skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for adding the links daveguy!

1) The stack is Rails and Postgres on Heroku, static assets (video/images) on S3/Cloudfront, and transloadit for video processing. $2500 isn't a crazy sum but the project doesn't make any money and the value for us is mostly the fact we created the website. Like any public project, the other non-intuitive costs are maintenance and customer support. We love that it's become a resource so we're moving everything to a static site and keeping the work archived.

The new beta is focused on B2B (with a need) and a lot of the manual processes of uploading and formatting projects has been automated, which is how we can offer the "human" element.

2) We had zero spend on advertising since the content is so damn compelling. A couple of projects hit the top of reddit/fb/HN.

3) The "main" project is our digital consultancy in SF which a small part came as a result of Monograph exposure. The business is growing, but we really enjoy building products so the beta is a primary focus for us this year.
> All I'm getting paid to do is drive nails.

Because you only have a hammer, what do you expect?

> Also, programming languages are not tools

That is obviously not true. If I want to write a decision engine then Prolog is a good tool for that, if I want to write a high volume web-api then Go or Erlang is a good tool for that, if I want to write a kernel module then C is a good tool for that. And so on.

Saying that all objects are nail-like and all materials are wood-like is, at least in my world, quite crazy.
This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11099782, which is currently trending on the front page.
It only should be used for code which doesn't have side effects. According to original github lib.
>A long-standing discrepancy between predictions and observed results in test reactors has been called “the great unsolved problem” in understanding the turbulence that leads to a loss of heat in fusion reactors

>In a result so surprising that the researchers themselves found it hard to believe their own results at first, it turns out that interactions between turbulence at the tiniest scale, that of electrons, and turbulence at a scale 60 times larger, that of ions, can account for the mysterious mismatch between theory and experimental results.

So basically they forgot the fact that a single pebble thrown into a pond causes ripples; or that a candle can light a room? Sounds like they forgot to apply the KISS principle and over complicated things a bit; which I can safely say, I probable do at least once a day.
Look at what Mike Pall did with LuaJIT2 - I assume if the world wasn't so focused on the web, we would see more of it in other languages. But really, things aren't that bad. Microsoft has enough good people working on RyuJIT, PyPy has some of the best people advancing metatracing JITs, and Mike Pall is a god among men.
Cox refuses to spy on subscribers to catch pirates
Better up your varnish game
OpenBSD on Amazon AWS: An Unexpected Journey
Using emojis (and acronyms, abbreviations and even to some extent memes) to augment conversation isn't the problem. Using them in such a random or repetitive way that they substitute for conversation - to the extent that some human interactions would struggle to pass a Turing test - is the problem.
Twitter, where the bot feeds are often indistinguishable from the human ones, is pretty much the poster child for this sort of communication malaise.
You nailed it.

MVC was popularized because after enough people went and just threw together random things for enough projects, turnover, learning curve, switching between projects, etc just became a huge burden. The big sales pitch for MVC on the web (largely influenced via Rails) was a good enough common structure for web apps that developers could learn and apply across projects.

It worked in that regard, but as usage became more popular we ended up adding on more and more and more and more to try to make the "common" solve everything. Constant changes screw the entire point of the "we all learned and know this" benefit.

Flexibility of your approach is probably more important in the world today than following a rigid structure in an attempt to let the structure solve everything.

I like the approach outlined here...but I'd have a hard time using a framework based on it. I'd rather write my own code using a simplified process and minimizing dependencies if I'm going outside of something that's clearly a major player that can be counted on to stick around.
Don't forget also that physical anxiety can trigger mental anxiety, and vice versa.
20 Years of Side Projects
> 100% agree. And note that HN is already running this experiment; we have downvotes as well as upvotes.

I'd say that even though upvotes and downvotes are somewhat helpful it is the mentality that differentiates HN from other communities most significantly. We can't outsmart human stupidity with technology.

Sure, we have loads of people who want to game HN to push their own agendas but at its core HN users actually welcome new points of view.

There is nothing wrong wrong with, say, fighting for animal rights. But the moment you consider yourself an animal rights activist you're very likely to give up common sense and the ability to value any input that doesn't conform with your peers' opinion. Basically you become a one-dimensional character.

Pleas note I used the word "likely." I am not ruling out that there are open-minded animal rights activists!
I'm not sure why author dismisses graphql. It greatly simplifies server-side work. You just need to implement one endpoint that responds accurately and quickly to a composed query in accordance to what rights the current user has. It's not as easy as "serve result of SELECT *" but it's well defined and flexible for consumers.
Amazon Promotions – I just cost my company $40,000 with one assumption. (2015)
> I've encountered quite a few posts that were unreadable.

You mean they were so faded that the text merged with the background? Highlighting it with the mouse usually works for me in this case.
This is simply a badly written article. In 2008 oil was very high, the market was not. Now in 2016, oil is very low, and the market is heading down. There's little correlation, and the market conditions today could be argued to be a result of bad regulation and poor government interference in the private sector (conservative view anyway), and now people want even more government influence when it's in $19 trillion in debt and the Federal Reserve mark to market is insolvent.
The script/site below is able to transcribe whole English texts into phonetics. It does take word context into account (e.g. "the" becomes "thee" if it is before a word starting with a vowel). Just checked "We've" and it does manage to produce a good phonetics transcription.

http://lingorado.com/ipa/
There is still a key difference.

With programming the information is always there. If you don't understand a higher level language but do understand the language in which the compiler is implemented, you can always read the compiler.

The "it trivially follows", the information is simply missing. Gaining a mathematics degree will often give you the intellectual power of finding the missing pieces yourself, but the only sure way is to ask the authors themselves.
This is true for some companies, but not all. Arguably this is not even true for most "startups" in the VC/pg sense.

Companies that are not only software, or that need a lot of money to scale (not just to annihilate competition, but to scale) are common.

Note: let's not forget we're talking about a VC pitch deck, not an angel pitch deck. You should theoretically be past finding product/market fit, and be at the "scale really big" stage.
"Just hire us" wrapped in a ton of buzzwords.

> Don't let your enterprise make the expensive mistake of thinking that buying tons of proprietary tools will solve your data analytics challenges.

...

> The truth is that a top team of data scientists can achieve great results ... This is broadly the approach that our own data science teams take when working with clients.
Rodeo 1.3.0 – Data Science IDE for Python
Note that the actual URL of this story is:

http://readwrite.com/2014/09/17/cobol-programming-language-h...

The posted Google URL just redirects to it.

Please don't do that.
What does investment thesis mean in this case?
While their growth tactics have pissed me off to no end (spammed my whole company once), I do see value in the product. I’ve found two jobs from LinkedIn and been contacted by recruiters at a number of companies I may want to work at. For me, the personal value seems greater than either FB or Twitter. Although personal connections tend to lead to the best jobs, for those starting out in a field this isn’t easy, and a more liquid market helps us all. I can’t imagine telling a recent grad not to put together a LinkedIn profile because there is no value. Certainly, this is more about the online resume hosting part than the network part, but I think the latter has some value too even if diluted. And the former is powerful because there are so many people in the network.
"But without magnetic compasses, like all ancient sailors they would have struggled to find their way once the clouds came over."

"Struggled", certainly, but Polynesian sailors crossed the Pacific without a compass or sunstone. Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation :

> Polynesian navigators memorize important facts: the motion of specific stars, so where they would rise and set on the horizon of the ocean; weather and the seasons of travel; wildlife species (which gather at particular positions); the direction, size, and speed of ocean waves; colors of the sea and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some islands; and angles for approaching harbours.

Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Piailug concerning the master navigator Mau Piailug:

> Prudent navigation relies on no single technique, but instead synthesizes position from multiple inputs. Underway, this constant synthesis makes it easy to spot the navigator—he's the one with red eyes from sleep deprivation.

I see no reason why the Norse wouldn't have had some of the similar navigation skills.

That doesn't mean they couldn't have used a sunstone, but rather that it's not unreasonable to believe that they could have navigated with only 'landmarks, birds and whales, and little else'.
You don't even need to maintain a separate custom tap repo. Keep the formula in the same repo in a Formula directory, and include the repo URL when tapping (gets rid of the homebrew- restriction)

The brew command for users would be:

brew tap octavore/delta https://github.com/octavore/delta.git

brew install delta

---

Example above of course doesn't currently work because the formula is not there

(I successfully use it in my repo: https://github.com/stepanhruda/ios-simulator-app-installer)
Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble Is Now 5 Years Old…Have We Popped It Yet?
This is bread and circuses for nerds...dopey mindless marketing drivel for public consumption.

It's very easy to fall in love with the ideas behind NASA and space exploration, but NASA itself is corrupt as all hell and is an arm of the military industrial complex and it always amazes me when they get a completely free pass here.
There are indeed a lot of companies selling expensive pre-packaged data analysis tools and other magic black box solutions at the moment. In my experience most of these are not that great and cost a small fortune. Large enterprises are certainly a sucker for just writing a cheque for bad software so I certainly understand why there was a bunch of VC investment in this space. However I also agree though that this "a tool will solve our problems" approach is vastly out of line with reality so am not surprised many of those firms have seen their valuations slashed recently.
I wish there were more good, open source, product life-cycle management (PLM) tools.
Let's Learn ES6 – A video series to get up and going with ES6 in JavaScript
Reverse engineering ARM1 instruction sequencing, compared with the Z-80 and 6502
I suppose that VCs can compare you to whomever and whatever they like when they have money that you are professionally begging for.
My Company Just Released Computer Vision / AR Software for Magic: The Gathering
I like that very much.
Agreed. But check out artist mode on Emacs...
> But if and when that person leaves your company, your investment just went up in smoke.

That means you'd like to get results from that person earlier than he/she leaves. Developing a person takes a measurable time and efforts; can you estimate how badly you need those results from data science? Maybe those anticipated benefits aren't that big?

That's not to say you can always incentivize the person to stay longer. Of course if you need the results.
I'm not one to argue about productivity. It's a term I never found very meaningful, so I cannot be sure other people mean the same that I understand when I hear the term.

For me it's not about lines of code per unit of time, but about what feels right, and that's very subjective. Dependent on the task I can probably make a decent amount of progress without Emacs, too, so I wouldn't argue that my productivity depends on it. But this Emacs environment is molded after my habits, so it's a really comfortable place, an extension of my body, much like a good tool for wood working that fits your hand just right and lets you work directly on an object without having to think of the tool as a mediator between your body and the work piece.

I wouldn't work with computers if I didn't feel comfortable. Thanks to the flexibility and hackability of Emacs I'm a lot more comfortable doing computer work than I would be without it, meaning that I'll become a gardener a couple of decades later than I would without it.
He starts with a negative tone when describing react & redux without backing up his negatively with proper & convincing arguments just so that later he can throw in his alternative solution.

I don't know why we keep doing it but often times we cover our eyes on purpose and brush off existing solutions backed by thousands of engineers so that it's easier to make our points.
SML? Pascal?

Edit: I was really referring to language families, so including things like OCaml, Modula, etc.
Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi on the Talk Show about Apple's Software Quality
Custom Aggregates in PostgreSQL
Well, if you look at the notes on Reid's site[0], he says

> 1. we weren’t the natural leader of a market or technology trend that everyone was paying attention to,

> 2. we didn’t have substantial organic growth, and

> 3. we had no revenue.

It sounds like LinkedIn really did need that money. Reid was still able to raise a B round from Greylock probably because he was a known quantity from his PayPal days, and because Sequoia led the A round. The bigger lesson here is that much of the advice given by prominent Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs often doesn't apply to the rest of us, because we're not in the positions of privilege that they are.

If I were a repeat entrepreneur with a moderately successful exit, a current exec at AmaGooFaceSoft, or participating in YC, I would devour all the advice these people are offering. Otherwise, it's useless. Forget about an actual pitch, you're probably not even going to get a 5 minute phone call with a partner at Greylock. Why would you expend any time or energy on preparing in advance for such an unlikely event? You're much better off spending your time figuring out how to generate and grow revenue and profit (what running a business is actually about).

0: http://reidhoffman.org/linkedin-pitch-to-greylock/
The only one odd here for me is the ban on de-referencing more than one level.

Even a simple linked list implementation uses double pointers to reset parent nodes.. Does anyone have insight into the risk in static analysis? Seems like it would be handled by whatever logic was handling normal pointer derefs.

Seems like the only argument is the one against function pointers, which is a pretty amazing thing to ban but at least provides logic WRT static analysis.
From Github's Scientist [1]:

Because `enabled?` and `run_if` determine when a candidate runs, it's impossible to guarantee that it will run every time. For this reason, Scientist is only safe for wrapping methods that aren't changing data.

When using Scientist, we've found it most useful to modify both the existing and new systems simultaneously anywhere writes happen, and verify the results at read time with `science`.

[1]: https://github.com/github/scientist/blob/master/README.md#de...
Not whole economy is based on oil. It makes 30% of revenue and 50% of exports.

https://www.regjeringen.no/no/aktuelt/the-norwegian-experien...
I feel like that too sometimes, but i think that line of thinking wouldn't really lead anywhere good.
- Icelandic rocks could have steered Vikings (2011) [0]
- 'Viking sunstone' found in shipwreck (2013) [1]
- Crystals 'helped Viking sailors' (2007)

[0] http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15523520
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-21693140
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6338535.stm
This can only become a systemtic concern if the growth of money and velocity exceeds GDP growth. In such a case, you would expect inflation (or huge asset bubbles) and relatively there is little in the US.

Real estate prices are well in historical norms compared to rents (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-c...)

By what measure are stocks overbought? If we blindly look at earnings, stocks have an earnings yield of about 3% over a 10 year Treasury note, well within accepted ranges (http://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/equityriskpremium.asp)
I am in a very similar place right now.

Similarly horrified that my only valuable skillset makes me effectively chained to the computer screen, forever.

Been self-employed so long that full-time employers see the experience as a disqualifier from hiring. Let a string of bad business deals put me in so much debt I have no hope of putting together the financial cushion or runway towards taking an extended break or re-skilling into another industry. Been taken advantage of so many times by tech industry titans that I trust no one. Turns out the root cause was partly a mental illness working against me my entire career that I only recently was diagnosed for, well into adulthood.

Completely deflated in confidence or ability. Burned out to the point where I can no longer even effectively fake enthusiasm for selling my abilities. Jaded hostility I can no longer control towards clients, peers. Hide away from socializing with anyone else with ties to the tech business because of social anxiety fears they'll judge me for my failure, or worse, I'll get drunk and lash out.

Therapists suggest a major career change but I have no skills in anything else that could pay my bills. All the attempts at shifting away to management, associated non-code skills tend to backfire.

When my checkbook is drained, it only refills with a half-hearted sales pitch to an old client, a grudging all-night session with a text editor.

Obligations to wife, sick elderly parents that keep me bound to where I live. Got somehow stuck in an absurdly expensive soul-crushing city with absurdly hight rents for absurdly tiny living spaces, that also happens to be critical for my wife's career. She's at the top of her game here. Leaving means she gives up her career.

I've been dreaming of living in the woods making furniture or something, being a tugboat captain, construction worker, a sanitation worker even. Welding, cutting bushes, mopping floors. It took 15 years to really truly drive home how badly I misjudged my ability to succeed in this business, what the consequences were for a career of being self-employed in something that didn't really motivate me to begin with. I need a paradigm shift in how I see my life, but it just won't seem to come.

Such a bleak comment. Ugh. Sorry. Anyhow, yea you're not alone.
This can be avoided by using CMake as QtCreator supports it as a project type. CMake isn't exactly a bastion of simplicity however.
FYI, the phrase "quite some users" is not uncommon among (continental european?) non-native speakers of English, but it's not correct.

"In the British National Corpus, for example, most examples of quite some are "quite some time", others are "quite some distance". If you replace "quite some" with "a considerable", the meaning should be clear.
If the sentence does not make sense when you do that, it's likely that "quite some" is not being used properly."

From http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/quite-some.1011589/
Except when it is misleading or linkbait.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: I'm not sure the OP was particularly baity, but we'll change the title to josu's suggestion.
I'm trying to give your comment the benefit of the doubt, but I can't help but read that as "well, beggers can't be choosers so just deal with it".

> I suppose that VCs can compare you to whomever and whatever they like

Generally true of all people, not just VC. Is it not, therefore, reasonable then to in turn judge said person for that behavior?

> when they have money that you are professionally begging for.

Which is cool because they are in the position of power?

Could you clarify? The author did not take the money. Politely declined and moved on.
Thanks for your awesome curation of this site :-)
Remember, the US used to have anti-communist witch hunts in which people were forced to give up their careers,...

Actually we still have those, and twitter often plays an important role. C.f. Pax Dickinson, Justine Sacco or Brandon Eich.

Luckily we've moved beyond lynchings and other such political terrorism in the US. It still seems to happen in Europe, however: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/26/french-taxi-dri... http://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2015/nov/12/greek-g...
Way, way more difficult. Companies are made up of lots of different people with differing kinds of expertise. You don't want everyone learning everything.

Derek Sivers wrote about how he had everyone in his company answer customer phone calls. There were phones everywhere, and there were incentives for employees to pick them up. It took a lot of work, but it paid off.
Well to defend Google a bit, all performance advice is implementation specific. Whether it be knowing how CPU pipelines and cache lines work or knowing the internals of the JS engine. Heck, anytime you have a design that leaves design decisions to implementors, you're leaving performance on the table.

Today's modern web seems like a race to re-implement an OS on top of an existing OS, badly.
Traditional OOP/Imperative programming tends to encourage this "reinvention". Where the old guard goes? I think programmers age out when they see the same "trend" for the 3rd time and decide they need to get off the hamster wheel and go into management. GoF patterns make sense if your language is statically typed and OO and you don't have real data abstraction.

To be fair, most OOP practitioners don't even know what "data abstraction" means: this is what is meant by "it's better to have 100 functions that work on one datastructure than 10 functions that work on 10 different datastructure. The latter is OO, the former is FP.