of moving from 3x front gears to 2x to 1x.
Is it common practice for the govt to release FBI files on people? Or, if it is, with this little delay?
All bugs lead to Rome
I'm guessing you don't use the site that much? It's awful, and the apps are significantly better. I favor Tweetbot, but if it weren't available I'd use Twitter's OS X app.
It's pretty amazing that AT&T charges that much per MB; that's close to market for satellite M2M. Of course, the terminals for cellular M2M are considerably less expensive.
The top marginal long-term capital gains rate in 1992 was 28%. From 2003-2012 it was 15%. In 2013 it went up to 20%. I bet the difference between 20% and 28% explains the rest of the gap noted in the NYT article.
Thank you! I have been that driver before, so that makes complete sense. I just didn't get it out of context.
http://android.izzysoft.de/applists.php?topic=search

does not actually work.
On the latter, isn't that how the EU is supposed to work? I can base my company in an EU country of my choice and not have to pay income taxes for sales in the other EU countries?

Similar to basing a company in a US state without corporate income tax, and not owing income tax on sales made in other states. Though the difference is that Federal taxes in the US are much larger than state taxes, while there isn't a broad EU corporate income tax, is there?