skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm pushing for toggles on my team, haven't made a single feature branch in this repo resulting in no merge conflicts (yay).

Sofar I'm the only one regularly doing it without feature branches. Running with the idea that just because you can branch cheap doesn't mean you should. Of course toggles are technical debt to be managed, but so are branches.

I've found good practice has been mentioning which toggles are available on the README with their defaults (could be generated)... they should be tracked and removed ASAP. I read a newer article that breaks them down into categories http://www.infoq.com/news/2016/02/featuretoggles. Toggles over branches are showing value as we run different variants on staging without having to redeploy different builds, but instead changing a launch variable. It's especially clear with 2+ WIP features. We're using environ with Clojure which doesn't have any fancy runtime toggling, but that'd be another thing to look at.
Like I said, that will help with the easy to diagnose stuff. What about the complex problems, that don't show up on a scanner.

For example, the equipment used to calibrate your air conditioning system. Its more complicated then fill to the manufacturer spec. Newer machines will run the air with a temperature probe, and modify the amount of freon to get an optimal amount.
How often does the fencing data change? If it's infrequent I wonder if you could load the data on start up and simply restart nodes to refresh the data. That would avoid a mutex lock entirely.

However, a mutex lock/unlock should take <100ns. It doesn't seem like that should be a bottleneck. It'd be interesting to hear more about the data, requirements, and response times (median, 90%, etc).
But guys, this is what is being proved. Stop. Don't. Come back.
How we hack social science by doing polls
We're talking about a company with $200 billion in cash lying around. They could build a few large nuclear plants without making a significant dent in that pile of money.
Your vote of confidence is overwhelming. ;)
It more or less is, assuming you are acting under the color of law it is criminal (1). The trick is having this law be actually enforced.

(1) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/242
And because we have a three branches of government, it is up to the courts to make sure that the bar is set very high...
I'll agree that the featured apps are badly designed (overly reskinned), but I think they have been chosen because they are well known open source applications and also because of the rich set of controls used.
The title is misleading/wrong. From the article:

> “[Waze] includes a specific default setting that prevents routes through areas which are marked as dangerous or prohibited for Israelis to drive through,” Waze wrote in the AFP statement. “In this case, the setting was disabled. In addition, the driver deviated from the suggested route and, as a result, entered the prohibited area.”

Previous discussion, from another source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11204145 (21 points, 4 hours ago, 22 comments)
Wtf is a “Cognitive App”
It's interesting that they're doing a spatial database without using a 2D spatial data structure. MySQL and PostGres both have data structures for this. But maybe they don't have that many geofences per city.

They have an N readers, one writer problem. It's possible to do that without blocking the readers. There was a YC article on a lockless solution to that yesterday. This is an easier problem. Each city's geofences can be updated by making a copy, updating the copy, and atomically replacing the single reference to the copy. Any searches still running on the old copy continue to run on the old copy. Eventually, the GC deletes the old copy.
Or, rather, it could be outright a web page, capable of being integrated to whatever repo web tool you're using.
Natural Language Processing- Senior Developers
About Kore

Kore’s enterprise-grade messaging platform and comprehensive bot network streamlines business workflows and communications with a single message-based interface. Kore’s advanced bots integrate directly with the apps and services users rely on, allowing them to receive updates, perform tasks, and generate reports as easily as they message their coworkers. What’s more, users can create customizable spaces where they can discuss projects, share files, and more. Lastly, Kore gives IT admins peace of mind with industry leading administrative and security features that comply with regulatory mandates.

The Role:

We are looking for senior developers who will work with the Product management group developing products as services in NLP. This position will report to the Director of Natural Language Strategy at Kore.

Qualifications:
5 plus years of development experience in C and C++
MS/Phd OR Compelling real world experience related to machine learning OR Artificial intelligence related to Natural language processing and or Computational linguistics
Experience with planning technology a plus(Particularly HTN)
Work experience with a Computer software company developing new generation products in the areas of mobility, SAAS, cloud etc are an added advantage.

Please send your resumes to bharat.raju@kore.com

Our Website: www.kore.com
A company selling an at-home email server is spamming me via GitHub
I can't use this. It gets stuck on step 4 of the tour; clicking "Next" doesn't do anything, and everything but the name and email field is greyed out.
In my last job, my whole team was, with the exception of one Englishman, literally people who moved from all over the world (Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa) to London. They were all quite happy with it, too.
Or actually the truth is the exact opposite. Javascript is exploding right now.
Um, no. Thank you. There are reasons for only using OSS software that are both philosophical and pragmatic.

Literally in the last three days I've had tools that were broken in Ubuntu but working on master or had fixes in pull requests.

Plex is the only piece of closed source software that I will voluntarily use on my non-mobile computers.
Heh. This reminds me of the mystery in the movie The Burbs.
And a... well, I'm not sure how to describe this promo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE1ImXs2LnI
Hey guys,

we’ve developed an app that lets you vote in polls on topics like ethics, politics, sex, sports and others. After you respond you see how other people voted.

Our plan is to give people the right feedback on what makes their opinions and values unique, and how they compare with other players. Ideally, it’ll work as a kind of personality test.

All studies are published online, and we can use this data to predict trends in society and consumer behavior.

What do you think about this project?
On which topics do you would like to see polls?
Another error tracking system for your list: https://bugsnag.com/

It has been rock solid for us with no event limits and cheap pricing.

(not an employee, just a fan)
Jesus, I just cringed to death.
I thought all HN readers also read Dilbert :-)
> or clone a directed graph?

I have had some need for this, while implementing tool for populating our database with test data :) But I have to admit that I went out of my way to snag that task, because I really wanted to utilize a non-trivial graphing algorithm one-day at my work.
We're using React/Redux to replace our Angular front end to MVC WebAPI. But we're also slowly replacing our MVC WebAPI backend to Node.js/Express. AD, LDAP, Tedious-Pooling, etc make it work perfectly in our MS environment.
Seconding this. Websites shouldn't push a preference like that on users.
Try and struggle through this please

http://martinfowler.com/articles/bothersome-privacy.html

Or read the google-translated version into Portuguese

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=pt&js=y&pr...

It explains very well why this is no trivial issue to Americans nor to tech people.

Also, your drugs should be legalized or decriminalized, anyway. It would put all the bad guys out of business and bring the entire drug market back within regulation. Portugal did it and it's considered a success, why can't Brazil?
SourceTree Design – what’s next?
A rolling road is another term for a chassis dynamometer.
I don't think they are tractable. They break the requirements.
Depends... Some entry level jobs kind of breed contemptuous workers. So unless they have great training, such as Starbucks or any Japanese store in Japan, you may want to actually avoid interacting with people.

And then you have the places where the servers think they're too good. That what they do is craftsmanship and artisan.
So you're basically just arguing that their webpage doesn't have a good layout. If you want to dismiss the product because of that, that's your choice, but I wish people would keep complaints about website design to themselves. They're so boring. I come to HN to read insightful commentary about articles and projects, and complaints about the websites themselves just make me roll my eyes.
"These ESPs can't exist with poor desirability"

I think you meant deliverability. But maybe we should all switch to calling it desirability.
Having worked with feature flags "at scale" (whatever that means :), here's some advice that I've learned from working with hundreds of developers across tens of teams and given to others. I'm leaving out experimental analysis (A/B testing, multi-armed bandit) because it just adds "...but consider how this affects your metrics".

* Always be developing against the current running features. No brainer.
* Design things so that they integrate feature flags, not work around them. This usually means pushing feature flag determination to more generic/common code.
* Separate backend/frontend changes into separate feature flags when possible. Turn on backend changes early and often to better measure your feature's impact.
* Give individual features their own flag, but also have a global flag that manages the entire experience. This makes it easier to manage your gradual dial up as well as shut off problematic features that would otherwise mess up the launch.
* Be diligent about removing feature flags once they're turned on. Schedule it into sprint time, reward teams that remove them, make it a management mandate, whatever. Just get rid of them once they're no longer needed.
* Invest in monitoring around your services that (ideally) can correlate failures with features. you should turn on features over the course of a few hours/days to mitigate customer impact in the event of failures and gain data about performance at 50/50.

I think the answer to your specific question of "testing every combination" is that you can't, easily. But by keeping the number of feature flags that are inactive low (< 150 is very liberal) for a given service, having everyone develop against the current running features + dev overrides, and using gradual dial up with integrated monitoring to catch poor interactions when the impact is small, you'll have mitigated a lot of your concerns.
What you mention are decisions, not policies. The latter is a decision to end a catastrophic policy, which itself contradicts your claim that such policies can work.
Thank you for sharing this. If you are open to some constructive feedback, I'd say - The best help that Elixir can get at this moment is endorsements / detailed-examples from large and respected companies. That will help a lot of developers convince themselves and their teams that Elixir is ready to be considered seriously. So, although the brief mention (and some data) that Pinterest is using Elixir for Pinterest API and Ads API was helpful, more details about how Pinterest is using it and more details about what benefits it's getting because of that would help Elixir and its future users a lot!
I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts on deploying feature branches to production before merging them. I've generally followed more of a git-flow approach [1]. This seems to have the advantage that multiple feature branches can be grouped and deployed together - thus, avoiding the problem in the article of the deploy queue becoming a bottle neck.

[1] http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/#crea...
NoRedInk | San Francisco, CA (or REMOTE for Sr., up to 6h difference from Pacific)

Full stack rails engineer, backend / infrastructure engineers and frontend engineers wanted to make sure that grammer is taught good. Every one's revolutioneyesing educaton but while some student's cant even right the write words.
Then there was NoRedInk.

NoRedInk helps students quickly improve their grammar and writing skills. We've got a small, technically excellent engineering team.

We're gradually porting all of our React.js and Flux code to Elm, and are really active on the Elm community.

On the backend, we use Rails and MySQL, and manage our AWS deployments using Chef / Opsworks.

Also we hired Evan Czaplicki, Elm's creator, to work on open source with us. http://tech.noredink.com/post/136615783598/welcome-evan

Join us as engineer #13, and improve how grammar is taught.

https://www.noredink.com/jobs

PS. We also really encourage open source and technical experimentation here - check out this static site generator built with Elm http://tech.noredink.com/post/140291903568/static-site-gener...
Simple UI Fixes to Set Conversion Rates on Fire
(The canonical version says something like "The information is generally correct, but subject to four adjustments".)
Cool, that person's math an mine are the same! :)

He does say, "That price does not include windows, door, insulation or interior furnishings. In place of a brick fireplace I have recommended a recycled steel barrel stove and stove kit from Vogelzang that would be more efficient."

Those things he is excluding will easily double the price. A wood stove costs thousands, maybe hundreds used. 8 sqft of insulation is $50. Windows are $200 each. A door the same or more. And also, 10'x15' isn't really viable for a home, even for one person, much less a family that wants a shower in the bathroom.

We also have building codes now that require a functional kitchen and bathroom which add significantly to the price of a livable structure the government won't tear down.

I think bare minimum costs to build a livable structure today, would be in the $50,000 range and the mortgage on that would be $300 per month, which would fit within my proposed living stipend of $2,000 per month per family of 4.
That article includes a link to an official Portuguese translation, which is still available at

http://lixo.org/blog/2013/08/05/privacidade-protege-pessoas-...
I've had good results with them. We never had more than 5-7 flags at any given time. We would flag things by environment (dev/staging/prod) and/or by user (everyone/beta users/internal team).

Flags were there because of two main reasons:

* Our app was deployed more frequently than a service we depended on (e.g. every commit for app, nightly for service in staging, every 2 weeks for service in prod, etc)

* We wanted to have it rolled out to a subset of users for testing

We did not run into exponential trees of combinations because we rarely had two different flags interacting. Maybe it was a happy accident of trying to make work parallelizable or maybe because our feature flags never lasted more than a month or so.

The code was intentionally dumb and the flags were stored directly in the source code (not in a database table or another config file or something). Simple, stupid calls to `FeatureFlipper.isFooReportEnabled()`. We did not test this class because each method was a simple boolean check that the current user appeared in a list or ENV != prod.

We stubbed out `FeatureFlipper` when using it throughout the app. Stub the feature to be enabled, check behavior. Repeat for disabled.

Most of the features were simply hidden at the view level. For users, if there is no button, it doesnt exist. We didn't particularly care if the user would "guess" the url of a feature flagged page -- not worth the effort.

Doing a "full rollout" of the feature was a non-event. Just delete the method on FeatureFlipper and go fix the compile errors :)
Discrete Analysis (arXiv overlay journal) has been launched
This was on the BBC last night:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03l61pn
Sometimes a worse O algo is way better in real life, due to things such as memory alignment and page size. The more time you spend writing high performance code, the more you learn that the kind of algorithm analysis you learn in school is crap in the real world. If my O(N^2) also is 3 lines and smoking in real benchmarks your 600 line O(n log n) algo, guess which one I am using?
What do you use to pay rent? That's the only use I still have for them, but landlords don't tend to take credit cards, and a check is easier than an envelope of cash.
Wouldn't surprise me, it's had lots of exposure with all the data leaks. I last looked at passwords sometime in 2010 off the back of the infamous "use bcrypt" post.

Just skimmed the WP ticket, what a horrible amount of effort to cover an edge case of people regressing to a 4 years past dead PHP version.
Fast Ordered Collections for Swift Using In-Memory B-Trees
And of course "German Democratic Republic", "Democratic Republic of Vietnam", "Democratic Republic of the Congo", and "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_republic
The advantages are quite tangible, apparently (the best kind of argument, frankly). To excerpt some metrics from that link:

"So, we like Elixir and have seen some pretty big wins with it. The system that manages rate limits for both the Pinterest API and Ads API is built in Elixir. Its 50 percent response time is around 500 microseconds with a 90 percent response time of 800 microseconds. Yes, microseconds (millionths of a second). ...We’ve also seen an improvement in code clarity. We’re converting our notifications system from Java to Elixir. The Java version used an Actor system and weighed in at around 10,000 lines of code. The new Elixir system has shrunk this to around 1000 lines. The Elixir based system is also faster and more consistent than the Java one and runs on half the number of servers."

I'm not the kind of person to regularly use the exclamation, but I couldn't help saying "holy shit!" aloud when I first read that.
Just getting done with a pretty significant realtime plotting app using CMake, Qt 5.5 and QWT. I have to say, it's been a mostly painless, pretty pleasurable experience. The Stylesheets CAN be a huge pain though. If you get a good and organized architecture down, it is by far the best method to style a desktop app I've ever used. Especially if you utilize QObject properties!
In particular, you really want a 3-way merge tool (which compares yours and theirs to the common ancestor) for resolving conflicts. Meld didn't used to have this, but it looks like it does now. FWIW, on OS X you can also configure git to use opendiff (which opens FileMerge). It does the job pretty well.

Source: my day job used to involve daily merging of Chromium with Rockmelt and I probably evaluated every merge tool that existed at the time.

Tip: git config --global merge.conflictstyle=diff3
> shill for a particular political stance

Government agencies lobby for what they want (restrictions on speech, limits on privacy, back doors into crypto), but we technical people should stick to technical discussion only?

A technical report should never discuss what government policy caused the bug, political decisions that could have avoided it, and their effect on society?

By the way (to save a click), the political stance is this (quoted from the article):

"Today, some policy makers are calling for new restrictions on the design of cryptography in order to prevent law enforcement from “going dark.” While we believe that advocates of such backdoors are acting out of a good faith desire to protect their countries, history’s technical lesson is clear: weakening cryptography carries enormous risk to all of our security."
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11204145 (21 points, 4 hours ago, 22 comments)
To apply visit the HR-written job posting here: https://partners.taleo.net/careersection/ghc/jobdetail.ftl?j...

Please feel free to contact me, Patrick Dillon, at pddillon@partners.org.
The very short interview with Clifford Cocks is good too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwNv0b-2AcU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-xEiOvXux4

"...I'm allowed to think about things outside work, but not allowed to put anything down on paper"
Yep, I do not get that. Indexing by city first or another single dimensional key (quadkey/geohash) and having an rtree of your geometries inside of that is simple enough. Maybe if they're dealing w/ < 100 geometries per city it would be negligible but I'd assume NYC has more than that.

Also don't know why they chose raycasting over winding number.

I've been working on geo stuff in golang and building the geometry libraries for spatial indexing was easy enough to do in my spare time, so I don't know why they couldn't at least try.
Nfsync – watch local files for changes and synchronize with a remote server
Not strange at all. Getting to know a tool and building muscle memory is also an investment you don't want to waste.
Hahaha, that was amazing. It's always the problem here, nobody can just read and shut up. Everyone thinks starting a startup makes them the smartest guys in the room.

I told my friend: "Hacker News: The place where people can call bullshit to someone as smart as Stephen Hawking..."
Meyrin? Oh, hey, I know that lake. I've been to Lausanne... It didn't even occur to me to try to visit the LHC on the way... d'oh!
Journal Website: http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/

Previous HN thread about the initial journal announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10197152
How  Great Founders Inspire Investors
What's My Magical UX Toolbox?
Huge influence? It's his paper, his invention and this price without him is again a huge fuckup.
But he should be used to that in the meantime.
I primarily use Django/Django Rest Framework as the back end so web-sockets are a pain right now. I'm looking forward to when Andrew Godwin's channel work gets into Django proper where socket.io would make a lot of sense. Unless I'm missing something and socket.io does ajax requests these days? I haven't used it in quite some time.
Malformed private keys lead to heap corruption in OpenSSL's b2i_PVK_bio
I wrote this application last night after getting tired of editing homework files locally and having to SFTP them to our school server. Ask me any questions!
Microsoft has been doing IoT before it was called IoT
BaseCase | Berlin, Germany | Software Engineer | http://basecase.com | Remote, Visa

Our primary product is a sophisticated web application which allows non-developers create interactive presentations.

We're looking for talented front-end and back-end developers.

Our technology stack is Javascript / jQuery / HTML5 on the front-end, and Python / MySQL on the back-end. But you don't need experience in our stack - we know a good developer can learn on the job. You can apply here:

-) https://basecasecareers.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0hffr

Currently our biggest 'gap' is on the front-end, so I'd like to particularly encourage Javascript/UI/UX experts to apply.

We're also looking for OpenERP / Odoo developers, to ensure our smooth operations:

-) https://basecasecareers.recruiterbox.com/jobs/fk0hiy9/

We can support remote workers, and are willing to assist in obtaining a work visa for Germany if required.

We have been profitable for several years, so we can offer very competitive salaries, with stock options.

Some relevant background videos:

-) http://basecase.com/company/careers

-) http://basecase.com/platform/video/

Cheers,

Diarmuid Glynn / CTO
This article is encouraging people to use deep learning. It's for people who are scared to try it, not scared of it.