skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We used Parse, and (contrary to your suggestion) it helped us get to market much slower and much more expensively. We experienced a hilarious amount of downtime, and hundreds of engineering hours that could have been spent developing features for our users or improving our services were spent working around fatal bugs in Parse, which were usually not manifesting on all instances, which made it very difficult for the Parse team to diagnose them.

Fixes for Parse bugs were usually not forthcoming from the Parse team---and when things were fixed, more often than not the fix was reverted within a week because it caused something even worse.

For the first six months of our time using them, Parse would only report downtime post facto and backdated by a day. “F@#$k Parse” was perhaps the most frequently uttered phrase among all of us in our douchebag Mission district headquarters. What a life.

All the time, push notifications inexplicably stopped working for hours at a time---we were running a daily sales app, and this really killed us. It ruined dozens of auctions and pissed off tons of our users. But what's even worse? Parse made my life a living hell for a year, and I'm glad they're gone.
Not to pile on here, but I try to use pure functions instead of Components as often as I can. The class keyword is sugar, sure, but like others have said - that ship has sailed. Personally, I just like that it's a language feature, since Components are the only time I ever use the class keyword my brain treats them as a 1:1 mapping. Perhaps it has something to do with both Classes and Components having a defined lifecycle? Cheers.
Thanks for those links. The paper by the designers is so much better than the incredibly dumbed down fluff in the article.

As I read the article I kept thinking things like "what Canon lens?", and "what are the details of the coating?". The paper has a wealth of technical information on all of this.
also major props for being up-front about the fact that they're shutting down the service and they realise it sucks for their users, rather than some "incredibly journey" style bs.
My sympathies to any workers displaced by these events, but I'm happy. Parse is a bad product: it has weird quirks in normal usage but most importantly scales abysmally. I'm thrilled to have ammunition to justify moving away from it.
Love love love the open source angle however, and wish more sunsetting products go this route.
Free - what's the catch? I don't want to have the same problem all over again. Forget the fine print, the body text is really hard to read superthin gray text on white.
Synthesis of Machine Code from Semantics [pdf]
This would be similar to internships in research labs (for the academically inclined) or startups (for product inclined). This is not at all similar to an internship at a traditional company, where you're given some kind of a bullshit problem that no one else wants to touch. Doing research or building a product (or, preferably, a mix of both) should be central part of the curriculum, not an afterthought which you might or might not pursue.
Someone knows who the art director is?
Are you familiar with accreditation? ABET is the one that comes to mind. Systems whose whole purpose is ensuring students really do know what they are expected to have learned.
I would amend that to "commercial grade 3D printers are terrible and awful". There are some monsters out there that can pump out amazing stuff quickly, but they come with a hefty price tag. And some use lasers, so that's super cool.
The cranking and possible mechanical problems with that seem to be the disadvantage. I have found the Varidesk (http://varidesk.com/) to be quite satisfactory. It sits on top of your normal desk and is adjustable in seconds. (I just own one; don't work for or have investment in the company that makes it.)
Now, there are two approaches: A) I'll try to answer the question or B) I'll try to crack the link to the next step.

Let's go for B, and have some fun! Have a look at the source code.

The answer validator works in this way.

1) convert the 4 answer to lowercase (thank you, the space is reduced to 26 character, not bad).

2) call val() and concatenate, now we have something like a\0b\0c\0d

3) the validation function.
in that function there are 2 things happening. resultA is summed with the ASHII code of each character concatenated in the string.

resultA += dat.toLowerCase().charCodeAt(j);

and resultB is for each step resultA * 31 XOR with the previous version of resultB.

resultB = (resultA * 31) ^ resultB;

fancy.
Couple of other And.
tmp = resultA & resultA;
resultA = resultB & resultB;
resultB = tmp;

and finally a XOR.

resultA = resultA ^ initA;
resultB = resultB ^ initB;

Now, luckily enough, this transformation are reversible. It does remind me and encoding system. A variation of a famose one.

So, anyone up for a challenge ?
Would something like ProtocolBuffers[0] or FlatBuffers[1] be a good replacement for XML? The data could then be transmitted in either binary or JSON formats.

[0] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

[1] https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/
Blurring the sign digitally to simulate how it might looks at night, under reflection and in bad weather is a darn good idea.

I suspect that the thinner strokes of Highway Gothic would fare better in this test than the thicker Clearsign. When we look at the "Expressway" image in your [1] reference, the difference between the top and bottom is reminiscent of Hwy. Gothic versus Clearsign.
These are precisely the kinds of things that Luminus http://www.luminusweb.net/ addresses. The template generates a project with all these things configured with reasonable defaults for a typical application. Luminus will also setup things like a logging configuration, authentication, databases, Swagger API, etc.

I think the fact that these things aren't magically is a big plus. You can use the defaults, but you can trivially customize the middleware stack for your specific needs.

Another thing to note is that a lot of the stuff that traditional frameworks do is geared towards doing presentation on the server. Modern apps tend to do presentation on the client, and the server primarily provides a set of stateless services for the client to fetch the data that it needs. With this approach, you don't really need a complex server framework in the first place.
(Blatant self-promotion warning)

If you’ve been using Parse as part of a photo-sharing app, you might want to take a look at http://www.ostetso.com. While we’re by no means a drop-in replacement for Parse, what we DO offer are all the pieces needed to create an instagram-like app, including the image hosting, user management, code that gives you a gallery of user images, etc., etc. (iOS only at this point though.) Check out the source code for an example app on Github (at https://github.com/PrecipiceLabs/Ostetso_SharePictures) that uses the Ostetso platform.

Free until you get to a LOT of traffic/users.
> It's as if you had to be there from the start to have a full image of how the language grew and truly understand the interplay between all the "features", otherwise it's too late to become an expert, and in some cases even too late to become comfortable writing good maintainable code in C++.

This is funny to me (not in a condescending way) because I had the exact opposite thought today. I actually came back to C++ on my own fairly recently after learning about the modern version of the language. I was lamenting about how lucky I was to have started learning with C++14 because I didn't have to go through the horrible C++98 and C++03 eras. In fact I could simply ignore most of it.

It's all about diving straight into the modern stuff. The biggest problem with learning C++ is that most textbooks, classes, university courses don't actually teach you the real C++ parts until the last 4 weeks of the courses. Instead they teach you "C with classes.. and std::cout".
This has been acknowledged as an problem by some of the more prominent members of the committee.

I urge you to watch Kate Gregory's talk from cppcon 2015 "Stop Teaching C".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk

Not only is she a great presenter, but she makes amazing points about what is fundamentally wrong with how C++ is taught in classrooms around the globe. I really hope her talk makes some impact. I know I used to hate the language. That was when I was writing it for my university that for some reason didn't want to upgrade their 2007 gcc compiler. The C++ programming I learned from that course was so outdated that I literally cringe looking back. It's totally pointless to teach C++ that only compiles on legacy compilers. CS education can be so backwards sometimes. We have C++14 on every major compiler, people!

Either way, I'm not optimistic the language will ever be popular on this website. From what I've observed, every C++ topic, project, or observation is used as an excuse to bash the language and talk about Rust.
We started using Parse for the simple push notifications, stayed for the DB.

Also had looked into Urban Airship but it's several times more expensive. I do want to pay for a service so it doesn't go away, but at those enterprise prices I'm definitely better off setting up my own APNS server.
The stumble was that CloudFoundry sucked until EMC bought Pivotal [Labs] and tasked them with cleaning up the mess. VMware isn't the cloud, Pivotal is.
Wow, and she was on the Rogers Commission, so she was leaking the information to a fellow investigator (not just a friend).
I have the exact same Dr. Who poster and same color top on my desk; used to have custom built frame, but switched to an Uplift 900 just because I wanted it to be a bit more sturdy.
Show HN: Real-time map of tweets related to the 2016 presidential election
I've had a lot of fun watching my poorly designed ship blow up in hilarious ways than I have actually getting to orbit, so I'd say yes, you can def get a long way in a half hour.
IBM LinuxONE
TypeScript is older. It was first released in 2012, whereas Dart was released in 2013.

Dart arrived with much fanfare though, whereas TypeScript was more low-key, and it's taken a while to become mainstream. Google's announcement that Angular 2 would use it has brought it a lot more attention from outside of the traditional MS/.NET dev crowd.

Microsoft have also been shifting the project's focus towards a more Babel-esque one, emphasising greater interoperability with existing (untyped) JS libraries, and support for new ES6/2015 features (and beyond).
That's interesting. I do use my laptop flat on the desk and find it very comfortable! Maybe I have long arms?
> what (generic) code is `super` syntactic sugar for?

super.propertyOnSuper ~= this.__proto__.propertyOnSuper

super() in constructor ~= ParentConstructor.call(this)

and some tools provide such things like this.super_:

https://github.com/isaacs/inherits/blob/3af5a10c6b51f9e99d9f...
GadgetsAlerts.com
Firebase is good for small hackathon-like projects and it gets ugly when your DB grows. Not much optimizations you can do.
Wiping the OS is an extreme measure only employed by power users. It's not their fault that it's a required step before using a new PC.
It is a sad day and I feel for the developers who got caught in the situation. If migrating to your own server is not an option, consider Backendless (https://backendless.com). We are stable and healthy and we have a team to help you with the migration of your app.
I know I might be biased (as someone directly taking advantage of the Trudeau Government's policies to start new businesses), but I'm becoming more and more impressed by the direction our new government continues to take.

The ministers are actually directing their government to do their jobs correctly. I've never seen a government like this before in either the United States or in Canada.
Intelligent Machines News, January 2016
First couple of hours? That's still how I play 90% of the time.
Radiant for Twitter – Free Twitter infographic style report
You're mixing up React and JSX. Typescript do not replace React, it just allows JSX syntax and transforms it to javascript for you if you want.
Thank you for releasing tooling to deal with migrating as well as releasing the server itself.

Too often services don't think about the full exit / shut down strategy and as disappointing as it is to see Parse go, it's nice to see it will actually live on in a way that can't be shut down by a corporate decision.
From the original post:

> We have a difficult announcement to make.

Yes, you can see their sheepishiness in the announcement.

I'm sure it was a tough decision.
This would be tremendous.
Would it be possible to open source the Parse Dashboard? Even if it's just the data browser? I really loved that part of Parse.
He has previously released an archive for "insurance" and I imagine either him or his legal team can give the pass phrase to it when he meets some criteria of urgency (gitmo'd)

I don't know how large that archive is, but it probably is nowhere near 18tb. 18TB is a huge size to be honest. If it was all text dumps, what would 18TB compress down to?
TypeScript is amazing. We decided on TS to build https://sameroom.io and never looked back!
I dunno, I've seen enough split-memory architectures(helllllo PS3) that you can't just say that cache-lines are the end-all-be-all. Although paying attention to them are certainly better than the current crop of dynamic languages.
We are discussing a puzzle games. Part of that will be discussing puzzles. Maybe don't read comment threads talking about things you don't want any more information about.
No, it just underscores the importance of properly architecting your apps so that they don't directly depend on Parse or others. Keeping that stuff to the periphery of your app will make it much easier to replace when the service either shuts down or you outgrow it.
This letter is an excellent illustration of why good writing matters, and why bad writing can be disastrous.

The most important sentence in the letter ("The result would be a catastrophe of the highest order - loss of human life.") is at the end of the third paragraph, and is effectively hidden by two paragraphs of dense, technical jargon that I, as a layman, cannot understand at all.

I honestly think that if he had just taken that sentence and moved it to the end of the first paragraph, 7 astronauts' lives could have been saved.
I don't think that this option was available when I tried Chrome and Picasa years ago but it should default to off...
If the pros/cons are apparent, rank those items. An obvious problem (like a big cost difference) may speed up the decision.

If there's time, prototype both; explore any claimed advantages and find some disadvantages. This will make any decision easier to accept.

If the two developers are regularly coming up with "equally good" solutions, consider alternating their decision power on projects (e.g. project A, developer 1 gets to decide; project B, developer 2; project C, developer 1 again...).
$55M Cyber Heist Strikes Aerospace Parts Manufacturer (1/28/2016)
>Really, I'd love to come back to Clojure but the problems I run into in my day job often have me thinking, "types would have made this so much easier."

I've gone back and forth on this one during the course of my career. My first professional language was Borland Delphi (strongly typed), then C (weakly typed), then Perl (dynamic), then Java (mostly strongly typed), Scala (very strongly typed) and now I'm slowly trying to adopt Clojure at my place of work. Out of all those the worst kind of code I've ever come across was in Perl, so for awhile I've blamed the lack of typing as a contributing factor to this. However. Most of the Python code I've seen since around 2001 has been fairly clean looking so that can't just be dynamic typing that was to blame. I suspect Perl's woes had more to do with the "there is more than one way to do it philosophy" as opposed to types. There's just no such thing as idiomatic Perl. In fact I'm seeing some of this in some Scala code. There are nearly-religious level wars around what constitutes idiomatic Scala way of doing things. I've seen completely insane spaghetti-style Scala classes, especially those that dealt with XML code and DSLs. So far, it seems that Clojure in Java ecosystem is more like Python than like Perl. I.e. only one way of doing things that is fairly clear from the onset.
The English section of the readme looks like it's a more-or-less literal translation of the Chinese section, so I think we can forgive a little spelling when it's clear his native language isn't English.
"Never let a good tragedy go to waste" is the quote I was thinking of.

Knowing that there was a national tragedy happening, Facebook takes advantage of all that great data coming from their french users.

it's disgusting. and the fact that I'm in a minority on HN that feels this way is pretty disgusting.
For undergraduate programs? Sure. For a Masters? I suppose. For both, what matters is the reputation of the school, really, not the online/physical dimension. For someone like Georgia Tech, they're the ones who are going to be badly hurt if they cheapen their online classes, so I'm reasonably sure that isn't going to happen.

Accreditation is an attempt to capture that reputation in a way that someone who has no idea about anything else can trust. Unfortunately, while you cannot game real reputation, gaming the accreditation is (almost intentionally) trivial.

A PhD, though, requires a lot of one-on-one time with a real faculty member. It's very much an apprenticeship sort of position. I've know people who did that remotely, and it's harder than doing it while being physically present. Getting a PhD while keeping a full time job is a very bad idea (I'm perfect evidence of this), and trying to do it 'online' is going to make that worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham
Parse was how I got my first backend needing apps into the App Store. Always thought they were a great company and really set the bar for how to build and document an API. Sad to see them go, but wish them all the best.
Fabric – The Tools You Need to Build the Best Apps
Facebook's stock is up 15% today. If they're this quick to kill off products and services then long term I'm bearish on them. Zuckerberg just came back from paternity leave and he announced a one month vacation next month. I don't think his head's in the game. Get rich and stop trying I guess?
Taking two expensive hobbies(photo + astro) and combining them!

Also my jaw dropped a bit when I saw all those white telephotos packed together, that's a lot of glass!
Wanted to downvote for spamming the thread with endless cloudboost.io postings... clicked upvote instead. Oh well..
> The event was literally moved to a different time UTC. I'm glad we agreed that it was rescheduled.

I think I see the confusion here. If you went to a group of people and said the movie you were all going to was rescheduled from 11pm UTC to 10pm UTC because of DST you'd get a bunch of "Huh?" and "What local time was it rescheduled to?" You'd answer it was rescheduled from 6pm to 6pm local time. You'd get a bunch of laughs at your "geek humour" while they secretly thought you were nuts. :)

Social events like meetings, movies, etc. are not considered rescheduled when DST starts/stops or the TZ rules get changed.

If you stored the event as UTC you'd have to alter your database when DST starts/stops or the TZ rules changed (is your system going to compare the old and new rules automatically now?).
As long as we're all clear that you're arguing for a significantly reduced human population, I guess I don't have anything to add. I'm pessimistic that the transition between our current populous life of toil and this idyllic future will be peaceful or pleasant.
You, Sir, have just defined my weekend project.
I've got a 15" rMBP and regularly get 8-10 hours of browsing, word processing, or light coding. On ArsTechnica's web browsing battery test, the rMBP exceeds 10 hours.

Recommended display brightness for standard office conditions is 150 nits. The rMBP goes up to double that, which obviously has a battery life cost. Also Chrome is poorly optimized for Mav, it takes several hours off the total.
How on earth such things don't surface harder ? W Bush was an idiots idiot for decades. His 'speech fumbles' are still very bad in form and "content" to me. I'd never expect to read anything of that sort about the man ever.
A tyrannosaur of one’s own
It's annoying when an API isn't backwards compatible for no good reason. Android increases their version numbers quite often, which means you have to do extra work (which is annoying if someone is paying you, but worse if someone isn't).

Crockford said, "Changing an API is an act of violence." An API designer should think long and hard before breaking backwards compatibility: usually it's not necessary.
How quality control could save your science
Alternatives to Parse?
Parse is shutting down, which sucks. What alternatives are out there at are comparable?
Where is the place to sift through the evidence?
The supputative remaining of the "cour des miracles" (~ rue du Caire // north montorgueil, la butte aux cailles, ménilmuche & place St Marc appeals more to my heart of former parisian than 4 septembre, champs Elysee, havre cau, Bvd des Maréchaux and other boulevards.
I agree that Firbase is a ool option and probably safe as they recently took steps to lock it into the google account. Someone will inevitably say google kills projects often, but they probably won't kill this.

Alphabet's strategy seems to be yo onboard new developers and get into mobile.Firebase is a good way to begin that pipeline allowing new devs into googles ecosystem and controlling how tags work on websites by creating their own library and pushing people in.

Why did parse fail though? Seems like a good strategy for Facebook.
WordExpress
Mark it zero!
> The different solutions might even have different effects.

I'm only about 100 puzzles in but so far some of the coolest "aha!" moments have been from this realization.
Many middle managers in the private sector only wants to keep costs down if their jobs are on the line.

Otherwise, they play the same games that their public sector counterparts do - spend everything they're given, always ask for YOY growth, resist efforts to automate themselves out of a job.

There is no private vs public sector magic wand that somehow makes the former more efficient then the latter. If there was, IBM would be out of business.
well, the coder is at least saying "optimizates", I have no clue what I would say "optimizes" in chinese, he is way better off than me!
Ember is awesome, it doesn't seem to get much love on HNews though. Which is a shame because its really really good - I tried react and spent 2 days messing with various starter packs, trying to get webpack configured and not getting anywhere. Ember took me half an hour to get started.
I'm head of developer evangelism at http://pubnub.com and we can handle push notifications for you easily. What is your use case?
DC is great at giving tickets, but as of yesterday main roads in DC still weren't completely cleared of snow. They are inept at the stuff that counts.
that's really fascinating, I'm not a liberal, but very opposed to the Bush presidency - I'm entitled, to since I voted for him once. And I always believed him to be stupid. And I think these days, I do the "No intelligent person could conclude X, therefore President Bush is unintelligent." because if he's dumb, the policies he executed that I disagree with it just a matter of ignorance, and not evilness. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Wow...you know the bureaucracy is toxic if even an astronaut as well known as Sally Ride is afraid to speak out.