skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Phoenix is much closer to Rails in terms of its goals than it is to Sinatra. It's a full-featured framework with asset handling, a recommended file layout, template discovery and compilation, generators, etc.

As far as I can tell, most projects one might use Sinatra for are done in Elixir by just working with Plug directly (Plug being the Elixir analogue to Ruby's Rack). I'm sure there are many lightweight web frameworks for Elixir out there, but I haven't seen any with Sinatra's level of ubiquity.
Babel has way too many errors.

I do not care if I am a grandpa for using 2014 tools - but I am not pushing ahead until things calm the fuck down.
I work in product development for things that have mechanical and electronic bits, etc. There are disciplined processes for designing things, typically applied to life support systems such as bridges and jet planes. Or, hi-reliability components like hard drives.

But outside of life support products, I would guess that the majority of product development is only as disciplined as it needs to be, for what's being made. A lot of stuff is designed by seat-of-pants, by people sitting at CAD stations who mostly have engineering degrees but don't engage in engineering and have forgotten all of their math and theory.

The level of organization and discipline needed to do things like design airplanes is done by the segment of engineers who enjoy that discipline and gravitate towards those industries. People who prefer to do seat-of-pants design find their own niche as well. At my workplace, I can't count the number of times I've heard: "But we don't design airplanes here." Our stuff works when it gets to the customer, but if you scrutinize our designs the way we've all been trained to scrutinize UI's, you'd be horrified.
> and the simple fact of not being git, regardless of whether it's better than git, is a serious problem for adoption

I think I was a bit too terse. I didn't mean to suggest that someone who wanted to do everything (SCM, bug tracking) distributed use Fossil instead of git. The idea was to use git for the code, and Fossil for the bug tracking and wiki.
Back in the real world, BigCo agriculturalists also go out into the literal field. I used to work for a company that did agricultural telemetry, and our clients were big and small, and our BigCo contacts were frequently contacting us from somewhere other than an airconditioned office.
especially given some of their behavior in the last couple of years...
Subvocal recognition
> open source doesn't inherently remedy the issue that other people will do things that you do not agree with, and that may cause problems to you.

It's not a remedy. It's just a lifeline. Some of us do take Icecat or Iceweasel. With proprietary software, you have no recourse at all. Wouldn't you prefer some safety net to none at all?
Yeah, title implies the list comes from Page directly. Poor quality site.
Holy hell, that's pretty much straight from Star Trek!

Sadly, Google Now doesn't seem to support it yet :(.
I worked on a crop insurance app for a while. Big insurance co's greatest frustration is that farmers could basically just sign up and be guaranteed not to take a loss due to anything except their own purposeful damage (even market price below a certain value). And it would cost them nothing. Only the smart farmers did. The rest were fearful they were going to get swindled.

The smart ones used it like a hedge fund where they guaranteed a profit and were mainly betting profit rates on how much supply there was going to be.

Insurance company was providing it at a very low cost as the govt sets the service charge over the coverage level. Insurance companies have to compete on how cheap they can make the offering to actually provide (good cheap IT, good cheap claims). Big insurance co I worked with did it just as part of their portfolio to make it easier to sell insurance on equipment and life insurance.

Really odd setup but made sense as an alternate way to do farm subsidies if you thought about it. But farm subsidies pay you not to grow, this pays you to grow and guarantees a certain income if you control your other costs (maintenance, overhead, etc).
Yet another survivorship-bias article with low insight.

1. Follow your dreams and make them real

This is a path to failure. Everyone's got a dream. Few actually work on it. Fewer still succeed on it. Do something that attracts money instead, and make it your dream. This is exactly what Google did. They didn't set out with a dream of becoming the world's largest whatever; they set out just to solve a smaller problem of how to rank web pages.

2. Do the impossible

This is just stupid. Do things in stages. At the most, do something that is at your limits. Impossible stuff has such a slim chance of success, and actually takes enormous effort of many people coming together. This is exactly what Google did. They didn't set out to do the impossible; they set out to solve a smaller problem of how to rank web pages.

3.Work on something uncomfortably exciting!

If you do 1 and 2 this will happen anyway. But let's look at what Google did. Was their first search engine "impossibly exciting"? No, but it was an interesting alternative to what existed before. It became exciting when people started to be attracted to it and they realized they could attract money.

4.Aim to be more lazy

This should be phrased as "Make or do things that save people effort." This is the foundation of capitalism. Hardly insightful.

5.Family and friends are very very important

Can't argue with this.

6.Now is the time to start, we need you

This is also true. Start, iterate. Fail. Try again. Maybe you will succeed. Maybe you won't. But if you do succeed, please, please don't write that it was because you followed your dreams.
Just stay away from Amazon.
As someone who has been around long enough to have had actual (shared) admins/secretaries, I'm not sure I see the value. For travel, for example, someone really needs to understand your preferences well enough to understand and evaluate all the tradeoffs involved. Or they need to be able to reliably evaluate which of the many requests coming into you are really potentially interesting.

Senior execs certainly get real value from long-term admins but that's a different equation.

[EDIT: Of course, to the degree the assistant can find a venue for an event etc., that's something else entirely. But I'm not sure the degree to which the typical virtual assistant can be trusted to do that.]
Counting down to first multi-million-dollar lawsuit after somebody's suit gets hacked.
> The fact that people aren't willing to pay for it tells us that they don't actually care as much as they claimed.

Or that they don't know. Supermarkets don't usually label their vegetables "BigCo" and "littleco". The problem with the 'market solves everything' approach is that it requires perfect knowledge on behalf of all parties.
Nava | Washington DC* | Experienced full-stack developers/devops/product manager/operations | On-site - Full-time

We're a small team of engineers and designers from Silicon Valley that came out to DC last year to help fix Healthcare.gov. It turns out there’s a lot more to fix, and it’s surprising how much can be fixed by a small group of resourceful people with a Silicon Valley mindset, deep technical experience, working closely with dedicated civil servants in government.

Our revamped Healthcare.gov application is used by millions, converts 35% better, and halves the completion time. The login system we rebuilt is about two orders of magnitude more reliable and two orders of magnitude less expensive; for example, it’s about $70M less per year to operate.

People die because the Veteran's Administration is months behind in processing claims. The Social Security Administration pays benefits to millions of deceased Americans. $80 billion is spent every year on federal IT contracting, and 96% of projects are deemed failures. [0] That’s not because there’s some conspiracy or because government is inherently incapable of doing it right. These are complicated legacy systems and processes, and there are very few people with modern tech industry experience who are aware of these problems and willing to help fix them. You can help change that.

Our team is about fifteen people (Stanford, Google, Khan Academy, Dropbox, YC alums) in DC and SF, and we plan to grow significantly in 2016.

We’re looking for:
* experienced full-stack engineers
* experienced devops engineers
* a product manager with a technical background
* a hyper-resourceful operations person

We have a social mission (we incorporated as a public benefit corporation), but we pay market compensation (above market, for DC) and equity (above market).

If you'd like to build software and infrastructure that radically improves how our government serves people, we’d love to hear from you at jobs@navahq.com

Learn more about us: http://navahq.com Job descriptions: http://jobs.lever.co/nava

*Not in DC / able to relocate, but intrigued and in SF? Talk to us!

[0] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/22/t...
x.ai looks very interesting. Still waiting for the invite.

> Amy Ingram

Like Nathan Ingram from Person of Interest, the co-creator of the AI that is a sorta-protagonist in the show?
For more info: "The neural networks behind Google Voice transcription" August 11, 2015 http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-neural-networ...
Self-improve in 10 years
Right, I fumbled on my grammar in that one sentence, but what I meant is that the nature of instagram with its "inward looking"-ness doesn't disconnect content producers from content consumers. Actually, ig connects many of us together, that is my experience at least. I'm not disagreeing with the idea that ig is inwards looking.

Anyway, that sounds like the next big startup, a simple service that links hashtagged (and otherwise tagged) content from ig, twitter, blogs, and puts its access into one portal.
I think GP is saying it actually is different this time.
For the SCAD enthusiast, Matt Adereth made clojure bindings so you can enjoy lisp style, repl/interactive modeling : https://adereth.github.io/blog/2014/04/09/3d-printing-with-c... (he designed an ergonomic keyboard with it)

ps: live talk https://twitter.com/adereth/status/666774776074133504
You don't have to maintain your own fork, though. When Firefox implemented pocket, Iceweasel saw a ton of uptick involvement. I'm not sure of any popular more free to edit clones of Wikipedia though, but that is only because I have never had to seek one out. I imagine they exist. Wikimedia has not gone aginst my interests yet - if they ever put ads on wikipedia, for example, that would be justification for forking. But that would not be your own clone, it would be a community divide. And most projects of scale realize that those kinds of forks are dangerous and act to bring the community back together by resolving a problem that is so bad it schisms the ecosystem.

This has happened before. Gnome 2 and 3 schismed, and Gnome 3 became more user friendly and configurable to bring back its users. Libva and FFMPEG split because FFMPEG was very contributor unfriendly, and then it started merging all the libva changes so contributing to libva got your changes in everywhere. Open and Libre office forked because of Oracle changes, and now Libreoffice is pretty much the only name left in town, and is more successful for it. It happens all the time in branches and private forks and message boards before it even reaches end users.

But that is the difference between MS Office and Libreoffice. When a problem is huge to the OpenOffice community, they fork and start LibreOffice, and when its substancial enough the community overrides the original developers and takes over when terrible decisions are made. If Microsoft fucks up their office (and the early ribbon was a great example of that) you are stuck, and have no power. When the version you like goes end of life, you either sit on decaying software or forfeit your preferences because Microsoft has complete control.

If Gitlab jumped the shark, you would not be spinning up your own gitlab clone to maintain yourself - the gitlab community would fork away from Gitlab Inc and create Librelab, and mindshare would drive products to it because its a seamless transition. And that is more unlikely to happen with Gitlab in the first place because the power of the user can keep the company in check from making extremely user hostile moves like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, etc can do with impunity because users are trapped and they hold all the keys to the castle.

> Their secret sauce isn't really the software, but the service they provide.

The services are the problem. Its the same problem with Facebook - Google+ is feature equivalent, but it was dead in the water to start and its free clones like StatusNet (albeit thats more twitter) are completely dead because they aren't just personal software, they are platforms. And platforms with mindshare and the users are insurmountable.

Its not about the wiki, or issue tracker, or pages. Those are replaceable - painfully, but doable. But replacing the community of developers is not a solvable problem, because they are already on github. You have already lost. And that gives github overwhelming and dominant power in how you conduct and host free software now, with no recourse.
That's ok, they'll try again in episode VIII. I'm sure the 4th death start won't have this one fatal flaw this time.
On the other hand, farmers will always find a way to complain. I was reading a farming rag from a nearby town, and the canola crop was a bumper one, the best year ever. Response from the farmers? "Yeah, well with so much canola on the market, the unit price will be down"

Don't get me wrong, farming is hard work, but the farmers I've encountered rarely have much positive to say about their work particulars. A bit like sysadmins, really.
I remember a time when it was actually possible to rank on the top 3 by writing quality content on your own blog.

But then I remember Google giving "trusted" domains such as digg and reddit extra weight and it was quite depressing seeing the top result for the exact title of one of my blog posts going to the digg and reddit page that merely pointed to my article.

Nowadays it seems practically impossible to get good rankings even for unique phrases and you have to buy advertising and backlink services unless you want to wait 2-3 years. And a lot of blog posts here automatically get accusations of blog-spam even though some of them actually aren't.
Well, Zuckerberg has said that he wants Facebook to replace the internet, at least in people's minds and actions; hence why he is ever expanding the walled garden.
Create a base image with all essential packages and updates pre-installed.
Image processing appears pretty central to human thought hence phrases like 'throw some light on the problem' and 'get the full picture', if you see what I mean.
Learning Equality - https://learningequality.org/ - San Diego, CA -- Onsite | Full-time

Who we are

========

We’re a small nonprofit committed to bringing the online education revolution to the 60% of the world without Internet. We started 3 years ago with KA Lite (https://learningequality.org/ka-lite/), an offline-installable platform bundling Khan Academy content and our own student tracking tools in an easy to install bundle. KA Lite has already reached over 2.1 million learners in 160+ countries.

We’re now starting to work on our next-gen offline ed-tech platform, Kolibri (https://learningequality.org/kolibri/), which aims to incorporate not only a wider set of content from partners, with alignment to local standards, but also allow anyone to create their own videos and exercises to meet the needs of their local context.

Positions

======

Full-stack Web Developer -- You will need to have some experience doing full-stack web development -- the specific stack we use is Javascript, Backbone.js, jQuery, HTML, CSS/LESS , Python and Django. We’re designing Kolibri as a small core app with the majority of user-facing features implemented as plugins. As an initial project, you’ll be working on creating a plugin that ports one of KA Lite’s features into Kolibri.

Executive Assistant/Office Manager -- You will have two roles - As “Executive Assistant”, you will be responsible for supporting core team members with communications, planning, drafting, and research. As “Office Manager”, you’ll be responsible for making sure the office runs smoothly, including handling mail, ordering supplies, organizing events and so forth. This is a combined role, with the exact job title and focus areas negotiable based on skills and interests.

Benefits

======

- Salary at the same levels as other core team members

- Retirement plan with matching employer contributions

- Health care + dental insurance

- Flexible and generous vacation policy

- Working in sunny San Diego

Read more and apply at: https://learningequality.org/about/jobs/
FiveThirtyEight: Our 47 Weirdest Charts from 2015
indeed, how did a post from 2009 get on the front page of HN?
somewhere out there, karpathy is grinning
Glad to see Rust jobs starting to appear. :)
> so I don't have to answer when or how much longer should I get snarled in traffic. Alas.

Makes me think of an idea: an x.ai for getting rid of people bugging you in inconvenient moments. You tell it, "Amy, please make X leave me alone" and it tries to parse your conversation, automatically providing things like expected arrival time, traffic conditions and attempting to deflect questions.

Every now and then I wish I had such a tool.
> As cities become more desirable, and as housing prices there increase, the reasons for moving to the burbs shrink.

Except that rising housing prices are the number one driver of people to the suburbs. Any urban area nice enough to want to raise kids in, is too expensive for most families to actually do so.

And that's the situation today -- I can't imagine how much harder it will be in the future, when cities have even higher property values.
Install, configure and automatically renew a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate
> With the exception of bandwidth concerns on data-capped mobile plans

That's most of the world.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/
That looks right.
This is a really touching story ... there are so many hurting children out there and you can help even if you can't practically effect an adoption. Find a place to help broken kids.

In our case, we adopted our daughter at 11 months and the adoption agency had arranged a loving foster home for her while the paperwork was done. I can't imagine our home without her, but I also wish we'd been able to help more kids.
I'm obviously biased here, but to be fair to instagram, you do have the option of putting links in your profile. This is how the spammers on ig work, they make a profile featuring a girl with big boobs, then they heart a bunch of random photos, then put a link for "more intimate pictures" in their profile. Besides the stupid spamming, many instagrammers put a link to their blog or website in their profile, and if a specific pic has a blogpost associated with it, they mention that in the description. Yes, it is an extra step and makes the process harder for sharing external content, but I think it fits instagram very well. Instagram really isn't for blogging or communication (despite the messenging service they rolled out a while back.) It's for photo sharing, and being focused yields a better experience for doing just that.
Looks pretty good. Have you considered turning this into a Chrome extension?

I've not found a simple photo editor extension that I can use within Chrome. Ideally I'd just like to right click on photos, do simple crop/resize/quality/colour conversions and have the results available for insertion into gmail attachments or form uploads (via a temp URL perhaps?).

This would replace my current workflow...often I find myself receiving a set of images in gmail, downloading them, performing trivial manipulation with Windows photo editor or paintbrush, saving the results with sensible encoding/quality (some ppl forward me bitmaps...) then re-uploading the results.
> impossible to set a fixed goalpost of when AI is truly achieved

We have a kind of fixed goal post in human intelligence. When computers are worse at something than humans like chess it's thought of as intelligence and when they get better it's ticked off as just an algorithm. The AI researches gradually tick off abilities. Chess long ago, image recognition happening now, general reasoning at some point in the future.
I tend to rely on the Apple's UI guidelines. They have many hints that are applicable even for non-Apple apps. I remember Apple had a similar thing already back in 80s, which I found amazing.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...
Material design is great but I see apps that don't need it implement it a lot. Not every app needs a FAB, or a card ui.
Yeah, the idea of trying on Spain and Greece seems great. Simpler politically and economically.
2015 Year in Review: GPS, Glonass, Galileo, Beidou, low cost RTK and SDR
Poe's Law. Do you know what's in rooshv's head?
No idea what is going on (disclosure, MS employee in China, don't work on Bing). It could just be a glitch.
Toronto, Semi-Remote | JS Developer: Code for a cause!

---

We're proud of our universal health care, but our system faces difficult challenges. Hospital staff use "enterprise"-quality software that is hostile to its users. Doctors often struggle with the software's interfaces, and are unable to access the information that they need in a timely manner. Quality of care suffers.

Konode is bringing the fluidity and simplicity of modern web apps into the EMR (Electronic Medical Record) space, with a dedicated focus on bridging the gap between qualitative & quantitative observations. We depend on using the latest and greatest web-dev tools, and a short feedback loop with real professionals to make this possible.

We're ready to welcome a new code ninja with a genuine interest in developing meaningful software to help take this project to the next level.

Short-list of great perks to joining our team:

- Flexible schedule; shared office space at CSI Spadina

- A small and dedicated team (100% programmers)

- Happy, helpful team atmosphere. Good people and constructive workflow

- Real-world testing & feedback with network of health professionals

Sound good? On the technical side, our project runs on the NW.js platform and we use React for UI.

We are looking for a developer with significant experience in the following:

- Javascript / Coffeescript

- ReactJS, AsyncJS, NodeJS, ImmutableJS

- Testing and Usability

- Open-Source Projects

- Version Control (we use Github)

Team members must be able to meet downtown Toronto periodically.

Ready to apply? Please email your resume and portfolio to: drdave2063@gmail.com
How well does it defend against this deobfuscation approach? https://www.cs.arizona.edu/people/debray/Publications/generi...
Aren't we over this visual effect yet? I renember a few years ago every hipster with a 5D was using this effect to give their work the affect of authenticity. It ma be interesting technically, but the overuse has made it far from beautiful or compelling.
I always thought "Don't make me think" was a bit of a UI reference that everyone should read.
It's easier than ever to scale like Google without being Google – Mesosphere
Exact same experience here, though I'm still an admin and contribute here and there, the politicking has deeply sapped my enthusiasm.