skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to persuade a traditional Java company to use Node.js
I realise this is a very subjective topic but IMO node.js from a development point of view, is much faster to market for a traditional web app than a Java application.

There's been many blogs and topics over the last few years espousing why it's a more productive environment to work in. I'm sure Amazon and possibly Ebay 3 or so years ago officially blogged the benefits of using node.js for prototyping applications in the sense of agile development. I can't remember exactly but I think Amazon wrote how they were able to reduce their development resource requirements to 10% of what was needed previously by Java developers (for a particular app they wrote), using the same developers after they were retrained.

I love the fact that I can write isomorphic applications and debug them both front and back end in the same environment. For many Java/C# etc developers this loose typing and functional type programming is alien to them but IMO, developers once they understand the language semantics, should be able to cope with that easily.
I'd like any opinions from others who've worked in the same legacy environment and moved to node.js to discuss the pro's and cons.

For me, there are a few cons. Moving to a weakly/loosely typed language. No precompilation. Functional/callback design. An ever changing world of ECMA compliance. Lack of tooling.
I can argue all day the opposite of those cons (e.g. typescript) but one of the issues I struggle to defend is the churn rate in any libraries you depend on.
I wholly support express.js becoming the standardised web framework API in the node.js foundation, however there's huge churn in the number of required libraries you may depend on and which inexperienced devs may add without researching their suitability or how stable they are.

NPM is great but those modules might be useless in 6 month, a year or later depending on how they're supported.
Similar: "How I fixed a bug in Atom".

http://davidvgalbraith.com/how-i-fixed-atom/

HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10993470
That reminded me the fun I had at uni (some time ago..) trying to exploit a buffer overflow vulnerability of an ftp server... for the security class...
They are pricing themselves out of the market for traffic-intensive small-fish operations that way though.
Goodness you make me feel old. Especially when none of your use cases represent anything new or revolutionary. This current round of vr tech is nothing more than the glorious output of continuous iteration and technological progress. Literally every one of the things you mention had been true for decades.

It's making a longer sword not inventing firearms.
I agree. I just wished there were more nuggets of encouragement in this sea of criticism.
Interesting data. Thanks!

It's obvious that I had no idea about costs. I honestly thought it would be much more expensive.
I meant exclusive or. I was getting at the arrogance: "Out of all the AI people, only the 5 of us talk to each other. There must be something wrong with the whole field, because they can't see how right we are!"

The arrogance - that "we" clearly are right, so "they" clearly must be wrong - grates on me. Minsky may in fact be right, but he should at least have the humility to see that, in a difference of opinion between the few and the many, it is at least possible that the many are right...
Here is a better approach for those N/A apps.

Try the app. Talk to the developer.

Template mail should not exist.
I think you're unfairly abridging the e-mail that was sent. I think a more representative abridged e-mail would be:

> Hey, we noticed you have special access, and we are trying to clean those up. You should either use the regular API with rate limits or our commercial offerings. Your special access will be terminated on Thursday, April 21st. Let me know if you have any questions.

On receiving an e-mail of that nature, I would very likely let my audience know that I was shutting down the service on Thursday, April 21st just as the blog post author did.

I would not assume "Let me know if you have questions" meant "Let me know if you'd like to clarify your situation and request an exemption from this policy". I would assume it meant I could inquire about the details and process of the shutdown, or ask questions about the Gnip service or other options that they discussed in the e-mail.
Indeed. I tell would-be founders exactly this. I bootstrapped my company for quite some time before successfully courting investors, and this was only possible because being an engineer pays well enough to build a solid savings in advance. While on one hand I take pride in having had the willpower to make things work, this isn't a satisfying solution for entrepreneurship in general.
Having used and developed with XMPP day in and out for the past 9 years I'd have to agree with the sentiments towards XMPP being on life support.

It's a real damn shame because XMPP is pretty awesome. It's open for one, can be made super secure with OTR (client-2-client encrypted chats), has numerous protocols and implementations for stuff as diverse as message archiving, Audio/Video signalling, file transfer, chat (of course), presence and an absolute boat load of other stuff:
http://xmpp.org/extensions/index.html.

There are two big issues as far as I can see with XMPP which really hurt it:

1. XMPP was incredibly poor at handling high latency, intermittent network connections (like cellular). Connections would time out, reconnections would take ages and all in all it really hammered battery life. As a consequence mobile app developers moved very quickly onto REST/JSON (yes there was XEP-0198 - Stream Management - but implementations of it were thin on the ground and even then it wasn't perfect).

2. There just isn't any interest amongst new developers or newer projects at least in an XML based chat protocol when REST/JSON is so attractive. Anyone who has had to write a god damned XML parser knows what I'm talking about.

Things are a whole lot better now. XMPP has fixed a lot of session and battery life issues since then but to be honest I'm just not feeling it when I go to XMPP meetups. Feel like I'm attending a wake for an old friend and it really is sad because if there was ever gonna be one protocol to rule them all XMPP was far and away the best candidate.

Who knows, a couple years from now large companies and governments might finally wake up to the fact that they have 100 different sucky (probably) REST based APIs amongst all their apps which are not remotely compatible and offer poor archiving and retrieval (like they did in the 90s when they forced Microsoft to open up their Office document format). XMPP might come to the fore again then (wouldn't put money on it though). More likely something similar (and not XML based) will take its place.

It's anyone's guess really, suffice to say the present situation does feel like a complete and utter mess and will really start biting us in the ass when compliance asks 'how do I archive/retrieve this pot pourri of data'.
Inspiring stuff!

What's your take on Jira? How is Zube different from others?
The engineer time to reimplement the other AWS services you're using may be substantially more than the $54k difference in bandwidth costs.
>> So I don't think Google solely acts in its own short term financial interests.

I think what your experience shows is that on the one hand individuals within
Google (or any big corp) can and do align their own personal interest with that
of the corp and on the other hand that the corp can benefit the community as
long as it is making profit and serving its own purposes. Nothing surprising
there.

As to releasing its tools, here's my Thought for the Day: There's no such thing
as a free lunch and the only people who pretend there is are the ones who want
to steal your lunch money. Google releases its tools when it is in the interest
of Google to do so, not when it's in the interest of anyone else. Yes, they're
doing better now than in the past in open-sourcing stuff and I can't know what's
on their mind. But I can tell that it doesn't hurt them to get people adopting
their tech even as Google itself develops it further and further to something
that can only be used by a corp with Google's resources. In short, I'm pretty
sure that their friendly offer of, frex, TensorFlow is just some trick to get
people roped in to their technology, in the same way that other corps have tried
to do before- except that they also made you pay for the privilege.

^
That's Google. They have put their cost levels somewhat below Amazon's. Maybe they don't see the need to be 5-10x cheaper than the market leader in traffic costs even if they could...
I've never actually used browser-side require, so have no idea how it works --- I just saw a boot.amd.js file.

Also, did I say browserify? I meant vulcanize.
But then once you do grant it you should only revoke it for a really good reason (such as abuse or some other violation of the terms of service). Otherwise it should simply continue.
The question should be "why not use a self hosted irc client instead".
At least developers will use IRC anyway to get and stay in touch with open source projects and the countless communities that have their own irc server/channel. Why not use one protocol that's widely used?
This isn't a popular question, but is there really a problem?

I've heard the big-brother nightmare scenario type answers before, but I'm curious to see how they are more likely to negatively affect me than a car accident or slipping in the shower.

Even with government agencies (NSA/FBI) overstepping or trying to overstep their limits, isn't the root problem with policy makers keeping them in line?
What sucks about (e.g.) Adium? I haven't had any major issues with it other than the fact that it doesn't seem to be too actively updated. My biggest complaint is lack of protocol support for other things (e.g. GTalk vs. Hangouts), but that's on libpurple, and the lack of open protocols by the providers.
Before Imgur, it was hit-and-miss as to whether an image would load, either because the Imageshack etc would take it down for bandwidth reasons, or the host would get crushed under traffic load.

Think about how many major subreddits exist because Imgur provides free, reliable hosting. Imgur allowed Reddit to scale its audience massively in quick, easy-to-digest content areas... and Imgur did that for Reddit for free.

Can you imagine how much gratitude that would engender?
Have you read iWoz? I enjoyed it much more than the Jobs biography. Every thing I learn about Woz...from how he created Integer BASIC on pen and paper and demonstrated it to the Homebrew club [1] to how he got around Nintendo Power banning him from its top scores list [2]...only makes me admire him more. It's clear he probably wouldn't be famous if it weren't for Jobs (as Woz tried to give away the Apple I to HP, because he felt obligated to)...but Apple wouldn't have gotten the runway it needed without Woz's spectacular engineering and game-loving spirit.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=hlA6Xv3-59YC&lpg=PA182&ots...

[2] http://gizmodo.com/steve-wozniak-was-once-the-best-tetris-pl...
CyanogenMod 13.0 Release 1 Released
I have found https://donottrack-doc.com [made by the NFB] to be helpful in thinking about data collection. If I have time at the end of this semester I'll be taking my first-year students through the first episode.
There's a demo on the front page --- try typing into the big white box at the top with the bullet points in it.
I think Apple does a combination. Both (from the article) of hosting on AWS, Google, & Microsoft, but also on its own data centers.

I suppose it also depends on what is being hosted. If you look at Netflix & Dropbox, they both took control of their core piece (CDN & Storage) - not the entire end to end platform. I'd imagine Apple does something similar.
Former Pandora Exec Tom Conrad Joins Snapchat as Product VP
Mossberg said in a recent review "Premium devices shouldn't be vehicles for carrier come-ons".

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/8/11176606/walt-mossberg-sams...

I can't imagine spending $700-$800 USD for a device and then having to uninstall junk.
To me, the difference between philosophical positions and ones which can survive the tests of the real world are pretty important. But I suppose that's my opinion as an engineer. I've studied a lot of philosophy that's logically self-coherent but completely impractical to let anywhere near physical matter.

I would say that "a geographic location where there exists a monopoly on violence (such as a monarchy without legislature)" nonetheless has implicit laws that guide its hand. And by which it is judged! Indeed, transgressing unwritten social contracts has led to the downfall of most monarchies throughout history. Or to put it another way, co-opted power structures are necessary for the governance of any sufficiently large group, above and beyond sheer force. And power-structures require some sort of bargaining and negotiation even if it's rather one-sided.

Laws as instruments to communicate expectations are what makes scalable organization possible past a certain point, whether they're explicit or implicit.

That's why you don't see any long-lived civilizations with true violent anarchy as a form of government.
Health app
Hi guys, I have an idea for an app and was wondering if people thought it would be a good idea or if they would use it.

The app would use your current location to show ready-to-go outlets near you and allow you to filter by meal type, nutritional content and customer reviews.

The target market would be health conscious city workers.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.- Thanks!
So you ranted a bit here and keep referring to this as new or a new category. In what way is this not just a normal iteration on what's been around for decades?

The question was why aren't some folks excited about the current Gen of vr, your kind of breathless reply is basically it. It's not revolutionary is just a neat advancement that fixes some problems but doesnt fix lots of the ones we already know about and were good reasons for the lack of adoption the first 20 times around.
It's very naive to bet your future on the hypothetical benevolence of other people.
> Try that in your programming language ;)

Short circuiting in Nim, seems simple enough:

template myAnd(a, b: bool): bool =
if a: b
else: false
Which makes one wonder what exactly 'Lucid' is doing different from Cycorp Inc (1995, described in WP article for Cyc), and is exactly what the TR article doesn't cover. /sigh
Because if Apple hosted exclusively with IBM, IBM wouldn't have the capacity?
Jasper is another cool project that has a bit better of a foundation. You can make little Python modules for pretty much anything.
There is something unusual with a contract for free access to a paid service that goes to perpetuity, no matter how many times you try to redefine it.
Kubernetes 1.2 release is out
Would be interesting to know what kind of discounts Apple got on this. It's a massive PR win for Google, the kind I expect they could give $100m for. Apple is also notorious for getting a very sharp price from their suppliers, so the combination suggests there were some steep discounts.
I didn't say NAT is a security feature. I said developers use NAT to benefit security. The security benefit of NAT is that it forces developers to assign a predictable, private IP address to each device/container/vm/box behind its "firewall," which the gateway can then use for enforcing QoS policies or port whitelisting. Sure, you can do this on IPv6. But IPv6 is more complicated to implement, because all tools support IPv4, and only some support IPv6.
What's dubious about it? It's saying that "no, you can't just reframe an act to focus on the speech (communicative aspect) and automatically inherit free speech protections".

Example: "What? What's the problem? All I did was the send the signal 100100111011110[...] to my computer. I have the right to say '1', don't I? I have the right to say '0', yeah? So I must have the right to say '100100111011110[...]'. The fact that this triggered a destruction of the evidence on my hard drive is totally irrelevant, because we established I have the right to say '100100...', don't infringe on that, man."
Protocol-Oriented MVVM with Natasha the Robot
Startups, Researchers Look to Apple Watch to Identify Those at Risk for Strokes
One pragmatic approach would be to continue to support existing DRM -- but only for the largest most established existing players like Netflix.

This would make DRM a problem for the content providers, because Netflix would then have a monopoly on the ability to distribute content with DRM. That's not good for their ability to have any leverage while negotiating.

A similar situation played out with iTunes, and we've got DRM-free music available for sale now.
> I use both Slack and Hipchat

I've had a lack of issues with Slack, but HipChat seemed to have updates every other day and crash a lot when I used it.
Developer interest is on the wane in pretty much every XMPP project out there. That's the main issue.

XMPP is very much alive in large businesses, especially for system to system interop, but as far as client to server goes I don't see a compelling XMPP client - where's voice, video, chat archiving for example? Compare any XMPP client to Skype for instance and they're not even remotely close.
Why do you assume you need a staffed data center to get cheaper bandwidth?

Just buy dedicated servers or VPSes, no datacenters or staff needed. The hosting provider takes care of the servers, staff and the datacenter.
Thanks! Means a lot. It's a good idea - one day, I hope when we're successful, perhaps then writing such findings then may be more meaningful and valuable as learnings for others.
And how many Zuckerbergs do you know...?
JIRA is a great tool but it's hard to set up and for small teams it can be overkill. We built Zube to provide an Agile workflow right out of the box so you can get up an running right away.

Zube is also deeply integrated with GitHub and everything is synced both ways in real time. So even if some of your developers want to stay in GitHub, everything is still up to date.
Yeah, but many people like myself use Google services on android, so it's a good alternative.
PySide development was stalled, and its future was uncertain.

However, PySide is being developed again for Qt5: https://github.com/PySide/pyside2
AES key reuse and guessing the key – Cryptography Stack Exchange
Ask HN: How to show business co-founders that I'm actually working hard
I'm the tech lead on a startup and I have co-founders who know essentially zero about tech or web businesses. Our CEO sold real estate before this. We are a SAAS for students and companies that connects them for jobs via our website. I'm the CTO and have worked extremely hard for this company for 6+ months, 80-100/week, and am still having to address concerns about being "all in" as a co-founder.

My commute is roughly 2 hours and I have a young child at home and am much more productive coding when we aren't all together. I seriously think they think I work 10 hours a week when in fact I work 100. I'm happy to attend however many meetings they want to have. Ironically, I've been the one to suggest 2/3 of the weekly meetings we do have. How can I convince them short of sitting right next to them in the office from 9-5 every day that I'm actually delivering a lot of value to the company?

Salient details: We don't have much funding, less than 100K, and I'm a very experienced engineer, so its highly unlikely I can be replaced in a reasonable amount of time. We have had listings for $40K salary/2-3% equity for both developers and designers on many sites for months with no takers. Before I arrived, another developer cost them ~$50K and took 4 months to build a website which was unusable according to their standards and generated no sales. I built our website in 2 months and this has lead to $40K in sales and the expectation to hit 6 figures imminently.
> Why wouldn't client-side search work if you wrote the entire app

It depends on how "deep" you want to search. Also, to get Slack's functionality, you need to be able to search through history that your client might not have "seen" yet because you were not in the channel when it happened.
That's neat. Since the underlying web site is contacting Let's Encrypt in order to obtain the certificate from Let's Encrypt, maybe you could increase the automation, speed, and reliability by removing the web site middleman? All of the code for the site is publicly available.

https://github.com/diafygi/gethttpsforfree

(I realize it's not super-simple to just do a port because the site's code is comparatively complex Javascript, so you couldn't just paste it into your code as a library.)
git commits?
I saw a (I believe) 60 minutes story about WalMart a while ago and they stated they stored everything at line-item resolution for 2 years of sales. With their volume it's an amazing amount of data.
UPDATE - did some quick googling and that was 10 years ago. I have no idea how big their DW is now (was 583 TB then)
MOLDAVIAN ESCORTS SANDY – Golden Diamond Escort
Thus causing even fewer Americans to have jobs. Perfect demonstration of why protectionism is such a terrible idea.
This article describes the exact process I went through with my Galaxy S3.
btw. very much agree most of the clients are inadequate but if I could humbly pimp Openfire (I'm a dev there):
https://github.com/igniterealtime/Openfire

And ejabberd of course (powering WhatsApp):
https://github.com/processone/ejabberd

You'll see that on the server side at least XMPP is very well catered for.
Between phone conferencing, email, and shared desktop video conferencing, I don't get what more is needed in professional contexts.

I don't even get IRC or IM. "Chat" is noise and distraction. Write proper emails or arrange phone calls.

What exactly are people using slack for? I don't get it.
> chat archiving for example

This requires a central server though. This is more a function of the service providing XMPP to you than the client. If you want the functionality on the client, it presumably requires some sort of interop between client and server that I'm not sure it part of the XMPP spec.
tried that, told them LOCs too. Doesn't get through to them.
Oh wow. That intro video is awesome: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/photo/

Too bad im on windows. :-(
OK, this has inspired me to write my own blog post for LibreOffice newbies:

http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/tips-for...
How to Increase Dividend Income
Munchery’s chief customer experience officer leaves company (after 5 mo)
Can't build it on Debian, getting:

/usr/include/features.h:374:25: fatal error: sys/cdefs.h: No such file or directory
# include <sys/cdefs.h>

(I installed uuidcdef, for what it's worth).

Also I don't understand the code for the operator and, isn't it gonna return #t whenever x is null?
Thanks. I found this: http://kxan.com/2014/03/10/congressman-upset-with-edward-sno... And wondered why that was needed, given his situation. But now I see this: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/snowden-sxsw-seven-proxie...
The root problem is that something which shouldn't be HTML was sent back with the HTML mime type.

Usually this happens with content type sniffing (IE no MIME type is specified) but it leaves the door open to attacks like these. It changes the handler of the input from code designed to care about security (IE your upload handler code) to code designed to care about usability (MIME sniffing heuristics, or in this case the decompression/rendering library).

When this happens you usually get bad/unexpected results, but it makes it easy to figure out where you can stop caring about implementation details- when the user input leaves the area of the code designed to secure it!