skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In addition to all the other great advise here, look at things like source code, contracts, customer lists, etc.

All the trade secret, confidential information.

If you have an auditor (CPA firms do this as part of a due diligence) that can do a procedures and practices audit - that firm can act as the "bad guy" that flags things that need to be addressed.

You know of one problem, there probably are others.

For example, bank account information? What is the wire transfer procedure? Can someone break in to a computer, login to the company's bank account and wire the money to Romania?
It always sucks when things have to come to an end, however, this is a pretty graceful shutdown if you ask me. Many other service providers, especially in other industries, would often times send you a letter with a month, sometimes less, notice.

From a business learning experience, I'm really interested in the reasoning. I'm hoping a detailed blog post comes out of this, which I'm sure it will, just as a "case study" of sorts.
Did you read the article? If a user wants to save a local time and you then convert it to UTC and save that instead, then it can in some cases be impossible to later find out what the entered local time was.

The users will rightfully expect their time to stay 14:00 Santiago time if they enter 14:00 Santiago time.
I'm building on top of Firebase at the moment, and this is exactly the sort of thing I'm afraid of.
Hi Ashley! Thank you guys.
I would recommend Kinto. It's open source and used in production for mozilla browser sync service.

https://github.com/Kinto/kinto
Can it hold a 27" retina?
>I'd just say that 80% of the US population lives in urban areas (from the census information I found), which are likely to be served by larger public service departments with more unelected middle management.

Except for the absolute largest cities, like NYC, many urban police departments are going to be a lot smaller and less hierarchical than you'd think.

Also, many areas considered urban still elect their sheriffs. For instance, Arlington, VA (home of the Pentagon and Arlington Cemetery) has 10-20 story buildings and elects its sheriff, as does neighboring Alexandria, VA (a colonial city that predates DC). I believe all cities and counties in VA elect sheriffs.

>They may choose to side with the lowest ranks of police, but it's not as bad as a simple "my direct boss didn't pay me enough, let's all vote him or her out."

In a place with elected leadership and limitless funds, so long as your union has enough critical mass, it's in the best interests of all members of the police force to push for higher wages, more stringent work rules, etc.

Why wouldn't they do this? There are no consequences for failure and lots to gain. It's not like a company where middle management wants to keep costs down; in the government your importance has to do with the size of your budget and number of reports and there's no negative feedback. In fact, because of how budgeting works in America, every dollar must be spent, and any savings will end up with a smaller budget next year. If anything, middle management is aligned with these demands.

The exceptions are agencies like WMATA or the MTA, where a significant portion of revenue comes from fares or advertisements. These are more likely to fight unions, but they are still state (or multi-state and Federal in the case of WMATA) agencies that at the end of the day answer to politicians and can still get government bailouts.

>But as a somewhat pro-union point, remember that public employees aren't bonused anywhere near private sector employees

Many public sector employees have absolutely sweet benefits, though. Good healthcare, good pensions or retirement funds, unions to go to bat for them, extreme job security, limited hours, etc. For certain classes of work government employees do make more than their private sector counterparts, but this is mostly related to low end work.

At the high end the government absolutely pays worse, you're right. The max salary in the normal Federal general schedule is roughly $160K.

I think this is part of the reason for demanding absurd rules and benefits, since salaries are set by law, not on the market, and the electorate doesn't want to hear about (or pay for) top talent making big bucks. Politicians respond to these incentives and cap salaries.
So, you're saying we should prepare for the "Oculus shuts down" announcement?
The displays are not the same. Period. If you don't understand that "Retina" is a marketing term, and that the only way to truly differentiate between display size is DPI then i truly have no idea what to say to you.

Enjoy your kool aid.
The last time I got a physical my doctor told me annual physicals are not necessary or recommended for someone my age.

There is such a thing as excessive screening and testing. PSA testing (for prostate cancer) had so many false positives resulting in procedures that were ultimately harmful for the patients that the recommendation to get the test routinely was dropped entirely. Recently the American Cancer Society changed its mammogram recommendation age from 40 to 45. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force Services went further and suggested 50 should be the age. Again, the reason is false-positives causing harmful outcomes.
jQuery's api seemed innovative and quite different than the other libraries I used at the time.

- css selectors to get at nodes. Very dom-focused, but without messing w/ prototypes like _Prototype_ did

- almost every function in the api acted on both single nodes and collection of nodes. It seems like it started the 'chaining' trend.

- no complicated class/namespace hierarchy to learn. Every function was on $ or $.fn. `$('.foo').hide('slow')` vs the equivalent in Prototype involved instantiating an Animation object and passing in the dom node, as I recall.

- cared about file size and not clobbering other globals.
I'd appreciate it if someone could explain to me how dangerous it is to use multiple parachutes instead of one. It sounds like it provides more reliability in case the one parachute fails, but it also seems there would be a risk of the parachutes becoming entangled. I personally have no understanding of the engineering or a sense of those risks.
Maybe it's also not such a good idea to claim you know everyone else's needs and constraints...
I wonder if Firebase will be next? They were acquired by Google in 2014. However they also acquired Divshot to join the Firebase team in 2015 which indicates they at least intended to continue with it then. Firebase does at least make more sense as part of Google's cloud services division rather than at Facebook.
Microsoft Cloud Strength Highlights Second Quarter Results
It's not like Docker is the ultimate tool. Docker, as far as I know, has very
messed up networking, which is not apparent until you need anything
non-standard. Also, Docker is not as debuggable as a regular service started
by initscript. It's not going to replace bare metal servers, virtualized
servers, or even containers, on top of which it is built.

Considering these, there will always be a place for configuration management
tools, like CFEngine and its derivatives, or for orchestration tools,
especially the ones that are not tied to a specific way of running things.
I don't think Docker on its own can do much good in a heterogenic environment,
and most of the big environments that lasted some time are heterogenic.
Why would you care? Most devs have no business with admin access to production servers.

Note: this is different than being able to deploy new code, I am talking about messing with a box in a data center
Ever heard of epigenetics? Genetic expression changes given the environment and stimuli. Do wild pigs look like captive pigs? Which would you rather be?
One group of developers this is going to affect most are those who used Parse's GCM Server Key for push notifications.

Since Parse is probably not going to reveal this key, Android developers using Parse for push will not be able to use their existing GCM push tokens with other services.
Contracting Cornucopia – A collaborative spread sheet for jobs
True, and anonymous disparaging comments on news posts generally are highly accurate, right?
>We’re proud that we’ve been able to help so many of you build great mobile apps, but we need to focus our resources elsewhere.

I read this as "our Facebook overlords have decided that our revenue/head can be dramatically increased if redeployed on a different part of the overall company, so they have decided to shut Parse down and move us elsewhere."

Which is a perfectly fair business decision but this is really sad to see since I saw the Parse acquisition as a beacon for platform companies being able to run independently post acquisition. :(
Caches generally need to be bounded to be effective. What am I not getting here?
Facebook is shutting down Parse
It can work in many ways. In my country(India), it was common for people to collect subsidized rations and sell them to hotels. Hotels get the rations at subsidized prices, and people make money on the free rations they recieve.

You could also see food stamps as a parallel currency. You get work done, you fix the payment as N food stamps. The guy who takes this, uses the same method to pay others... and so on, until the final guy in the chain exchanges those N food stamps for actual rations. This has other side effects, since there is a parallel currency, it can't be regulated, its supply cannot be controlled. You can't levy taxes on it and so on...

These sort of parallel currencies already exist in India.
> Maybe its not such a good idea after all to code your app to a proprietary API in the cloud.

That's why you write an adapter.
And just when I was about to choose between Parse and Google's Firebase. Makes me wonder if Firebase will follow the same path through acquisition, seeming stability, followed by closing?

As far as similar open-source systems, it seems like Mozilla's Kinto compares favorably to Parse after it's code is released: http://kinto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/overview.html
There's a nice table there comparing the different services' features.
Do you specifically want a graph database?

Because if not, SpatiaLite's VirtualNetwork module may work for you. Otherwise, neo4j.
The main reason I prefer an electronic height-adjustable desk is the height presets. Imagine if every time you sat down in your computer chair you had to adjust it from the lowest setting to a comfortable height. How much time would be wasted? It's not the effort of cranking it there, it's determining where the optimal height is. With electronic, you set it once, and then whether you're sitting or standing, your surface is at the ideal height. (Elbows approximately 90 degrees while typing, etc.)
My thoughts: http://i.imgur.com/TnQRX6v.gifv
Show HN: ApolloPad, for writing novels, ebooks and blogs
I'm afraid google will kill firebase too. I built some sort of mvp with firebase and I intend to port it to express/postgres.
Luckily, this time. Not all startups who provide a service like this may choose to do the same when they implode.
will you also open source the front end tools? i really loved the data explorers
I doubt that. This update is entirely client-side, while a rating system requires data management server-side in addition to the user interface elements.

That doesn't mean ratings are difficult, just more difficult than this.

Besides, the developers in place to build this update may not overlap at all with the developers in place to implement new rating functionality.
How to Work with Community and Come Out with a Product That's Better, Not Worse
Anyone with eyes has a pretty good idea that they are walking into a toxic soup. I left Delhi on the 22nd - this picture is pretty accurate:

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/2343988/images/o-DELHI-AIR-POLLUTI...

Or, back in July (before things got bad) I could do maybe 10 suicide sprints in NY. Then I flew into Delhi and was down to 4 - breathing was just that hard.

I know there are lots of jokes about Biharis, but they aren't as stupid as you are making them out to be. They move to Delhi with good but imperfect information about both the pollution and the economic opportunity.

I'm all in favor of pollution taxes and internalizing externalities. I'm just saying that even in spite of that, the economic gains seem to drastically outweigh the health penalties as evidenced by millions of people moving towards the pollution.
Great feedback. Will flesh out the team section.
You're right on the customer feedback section that there may be a huge disconnect between customer and vendor perception. We will likely have to get in the middle of that in certain situations to ensure feedback is fair and accurate.
There is some movement on standardization of reporting e.g. Now a 43 page document from the PCI council on how to do the pen test.
On your personal peeve: I hear you. That why I tried to define pen-testing for what it means to me. There's tons of other definitions out there and many are prejudicial to scope and quality.
Current HN discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10991729
Okay, but that only helps the tiny subset of HNers who are manually pinning certs for a random website.

Further, real world MITMs are ad injection at the device (Lenovo Superfish) or ISP level, so they are persistent.
This app was meant to connect physicians with patients, needs licensing to legally operate, and on top of this the team fell apart. Someone licensed could grow the app, or someone with a different vision could use the product to connect other type of professionals outside the healthcare space.
I used Parse a few years ago to serve as a backend for a simple event aggregation app. It was incredibly simple to use and integrate with. I probably spent on the order of ~1hr reading documentation and another 2 hours doing some quick and dirty implementation before having a functioning Android app. It's too bad it's shutting down, but I can't say I didn't see this coming after the Facebook aquisition.
I don't think that's reason enough. AWS wasn't/isn't Amazon's core business, either. For a company that wants to be deeply integrated in all web-connected software, it makes sense to make it as easy as possible for developers to work with them.
Does Nim deep copy messages between threads now (i.e. serializes entire object graphs)? If so I'm glad to see it and yes, it would of course be safe, as it would basically be Erlang. (It wasn't thread-safe when I last looked a year-plus ago.)
A RTL-SDR Software Defined Radio Primer: DIY Police Scanner
Rails number_to_currency should not return “$-0.00”
Did you ever learn Paredit? Once I did, editing any other type of code became awkward in comparison.
I stopped reading after the fifth annoying inline gif.
IPv6 Has Arrived – Is Your Security Infrastructure Prepared?
It seems to me that ANYONE who buys ANYTHING is equally likely to be targeted via their Amazon account -

Think about how many people actually use Amazon services

Through sheer competition, Amazon is forcing Walmart to close over 100 stores. We only know that because Walmart is big enough to get noticed.

Remember when Walmart was the company putting local mom and pop shops out of business?

Cycle of life I suppose...
Is that really a legit website affiliated with LinkedIn? Smells fishy:

$ whois workatlinkedin.com
(...)
Creation Date: 2015-12-28T20:13:00.00Z
Reseller: NAMECHEAP.COM
(...)
Registrant Name: WHOISGUARD PROTECTED

$ dig +short workatlinkedin.com \
| xargs -L1 whois \
| grep Organization: \
| sort -u
Organization: CloudFlare, Inc. (CLOUD14)
The Safest by far is the northern side, Rogers Park.
There are two major kinds of puzzles:

1)Puzzles about getting a solution that follows a set of rules, which can be deduced, and are reused from puzzle to puzzle. The game just checks that the rules are followed, so there is more than one valid solution sometimes. The different solutions might even have different effects.

2)Environmental puzzles, where the right solution is indicated by the environment. Without giving too much away, imagine that there's a line near the puzzle, matching the puzzle's grid, and the solution is just to trace that same line in the puzzle.

So there's never an arbitrary rule that you can't figure out. That said, a part that is difficult for some people is that they make assumptions about what the rules of the puzzles are, and the assumptions might be incomplete, or outright wrong. There's typically simple puzzles that are trying to teach you the rules. Part of the game's progression is to find those tutorial puzzles.
Currently using Parse for Push notifications (it's simple to send a request to Parse and it handles iOS vs Android issues).

Is there any tool out there that has similar functionality? Ie. you register all your users devices there and they simplify the sending of push notifications.
yeah this makes no sense
There are still issues with type definitions for third party libraries. I love TypeScript and would love to work on it full time, but it's painful when you need to use a dozen third party code. Unless this has been solved recently, I remembered tds files weren't updated regularly.
firebase, it is owned by google. Or roll your own observer pattern pub sub document api service.
>When someone is working for the public the considerations are entirely different.

How so? People don't work in the public sector because the are doing everyone a favor. They are working there because they are being compensated in some way. I think that they should be able to negotiate for what the market will bear.

Do you work for the private sector but think that people who work in the public sector should do you some sort of favor? That's pretty rude isn't it?

I don't think highly of police unions, but I do think they have the right to get the benefits and income that the market will bear.

I do think that the better thing to do would be to pass laws that require external investigations, mandatory prosecution for wrong doing and mandatory auditing.

If you want police offices wearing cameras with sound 80% of the time, pass an law/ordinance that has auditing requirements and a budget.
Why? React and React Native are both pretty core to Facebook's main applications these days (all of Instagram is written in React, there's a smattering of components all over the main Facebook page, and multiple Facebook-written applications are written in React Native, including parts of the main Facebook app). In contrast, Parse was more of a dev-infrastructure product that didn't end up impacting developer relations as much as Facebook wanted it to (I'm guessing)
I'd be hesitant to use anything released by a large company that they don't use themselves for their flagship product(s). Angular 1 comes to mind.

I believe Facebook does use React for facebook.com, but not React Native for anything in production yet.
The NYT article has some pretty good explanation here.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/facebook-to-shut-do...

"Facebook also would have had to invest untold millions of dollars in capital and, more importantly, engineering talent, to get the Parse business fully off the ground to have a better chance at making a dent in competitors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google."

That old blog post doesn't make sense any more - we should just take it down.
Good for you, man, for having the balls to stick up for your principles!
> Why is Apple the only one that can build a 15" retina laptop with 9-10 hours of battery life

Because "retina" in the context of displays is an Apple-trademarked marketing term, which is why Apple is the only one who can build a "retina laptop", irrespective of size or battery life.

More to the point, another manufacturing aping Apple's tradeoffs means the two end up competing on price, which neither wants to. So, naturally, other competitors who are interested in claiming some segment of the price-insensitive market by competing on something other than price make different trade-offs -- in this case, better DPI and shorter battery life. For lots of laptop usage patterns, this is a superior tradeoff; for others, its not.
Mark the height with a piece of tape on the wall behind the desk.
If the user expects 8:00 local time then it should stay 8:00 local time. That is at least how people would want their applications to work 99% of the time. If someone enters 8:00 and then the software suddenly changes it to something else, that is confusing.

If you actually look at what happens when timezone laws change, people continue to anchor to their local times.
ClojureScript is awesome, and soooo much progress has been made in the past year.

It has made writing browser based UIs so much more fun.

I am really excited about what is in store for it this year -- personally, I am going all-in with ClojureScript.
The "self-explanatory"/"brevity" problem is quite interesting. It reminds me of the point Donald Norman made in "The Design of Everyday Things", where information is either found in the world, or in our heads, coupled with issues of information-density. When we pick names, it's a trade-off between abbreviated (-> fast to use), descriptive (-> fast to learn), and mnemonic (-> easy to remember).

I roughly divide naming problems into 3 areas mentally. Most commonly used commands(/functions/identifiers/...), commonly used commands, and rarely used commands.

Most commonly used commands are things like ls or cd or mkdir. Due to their usage frequency, an intermediate user will remember these by heart, and mentally substitute their long forms whilst reading them out. Technically we could assign these to even shorter codes, but then they would loose their mnemonic value.

Preferably they would also have a long-form alias to provide a certain amount of easing into them. (list-directory, change-directory, make-directory)

Commonly used commands should not be abbreviated as readily. The few extra characters required to type them are usually well worth the additional clarity. Pythons .deepcopy() is a good example. It copies a data structure and its sub-structures completely. .dpcp() would be a lot harder to remember given how often it is used.

It should be possible to alias these to shorter versions as well, should someone have to use them frequently. Auto-complete functionality may also reduce the amount of memorization necessary whilst typing these in.

I personally think emacs handles these two cases very well,
with it's quick chords that need to be memorized but provide speed, and calling commands by name via M-x which provides ease of use.

Then there's the rarely used stuff. These names may get very long if they are to be descriptive (ncursescplusplusmusicplayer), which means that they, or parts of them should probably be abbreviated (nccppmp, or preferably nccpp-musicplayer). Runs of abbreviated words should not become too long, 3-5 characters being the maximum. Past that length, it becomes hard to remember which characters one has already typed. (ncpmpp? or nccppmp?). Past that sensible chunking through full words or hyphenation may become necessary.

I do think these are sensible rules of thumb, but then they are rules of thumb, and there are most likely thousands of exceptions to them.
If resource is the question, then I wonder how come they are sustaining WhatsApp? Its a zero-profit activity, the users chat amongst themselves, what does FB gain from that? I guess the parse resource traffic would be little compared to terabytes flowing through the WhatsApp every day.
Upsides and downsides to roll your own. Your timing seems pretty unlucky though ;)
>>It seems like no one else will learn a thing from any of this.

There is a ton to learn from your story.

Most people think retirement is what you do when you get old. Retirement planning begins on the day you get the first pay check of your life. In fact the whole purpose of working should be to eliminate the need to work.

If you are not doing this already. You are sitting on top of risky avalanche which will go downhill any day.
I purchased the Jarvis desk and wrote a review. I've really enjoyed it. http://timleland.com/ergo-depot-jarvis-standing-desks-review...