skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've experienced this pain point (exceedingly complex systems) over and over again, and it's something I'm pretty passionate about. There's a lot of experimentation in JavaScriptLand that involves doing something cool or novel while totally forgetting about managing complexity. This is exactly why I built Nodal [1], I just wanted a fast, easy solution to build API servers.

We're a new thing, but the focus is on simplicity and how easy the system is to grok. The goal is to reduce complexity via separation of concerns as related to systems, not just programming modules (actually, Nodal itself is opinionated and some parts are tightly coupled. The argument there is consistency within the service to keep it easy to reason about. There's no DSL outside of the ORM, which reads like Django's. Just ES6 JavaScript.) We're not trying to compete in the space of "real-time apps" at all, because microservice architectures are tried, tested, and much easier to reason about (at the expense of having separate codebases - which I actually view as a positive).

I did a write-up about it this week [2] and we're focused on trying to tackle pain points re: web app complexity as best we can.

1. http://nodaljs.com/

2. https://medium.com/@keithwhor/hello-nodal-why-we-re-building...
> The big question is - who is Square competing with.

There's a bunch internationally where Square hasn't really begun to compete.
Pretty Cynical there. Its really all about perspective. Look at this.

As we continue to automate things, we reduce the time and effort required to manufacture the things we need. This creates an immense amount of leisure time. As we focus on creating social systems which provide basic income and living needs, we are currently on trajectory for a system where people can choose to do whatever they want, with complete leisure. All need for food and devices is sustained by machines, we are provided with all basic needs by the government and you can do whatever your heart desires.

Now people may think that is pointless, but imagine what people could accomplish with the ability to pursue anything they want. There is 7 billion people on this planet. Its impossible to expect everyone achieving the american dream through sheer handwork.
From the article: "What does this portend for our well-being over the next half century? Has technological progress slowed for good?"

Yes -- but is that a problem? Technology naturally reaches plateaus from time to time; at present, we're on such a plateau, able to catch our breath and more fully deploy our ideas before whatever it is that comes next. Africa has skyscrapers now; who cares if we don't have jetpacks?
> Apparently criticism is simply not allowed. Sorry to poke the fluff that is somehow being perceived as value.

Your original comment suggested this person mis-understood a foundational principle of software development. I, and I suppose many others, have been reading Hacker news since before we were senior engineers. So its not being "perceived" as having value; by your own admission, it is full of value (for a large portion of hacker news). While criticism is indeed tolerated, it must provide some value to the discussion. your original comment effectively read: "You are so incompetent, how did you ever get hired". That is not conducive to discussion; hence the down votes.
It'll be easy to find a cheap place in Morgan Hill! SF/Peninsula, not so much. Prices never really went down by that much in '08 which was a real, honest-to-god housing crisis.. so a smaller tech deflation won't help much.

.. Or so I hope, since I just bought an overpriced Peninsula house last year :)
A broken clock is right twice a day.
"This kills the 3G data plan". At least with "the optimized for mobile" version, preloading should not happen. And it definitely shouldn't happen twice for the same video.
> would you be better off using a search engine crawler like Nutch for this?

Fwiw we recently met a client who tried Scrapy + Frontera vs Nutch, and their assessment was that Scrapy + Frontera is twice as fast. Here's a deck on Frontera FYI:

http://www.slideshare.net/scrapinghub/frontera-open-source-l...

Aside: don't hesitate to get in touch with our sales team if you need help. We're experienced in this type of project.
Mass isn't weight, it's the amount of matter. Weight is the measure of the pull of gravity on mass.
Leadership in a world of equals
Seriously? Can we go a day without some political invader trying to make open source into a cudgel? It's a shakedown, because if you don't give in they cause an 'opalgate' clickbait storm.
America’s Best Days May Be Behind It
No worries! Gotcha, that is indeed very helpful! I appreciate it, will be in touch if I have more questions in the future :)
AirWorthy Postmortem
the apparent answer is because I need the content.

admittedly, ad is a legit monetization method. browsing a site with ads blocked is like pirating a software.

but some sites are doing it too much, for example, I often see ad blocker blocks 40 more ads on a single page. that's insane!

some commercials are super retarded, like those Geico ones!

there was a Geico commercial with a single line: "you can't unwatch this commercial because you have already watched it!" Man, I'd pay super hard to block it.
I think the author dismisses evil maid style attacks too lightly. It is true that its kinda difficult to protect against such attacks, but Secure Boot should raise the bar slightly.
Why is a contributor agreement needed? Can you post the link to the PR?
Or, third option, "there's only a few decent ways to represent orbits on a graphic".
Its a game. God is hiding somewhere in the Universe and we have to find him. Thats the purpose. Its just a giant game of Hide and Seek.
Is it new? Weren't people taking about "Killer Apps" in the 80s?
12+2D+Platformer+Games+Like+Ori+and+the+Blind+Forest
Must be just the geographical center of the USA. Probably it just puts all the relays which don't have further geolocation than the USA, there. It doesn't do the same for Russia, though...
2015 Was the Hottest Year on Record – By a Lot
It should "be optimized for mobile". 4MB per page is anything but. If you visit 100 pages per day, you'd need a 12GB data plan.
Incorrect. There are two separate things here. First, there's the Dev Share program which is opt in to allow projects to make money. This puts a bundleware installer up first that then downloads the main installer as the primary "Download" button with an alternate main installer only link alongside. Projects like FileZilla do this to support their development.

Second, there was a program where some of SourceForge's mirrored projects were distributed in the same fashion. SourceForge does mirroring of open source projects not hosted on SourceForge. SourceForge, in an effort to make more money, used the same bundleware style download installer for projects like GIMP. As GIMP wasn't repackaged in this installer, there was no GPL impact. However, it was distasteful to say the least. After both publishers like GIMP and the wider open source community reacted negatively, SourceForge discontinued the program and announced on their blog that they would not reinstate it. They also stated that they would form an open source community advisory board before implementing any additional open source monetization strategies in the future.

Today, SourceForge has 400,000 projects hosted, many of which are hosted nowhere else, all of which are blocked by uBlock. Of those, about 10 participate in the Dev Share program on an opt in basis to fund their development. No other projects are presented as a bundleware installer by SourceForge. It's been this way for months since soon after the publisher and community backlash and SourceForge's subsequent apology and policy changes.
Your argument didn't get any less shaky, unless you consider any interaction with an agenda, and therefore every interaction you will ever have, to be manipulation.

If you do I feel a great amount of sympathy for you. You must feel inundated.
Google either lost and surrendered or simply stopped caring about the war against crappy spam sites in search results sometime around '08/'09. Combining with a bunch of other things this led, IMO, to a reversal in what had been a steady increase in the quality of the web[1]. By around '11/'12 most of the web that wasn't crappy spam sites came to strongly resemble crappy spam sites. Anything like real, quality content not on a handful of major sites (e.g. Wikipedia) is either gone or impossible to find via search without knowing precisely what you're looking for.

See also: all sites and news organizations everywhere embracing terrible clickbait titles over traditional, informative ones.

[1] Like a massive jump in Javascript use and page sizes killing performance, and the expansion of Facebook/Twitter and the related death of the "no-one knows you're a dog" web.
I guess this is sarcasm? I didn't say 'slightly'; certainly it is much more problematic. Obviously, the comparison is hyperbolic, but I don't think so much so that it is valueless. (On an uncharitable personal note, I'm not so sure that comparing Wolfram's own ambitions directly to a dictator's is all that exaggerated.)
I think it's interesting to consider the reasons why that is. Why are backends typically slowly upgraded while maintaining a compatible API, while front-ends undergo big re-designs and re-writes from scratch just about every year? At commercial, successful startups?

One obvious reason is that the appearance of looking "modern" and "up-to-date" is a strong signal of vitality for many consumers, and this is awfully similar to the yearly fashion cycle. But are there other reasons?
Careful about letting "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough". Culture has always been determined by people who are well off enough to spend time on it. Even the people who are commissioned creators (Dickens was paid by the word, Mozart had aristocratic sponsors) spent thousands of hours working for free to get to the point where anyone would pay them.

Further, it's not like ads have been some democratizing element for cultural creation. They pay a pittance for everyone but the large traffic generators. No one is quitting their job at Denny's to become a full time blogger paid by google adwords. The independent instagram/youtube/blogger "celebrities" all still keep full time jobs until they get enough sponsorship to pay the bills.
They are always ahead of us.
Gang of Four: Apple / Amazon / Facebook / Google
Well, if the smear takes the light level below the noise floor of the sensor then you can't even say that there's a smear.
Visual Studio 2015 does not have upper case menus.
I'm glad you like it! I think such an installer feature could be added in by integrating with https://github.com/loopline-systems/electron-builder, I'll see if I have time in the next few days to add this in before school starts.
So some bastard who supported anti-gay legislation has built a browser. And that makes the front page in Hacker News?
> This creates an immense amount of leisure time. As we focus on creating social systems which provide basic income and living needs, we are currently on trajectory for a system where people can choose to do whatever they want, with complete leisure.

Could yes, but will it, maybe in the long run. In my lifetime, basic income will be exactly that, basic. Enough for probably shelter and food. You know people living off food stamps, see how much luxury they have. That is still tied to the economy. Most of the income generated will go to the people who own the machines that produce that output.

The sort of optimism you were talking about Adam Smith talked about, it never happened in Capitalism. Despite the fact that we solved a lot of automation problems of producing food, shelter, and material goods around the 1940s.

The government only has so much money it can give out. Divide the entire world's GDP by the population and you get 11,038. So if we could do that we can all live on 11,000 a year. That would be in the case that you took away the money from private interest and implemented something like Communism globally. That's not going to happen. The elites will cause massive wars before their give up their strangle hold and control on the world. Private interests will hold on to the money and make people work for it, as they always have.
This whole debate seems philosophically sloppy. The rate of return on capital investments, the pace of technological change, the disposable income of ordinary people, and subjective quality of life are all different things that are only loosely related. But if we throw around the word "progress" without carefully defining it, we might imagine they're all the same thing.
Automated Failure Testing
Have you guys heard of "libraries"? Having that much source code open at once when I bet 90% rarely needs to be analyzed/parsed is insane.

It always amazes me how someone can say "x sucks" and never question their own insane workflow.
Are you sure it's r^4, not 4r^2?
The Top 5 Analytics Tasks for Your New Startup
If those rights were really so important, why shouldn't independent contractors have them too? If the rights are not important when dealing with an interchangeable service provider like a driving contractor, then Uber is right not to grant them.
In the Netherlands I take my phone and send money to friends, companies, tax services etc, for free in about 15 seconds... arrives within minutes usually. Then there's iDeal which is nice, too.

Creditcard payments are a different story, also pretty quick but not as seamless, and not as popular either. I only have a CC to buy some stuff from other countries, or when I leave the continent although my regular debitcard worked in 4 different continents so far, too... Tbh my CC is pretty much collecting dust.
Afaik the primary mechanisms behind hardware degradation are electromigration in semiconductors and evaporation of electrolyte from capacitors. Both of these are temperature dependent, and a golden rule is that an increase of 10deg C halves the lifetime of a component (at least for caps).

A device may still work most of the time, but the analog electronics that implement the Boolean logic your digital device depends on are running outside design-spec, and the probability of a transient failure is increased.

One can further fantasize of secondary effects for example caused by unclean voltage rails due to bad filtering on switching regulators, perhaps increasing the probability of transistors latching up, frying controllers, or directly injecting strong noise typically in the 100kHz range into IO devices fucking with touchscreens, Ethernet, WiFi, you name it.

Take all of this with a grain of salt, I'm merely a university dropout struggling to make my boss understand why the 100's of decade old kiosks I service for a living don't work good like they used to.

Edit: Apparently my mind-dump above merely scratches the surface.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_compon...
At the core of the article is the debate regarding the points that were brought up in a book.

Robert J. Gordon, a professor of economics at Northwestern University who
has patiently developed the proposition in a series of research papers
over the last few years, has bundled his arguments into an ambitious new
book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” (Princeton University Press).

As for

“If you are sitting in Silicon Valley, rich and at the frontier of
technology,” said Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard, “it is probably true
that things are getting better.”

The same can’t always be said for the rest of us.

I hope

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed
The anomaly itself does not seem to be disputed. It's true that when looking for arbitrary clusters and unusual patterns you can pretty much always find something -- though it's more of a Texas Sharpshooter fallacy [1] than the kind of multiple comparisons you see in e.g. medical research -- but the paper in question [2] mentions a whole bunch of alternative theories for why the particular clustering of a bunch of rocks in the Kuiper belt is what it is, and it doesn't seem very likely to me that none of those researchers ever thought "well, gee, maybe this is all just a fluke." In fact the competing hypotheses would be my main source of skepticism – maybe it's a planet, maybe it's an entirely different phenomenon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy

[2] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22...
To be fair, though, it is very easy to customise TeXLive so that it doesn't do this; whereas, as far as I know, Mathematica offers no such option. To be sure, you can delete it afterwards, but I'm not sure how gracefully Mathematica deals with that; whereas TeXLive, for example, gracefully deals with incremental upgrades from a very basic installation. (I know, because that's exactly how I run it on my tiny SSD. My current installation is well under 1 GB.)
The only hope left is to reform the political system.
USA is not a single entity with a single voice.

Historically, generals of strong empires tend to go fight rebellions or weaker enemy states for prolonged time even if they could destroy them quickly. They do that to maintain power, or the empire will have no more enemies and the military's influence drops.

I'm not saying that's what happened in this case, but that is one of many reasons American entities (military, politicians, whatever) act against some other Americans' interests.
It is common with all media. The key is to be aware of the framing and question what the author wants you to believe is true.
>Consider that, if taxi companies offered competitive phone-based reservations

And instead, they are suing apps like MyTaxi in Germany. [1] The app allowed you to call cabs and pay via the app. But because MyTaxi promoted their app with discounts - even though MyTaxi paid for these - they sued them. Because f*, we don't need any new customers.

And considering they sued Uber as well, it seems like most taxi driver associations just don't want to improve and hope for the best.

Another example: In Berlin, they went to court over a new law forcing them to accept cards and collect a 1.50€ surcharge for it.

And this is even though a 1.50€ surcharge greatly covers their costs. https://sumup.de for example charges 0.95% for the debit cards that are very popular in Germany, so they make a profit for all payments under 158€ which seem very rare. And SumUp is quite expensive already.

They seriously need to improve their product. "Sorry, no app orders", "Sorry, card machine is broken", "Sorry, xyz"

[1] http://news.newsdirectory2.com/daimler-subsidiary-mytaxi-thr...
> sometimes

By your own admission, advertising has a poor signal-to-noise ratio. The mental cost of advertising (not to mention the economic cost) is very high[1]. Why should we stick to a system with such a poor efficiency?

> I want to buy

There are other ways to do that. For example, the internet should make it very cheap to make information available to anybody that wants to buy something. Services like google shopping are very primitive attempts.

> making people aware

It's the "making" part that many of us find extremely unethical. Like everything else, consent is opt-in.

[1] If you don't believe there is a high cost, isolate yourself from ads for a month or two. Humans are very good at adapting, so it's easy become blind to how much energy and mental capacity are necessary to filter ads.
An open source fitness challenge format and mobile run-time
"actually helpful" and "not invasive of privacy" are in tension.
It's possible to "game" this a bit to squeeze an extra $50 or so out of an empty account. Of course, it's a losing proposition given the overdraft fees, but I managed to get a few desperately needed bottles of booze this way back when I was struggling with alcoholism.
Sorry to tell that but no, it will not really help with raising a family here. Sadly current prices are new normal and deflated pressure will just let them to not grow further up in near future. (5%-10% drop is nothing for affordability). On another hand looking at what it became I don't even feel sorry for it's future. SF is over and to hell with it. Just a whole bunch of douches.
some of the Brits who joined ordered Islam For Dummies - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/08/two-british-men...
The ratio is probably at whatever gets the most money from the advertiser, or as close to they know how to be.

So perhaps the real question should be what incentives we can create to tilt that ratio towards useful information and away from slimy things?
NPR had a debate recently about this

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FseKcahmDiA
Newspapers don't really make money selling their printed versions. That's why the printed version is full of ads in the first place. Advertisers pay for printed newspapers to exist.
Anyone OK with this business model should also be ok with ISPs stripping out ads and replacing them with their own content (remember that?)

On the other hand, if this gets traction (unlikely, admittedly) this may finally force the issue to the courts and get content fiddling declared copyright/TOS violation. Which I'm not sure you all want.
Yep. For me, at least half of the value of an article comes from the (external) internet discussions about it, which summarize key points and weaknesses much better than the author is able to.
I currently use Meteor for a production app, but only use Mongo as a scratch pad (holding data until the user is mostly done changing their mind and other minor UI state). Data is then packaged and sent to MS SQL Server for long term storage and reporting.

As an example, a user can start updating a piece of data (eg: sales order, item, etc), with everyone able to see the changes as they happen (no hard need for locking, easy to support temporary network loss). Once they are done with changes, they are sent to SQL.

The advantage of doing it this way, is that the data stored in SQL Server can be completely optimized for reporting/storage and doesn't need the schema to support UI requirements. This makes things much simpler for people writing the UI as they don't have to change the SQL schema often to support the shinny new UI widget of the day and the report writers don't have to sift through a million useless to them tables/columns or partially entered rows to find the data they need.
Confused about this. Does it display adverts on pages belonging to organizations not using its network? That would be pretty ethically dubious in my book.
Every time it takes more than 10 minutes to solve a bug, describe the problem in your journal. When you eventually fix the bug, describe what went wrong, how you found the bug and how you fixed it. If you can't explain precisely what caused the bug, you haven't solved it yet.

As you build up a collection of mistakes and their solutions, start treating your journal like a checklist. When you encounter a new, unknown problem, review your journal- do any of the symptoms seem familiar? Any strategies you can try again?
The scales involved are astonishing. If the orbit is correct, less than one year has passed on it since the invention of writing here on Earth.