skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How does your team write documentation? What tools do you use?
We're trying to get better at writing docs, so I thought I'd turn to you guys for help.

How does your team write documentation? What part of the documentation (e.g. architecture, processes, tooling) do you give the most attention to? What tools have you found helpful in improving the documentation your team writes?
Posting the links again (since HN doesn't allow links in text posts):

The book: https://www.manning.com/books/reactive-machine-learning-syst...
Chapter 1: https://manning-content.s3.amazonaws.com/download/9/f0caa1d-...
The Medium intro post: https://medium.com/data-engineering/the-reactive-machine-lea...
My site on this overall project: http://www.reactivemachinelearning.com/
Some materials from recent talks I've given on reactive machine learning: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/7038-lightning-talks-2 http://www.slideshare.net/jsmith54/collecting-ucertain-data-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBr34dTDQ88 http://www.slideshare.net/jsmith54/reactive-machine-learning...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xupl are available and have many language bindings
A Chilling Effect as Hong Kong's Missing Bookseller Cases Go Unresolved
First year, second semester we learned binary logic, system bus, how a CPU works, etc. I think it was seen as the foundation so you actually understand how a computer works.
Here's how User Experience Designers think and work
The issue of gun control is completely absent from the US debate. Guns are discussed in terms of a false dichotomy between laissez-faire or outright banning.

Contrary to the impression given in the US media, there are a lot of privately owned guns in Europe. Even in the UK, there are over 700,000 licensed gun owners. Germans can own almost anything that an American can, including handguns and so-called "assault rifles".

European countries require licenses for firearms. You have to pass tests, prove yourself to be of good character and demonstrate a legitimate purpose for gun ownership. Your guns need to be registered and stored in a safe place. Your license can be revoked if you do something reckless or criminal with a firearm.

The difference between crypto and a gun is that you can't actually kill someone with cryptography. A more reasonable comparison is with cars; that comparison shows the oddity of attitudes in the US. Few Americans would argue that you shouldn't need a driving license or that cars shouldn't be registered and insured. Few Americans see vehicle inspection as an affront to civil liberties.
> India is saying software patents are not novel enough to protect, and directing its patent examiners not to grant them

Or it may be saying Indian firms are not producing sufficiently novel software, so there is no net benefit to Indian society in granting them. It could be the majority of filers are foreign companies. Why protect inventions made by outsiders, who will only use it to tax local companies? This may sound far fetched, but historically most nations have gone this phase as they develop: Until they can produce state of the art technology indigenously, IP tends to hamper development, so IP laws tend to be weak. Once a nation starts becoming competitive in innovation, they tend to ratchet up their IP laws. There are studies about this, will try to find them.

(I've worked with the Indian software industry and still have close ties with it. I see even less innovation there than I see in the west. On the other hand, the startup scene is booming, so there's hope.)
I don't know. Corruption in Mexico is getting worse. I don't think it's going to work itself out.
This is how it sounds to me. I think it is naive to assume Mr. Gates' character is so one-dimensional. He is a critical thinker; I'm sure he realizes the dichotomy he presents is BS. He wants to protect his legacy.

Mr. Cook, on the other hand, I truly feel is using this issue for a little free (minus legal fees) publicity, and to tell the FBI not to make such a big, public stink if they want cooperation. Like a contract negotiation.

It's easy to believe in someone who says what we want to hear, but necessary to question their motivations.

Honne and tatemae, pure and simple.
It's a pain in the ass, for sure. On the other hand, it's a good filter for finding people you want to be close to and finding people you want to avoid at all costs, that is unless you want to be punished with tedious drama. At least for me, many of my family members fall into the latter category... which is tricky to negotiate...
Slightly OT but the history of DHL co-founder Larry Hillblom[1] makes for some interesting reading.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Hillblom
The "imagine 1000 women..." formulation definitely sounds easier to understand, but doctors do very poorly on it as well. Some numbers:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/17/statistical-literacy-am...

In practice things are not quite as dire as you'd expect, thanks to diagnostic guidelines written with input from people who know about conditional probability.
Thank you obulpathi and glad to hear this. Can you also take a look at our new docs here:

cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/

and let me know what you think? This is an iterative effort of course, so more changes to come. Thanks again!
Yup, a huge step up from SOAP APIs serving XML and RMI serving serialized Java objects ;-)
The actual commit:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/golang-checkins/r...

From what I recall reading about the change, it was believed it would allow them more flexibility in the frontend, and they greatly preferred to write the parser in Go instead of yacc.

Also, at this point, they felt this would also make it easier for others to contribute improvements to the project.
map(print, ["ok", "flat is better", "but", "the with statement", "is badass"])

;)
> And whenever they recommend treatment it's always good to ask "What happens if we don't do this? What happens if we just watch and wait?"

And then you don't do that and spend $1400 in vet bills to find out your bird had a tummy ache. Thanks overly worried girlfriend.
Hehe, "design center" of san francisco, aka just basically a bunch of overpriced furniture stores or other 'life-style' chains such as Bang and Olufsen :P
Power users have ublock installed and don't see any of this anyway.
The Next Generation of Boston Dynamics' ATLAS Robot
Wow, this is word-for-word how my brain works. I don't hear words when I read and I tend not to see pictures in my head despite being a very spatial person. This is really neat! Thanks for articulating this!

Whenever the book turns into a movie, my friends all say, "Yeah, that casting is exactly who I imagined." That just never happens to me. I don't have preconceived notions of what characters look like, even if I read their descriptions. But I'm very spatial and good with layouts and furniture. I keep thinking that because I'm spatial I should be visual but... not so much.

EDIT: Oh, almost forgot! Despite all that, I'm great with faces. If we've met before I'm going to recognize you. But I'm embarrassingly bad at names, forgetting them almost instantly if I don't concentrate for a long time.

On the other side of things I've got great relative pitch. If I can get the first note on the piano I can pretty much just play the rest of the melody. And, same thing, music is pretty finely textured for me when I concentrate.
The absence of parked cars in all but one of these photos is pretty striking.
One of my friends at uni wrote a Z80 emulator/assembler in PDP-10 assembler as a hobby project - and he was studying chemistry, not CS...

I don't understand why a basic understanding of CPU architectures isn't a CS fundamental everywhere.

Even if you have no interest in emulating a CPU or an OS, you really do need to know what registers are, how caches work, what interrupts do, and how basic IO happens.

At the very least it's a practical demonstration of one particular kind of VM, and - if you want to - you can generalise from that to VMs of your own design.

For web apps, not understanding these things can get expensive. Cycles, even cloud cycles, aren't free, and if you take zero interest in optimisation and efficiency you're literally throwing money away.
The distinction in legal approach between FanDuel and Uber is kind of interesting here.

Uber disrupted a heavily regulated market, shot first, asked questions later, and dealt with the legal blows as part of their strategy.

From what FanDuel's CEO is saying, it really sounds like if the Daily Fantasy companies didn't burn money in their massive marketing campaigns this fall, they'd probably still being going more or less unnoticed by legislators/state attorney generals.
Crackdown on Hong Kong booksellers reflects the deep divides in China
> As you said, the sauce is secret. I think the question of whether Qualcomm should be permitted to keep the sauce secret and how much the law should help or hinder this secrecy is worthy of at lease some debate.

This is going in circles. You cannot patent something without disclosing it. So, either Qualcomm has a patent, and it isn't secret, or they don't have a patent (nor can they ever, after 18 months) and the argument is moot.
Warren Buffett refers to a moat. Same idea in that you have a defensible advantage.
Ahh yes exactly! I have never seen this before. Thanks for sharing.
I share your experience (lacking any inner voice), except when I'm staging words to be spoken (or written as a conversation). I'm a native English speaker, and I never remember having an inner voice. Until reading a page linked here, I had thought I had mental imagery, but it sounds like I don't have that as others do, either.
I know this is probably covered in day-to-day conversations with founders at YC, and this email is about raising funds... but, I'm astounded there is not a single word in here about building a business to be profitable, or to "polish up the business plan" ready for investors to review.

Or put another way - with all the issues documented (and probably over-blown) in the media regarding the current fund raising climate, is it truly good advice to just give a suggestion to "3) You should raise enough money to get to your next significant milestone.".

Surely developing the business case and reaching profitability should rate a mention somewhere when it comes to giving out fund raising advice, particularly when this is being released publicly for budding entrepreneurs not part of YC? And even more importantly because investors will be motivated to use this current climate as an excuse to negotiate harder than usual and get more stock for less money?
The book `Just get out of the way' (http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=51...) addresses this topic. One point the author makes is that honest and competent government officials are one of the most scarce and valuable resources for a developing country, and thus institutions and laws should be designed to lighten their workload.

One example are insolvency laws.

In most countries, there are three options: creditors and debtors reach an agreement. Liquidation. And Administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administration_(law)) ordered by court.

Administration is complicated, and requires complicated laws and competent and honest officials to administer the laws. So countries, especially poor ones, should not offer this alternative.

If the company is worth more alive than dead, creditors and debtors will come to an agreement. (Especially if you remove the alternative of administration, that gives the debtor an out, rendering the creditors threats toothless.)
Apple will argue that the FBI's court order violates its free speech rights
Sysdig makes me giddy like dtrace used to.

I also sometimes feel a bit ... challenged ... by translating the questions I have (e.g. why did this arbitrary program start using a lot of memory and then OOM) into actual sysdig chisel invocations, but I'm learning slowly but surely. This command line spectrogram looks like a really nice addition to the existing toolset!
> Bet my team of PhDs would come to the same solution.

What is missed here is they might of come up with a better solution, but due to the risk of a lawsuit they never even try.
Oh, I wouldn't call this emu fast... but its still faster than a lot of smartphones I encounter
Giant GPS doodles mapped out by Victoria cyclist
No idea whatsoever. Maybe merge Spotify into Google Fiber and include it as part of a content offering?
Surface your knowledge to become better at explaining things
Absolutely, we use it especially because our servers are linux and our personal machines are mac. Most of our app is not containerized but sidomo helps us make the 'fiddly bits' (e.g., ffmpeg) super portable.
Meh. It's like saying that the fundamentals of film-making are writing and acting -- except writers and actors are nothing without an actual camera, and if you don't know how to place the camera and how to cut film produced by such camera, you will never get a film done. Cameras change, but you will never have a camera that miraculously materializes in all the right places to take exactly the shots you imagined. In the same way, some things will never change on the hardware side: you will always have inputs, outputs, memory, storage, human interfaces, power management, booting and so on.
Wow, you're not kidding. It didn't even stop when he died.
Do I have the record for detachments? ;-)

I love you.
Hackathon on Network Automation
Corruption in the US seems to be getting worse too. Also other first world countries.
In the early days of train travel (1840s), they quickly realised that the first class passengers arrived no faster than the cheaper passengers, somthey did the only sensible thing. They took the roof and Windows off the third class carriages and made you share them with cattle.

This way people paid extra to avoid the weather and cow shit

There is a hard upper limit to how good flying in a tin can at 35,000 feet can be made (1)

If airlines could strap economy class passengers to the wings they would

(1) actually an ad exec made an excellent point in a ted talk - instead of spending 4bn on reducing the time the high speed train went from London to Paris, spend 2bn on half naked super models handing out free champagne and no one will care how long the journey is. This is of course what airline stewardesses were supposed to be before all those pesky lawsuits.
Clash Royale game apps
Works really well here: https://audio-analysis-application-starter-kit.mybluemix.net...
Plenty of people are starting software businesses without taking outside funding.

I imagine the majority of Show HN posts are of that variety.
I really appreciate the level-headed discussion in this thread so far, especially the comment I'm replying to.

It's a stark contrast to the CFRG mailing list. (At least, so far, no one has tried to derail discussion here with "hey check out my custom cipher it's soooo secure but you need to compress the data before encrypting it or else you can observe a repeated structure out of it".)

I like 25519's school of thought. If you use the smallest possible value for a given performance/security goal, there's less room for conspiracy theory (provided the person making the theory understands what's even going on).
Why must everything be a monopoly? The biggest ecosystems of wealth has been created around open source software. Email. The Web. Linux. Webkit. Git. MySQL. NGinX. Wordpress. Wikimedia. You can build something for the world without capturing 100% of the value that results, and still have a billion dollar company. Or several, if they all have a first mover advantage. Once you have a huge audience on a platform you built, the subsequent investments can be seriously de-risked.
{Random advice from the internet}

My first thought is to wonder why someone would want to be in a space where an arms race against people devoted to child porn was both necessary and constant. Particularly when that space wasn't providing capital sufficient to retain a lawyer.

My gut tells me that as a matter of will, it's going to be hard to keep this class of activity from reoccurring regardless of how this incident works out and that scaling the service will scale the headaches of monitoring and policing user behavior along with it. Personally, I'd rather deal with users I liked. YMMV.

Good luck.
Is There Life After Parse? – Codementor
Instead of crying over spilled milk (or Parse code), let’s look at some alternatives!
http://bit.ly/1S02k6p
The war for tech talent escalates
> It's a very interesting question.

Thank you. The multiple downvoters I got appear to believe otherwise.

> I guess I'm OK with restrictions on ANFO in the same way I'm OK with our (US) current restrictions on Browning .50 machine guns.

That is where I think the comparison between crypto and guns breaks down. You're okay with restrictions on more powerful weapons - are you okay with restrictions on civilian use of more powerful crypto?

No, I don't think you are. I am not. The use cases and threat models are very different. For example, I think we are under frequent though usually irregular attack by people who want to acquire "secrets", which includes credit card and blackmail information but also more prosaic marketing information and the more Orwellian large-scale government data mining.

I think it's more appropriate to compare crypto to another type of munition - personal armor. (The United States Munitions List has the category Personal Protective Equipment. This includes "Body armor providing a protection level equal to or greater than NIJ Type IV".)

Yes, some people want to make access to armor more difficult, because it it used sometimes when committing a crime ("in the wrong hands, the same tech can be used for great harm").

But unlike the physical world, on the internet we face attacks every day. If there were random shootings in everyone's normal life then there wouldn't be the call to get rid of personal armor. Moreover, we face increasingly powerful attacks on crypto, and need to have mechanisms which can keep secrets against decades of future improvements.

> cow poop -- the fertilizer component of a homemade ANFO bomb

Whoever you heard that from was mistaken. The fertilizer component was ammonium nitrate fertilizer, not cow poop.

> It's a complicated issue. What do you think?

My primary interest is in highlighting how the argument you made doesn't really support your thesis.

As for my own beliefs on the topic, and bearing in mind that you wrote "I have zero desire to re-enact the same old gun rights vs gun control Internet flame war yet again.", I think the distinctively American views[1] for gun ownership are rooted in the US history of Native American genocide and Black slavery, and are an expression of a form of white male power and machismo. I see no reason to discuss it further as this pigeonhole is well known.

[1] By 'distinctively American' I mean to exclude the arguments one might hear in, say, Sweden for having a gun; eg, hunting and the fun hobby of target shooting.
Linux from Scratch has instructions for building your own custom Linux
Honestly I would not give much important to Indian Patent Office. It can be appealed in High Court and Supreme Court which may take our lifetimes to arrive at any conclusion
Well, this is simply wrong as:

"The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
you can! I found it difficult to work with and decided to make something new after reading this post: http://blog.bordage.pro/avoid-docker-py/
It's a few years old but I think docker-py still needs some love for it to really shine.
Show HN: Pages per Day
I wasn't sure if I should interpret it as a variation of the idiom "making my head spin", or as a disapproving "shaking my head”.
So does this means we can create ISOs of Ubuntu etc with all the media codecs pre-installed and distribute them freely in India ?
I like to spend 15 minutes out of my work day reading technical books. To encourage this habit I like to see when I'll finish a book (eg in 2 weeks time) - it's amazing how quickly you can get through a book if you spend just 15 minutes per day on it.

I used to do this calculation by hand but I though it would be fun to see visually.
So I wrote an app to show me when I'll finish.

(This was also an exercise in learning Swift and going through the learning process of publishing an app.)

You can specify which days of the week you read and it will take that into account when doing it's calculations.

For example, I read technical books at work. So I only read those on weekdays. Given I spend 15 minutes per day reading a tech book and read about 15 pages each time (depending on the book of course), I can now see when I'll finish.

Does anyone else do something like this to motivate their reading?
Sex Slave Escapes in Front of Pizza Guy
Billing support is provided for free to all customers. If you had trouble with a particular ticket, please feel free to ping me.

Disclaimer: I work in Cloud Support.
Not gonna lie - kinda felt bad for it.
Show HN: Generalized Suffix Tree visualization using d3js
The app seems to like physics =) https://audio-analysis-application-starter-kit.mybluemix.net...
Wring.io, 0.3 released
What are some good open-source alternatives to Slack and why don't people use them?
Yes. Patents are probably a detriment to the economy. But like so many other economic rents, the benefits are concentrated, while the costs are spread out.
Does anyone known if it's walking using zero moment point like asimo? I thought they were beyond that?

It doesn't seem to have a very natural gait. Very uncanny valley.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_moment_point
A better question is, "How do you spend $1 billion on software and succeed?" The fundamental problem isn't the quality of your developers, it's the fact that you have to coordinate multiple environments composed of mutually-irreconcilable workflow and processes, legacy systems never designed to talk to anything, and real-world problems that aren't amenable to solutions at scale. Big Bang projects are almost impossible to get off the launchpad in a single piece, so can we learn from the ones that actually make it to orbit? Or is there an inverse Tolstoy effect here -- every failed project is alike, but every successful project is successful in its own way?
Scalr Launches Public Beta Version of Its Cloud Management Platform API
Graphically it was so-so. But the game play itself was just not fun. The worst part of it was the time limit was basically the number of "steps" the character moved, and you had to collect these "communicator" parts that were buried randomly in pits and then use some kind of crappy "levitation" move to get out. And that took up extra energy as well so it cut into your time limit to find the next communicator piece.

Never beat it. Got extremely annoyed/bored with it after a short time. There were games with much worse graphics and sound that had a much better gameplay overall.
... is still bad? /grammarnazi
Oracle ERP is just as bad. At $job-2 they spend $500m and 5 years to get zero modules of Oracle Retail installed and eventually decided to just continue on with the mainframe legacy systems.

The latest Software Engineering Radio has an excellent discussion of the topic of large scale IT failure aka black swans: http://www.se-radio.net/2016/02/se-radio-epislode-250-jurgen...
Oh, the problem is that Wolfram portraits his book as the ultimate breakthrough, even though at bests its an entertaining pop-sci tome.

See http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0206089

Also funny, from the same author:

> “The impact of NKS on all the areas of computer science and physics I’m familiar with has been basically zero,” he says. “As far as I can tell, the main impact is that people now sometimes use the adjective ‘Wolframian’ to describe breathtaking claims for the trivial or well-known.” [Martin] Davis offers a sunnier take: “The book has a lot of beautiful pictures.”