skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> By focusing on the small-scale complexity to such an extreme, you've managed to make the whole system much harder to understand

Well put. I've noticed a curious blind spot in how people account for complexity: we count the code that 'does' things much more than the code that glues those things together. This distorts our thinking about system complexity. A cost/benefit analysis that doesn't consider all the costs isn't worth much.

An example is when people factor complex code into many small functions, then say it's much simpler because smaller functions are easier to understand. In fact this may or may not be true, and often isn't. To get a good answer you must consider the complexity you've added—in this case, that of the new function declarations and that of the calls to them—not just the complexity you've removed. But it's hard to consider what you don't see. Why is it so easy not to see things like this? I think it's our ideas about programming, especially our unquestioned assumptions.

The complexity of glue code goes from being overlooked to positively invisible when it gets moved into things like configuration files. Those are no longer seen as part of the system at all. But of course they should be.
Elms isn't a JS library, it's a completely separate language that happens to compile to JS.
http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=21950...
Edit: sorry, I was continuing from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11356350

We spent four billion dollars for a train station. And then we raised ticket prices on the path train for a beautiful station nobody wants. Why?

> To win these concessions, Larry Silverstein took advantage of the Port Authority’s eagerness to show some progress on the site. He played hardball with the government from 2004 to 2006, a period of acrimonious negotiations between Silverstein Properties and the Port Authority over who would be responsible for what aspects of the site.

> His lobbyists were the best of the best. He hired Global Strategy Group, whose clients have included Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo, to lobby for him, along with David Samson, who would go on to become the chairman of the Port Authority.

> Given the choice between making Larry Silverstein pay his way and trying to get the site finished as quickly as possible, the Port chose the more expensive option. (Whether it worked is debatable—3 World Trade Center is a stump, and 2 World Trade Center is nonexistent; both are awaiting tenants to restart construction, with delivery now slated for 2015 and 2016.) The feds were throwing even more money at the Port Authority—nearly $2.9 billion—and it was the path of least resistance.

http://observer.com/2013/05/pathfail/

It is mind boggling that a seat on a train to cross the hudson river costs as much as a ticket on the MTA. I don't have any inside information and I don't know who to blame for this (perhaps there is no point in blaming anyone other, everyone did what was in their personal best interest) but this does bring a point that we can't just throw money at infrastructure problems. We have to be judicious about it.

The twitter feed of @pathtrain https://twitter.com/pathtrain is littered with problems of signal failure on a bridge on the Newark World Trade Center line. I bet they could use some of that four billion dollars to fix that issue. But of course, the federal money is not for trivial things like that. They have a monument to build!

I guess this is something we need to think about in many government projects, not just at the federal level. We say that we spend more than $12k? per child in our school system and raise pitchforks and say the teachers aren't performing well enough for all the money we pour into the school system. Well, perhaps we are not pouring money at the right places. And no, I'm not advocating we get rid of public funding and make school administrators or teachers start a go fund me for their salaries or costs. That would not solve anything. These are difficult questions for me. I don't think our politicians and bureaucrats are making the right call here but I don't think it is right to leave these questions up to a ballot measure either.
Ask HN: Best payment processor?
Hi HN,

Does anyone have any recommendations for a payment processor for use by a startup?

Some details:

-We have a high volume of payments with low margins.

-The tech stack is node.js with react/redux. There is a planned iOS/Android app.

-We're based out of Canada and only serve Canadian customers.

Even if your preferred processor doesn't cater to those bullet points, I would be interested in hearing your experience with them. Thanks in advance.

P.S. I'm sure this question has been asked many times already, but I found nothing too relevant from within the past year: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=payment%20processor&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=pastYear&type=story
"Wrong Way"

Sometimes I see people drive the wrong way down one-way streets, maybe this would help.
I think there's a fundamental difference between, say [0] (thoughtful, nuanced), and [1] (just plain silly). The initial posts are all worthwhile and interesting, with the latter clearly being satire. It would be even funnier if the OP exposed a more robust string-handling library from ruby or python to the javascript runtime in node by way of a native lib binding. [2] is kind of just elitist, "get off my lawn" yelling, which misses the point fundamentally in this problem.

There are different flavors of comments on these threads. Some are pretty cogent and thoughtful. Others aren't. A "sky is falling augh, isArray is one line, javascript devs are teh worst" misses the underlying problem of javascript being addressed (interpreter fragmentation, not having a reliable way to test if something is an array on older platforms). I'd argue it doesn't contribute at all to the improvement (metacognitive or otherwise) of any javascript dev, but instead serves to harden people's opinions on one side or another of a mythical line.

The difference is whether the goal is to contribute to the discourse or just go for the shallow laughs. It's an important difference, because the former does lead to improvement all around, whereas the latter leads to high-fives and community decay.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11352704
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11350651
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11348798
The defensiveness, at least for me, is that the laws are being applied globally. Nobody should agree with US laws applying in France. Seems a lot of people agree with EU laws applying in the US. The internet is global, laws are not. I have the same opinion if a French company, doing business in the US, is told how it must do things in France by US regulators (as opposed to its part in the US).

> So if you're going to start arguing that the US's 1st amendment should apply in France

Did you read the article? It's the opposite (EU law applying outside of the EU)
This is not new, and not limited to HN.
in my opinion we need to be reminded that all tools have flaws.

https://wiki.theory.org/YourLanguageSucks
The data shows correlation not causation. Maybe people in urban centers on a whole would be more happy if there was better public transit, and thus, less traffic congestion. Or maybe people in urban areas would be happier if there was a better balance between real estate supply and demand such that price curve wasn't so steep as one gets closer in? Or maybe it's that concentrated poverty in big cities drags the happiness index down? Who knows, it's probably some combination of all of those things.

I know that when I hear people complain about living in the DC Metro area, the two complaints are traffic and real estate prices. We have the metro but it is literally teetering on crisis as they had to shut the whole system down for a day recently. Improving the operation of metro should be a very high priority for the DC, MD, and VA governments, and the feds for that matter.
There's this "Tone Argument" Fallacy Fallacy. You can't win an argument by complaining that the other's tone is unpleasant. So that's a valid fallacy, but it only applies to a particular argument in a particular circumstance. Certain people on the Internet then make the illogical jump to the conclusion that they are therefore justified to use whatever tone they care to in any argument. (And lo and behold, they always "win" arguments.)
> The species used here (mycoplasma) does not have a cell wall. ;)

OK, I am not a biologist (I don't even play one on TV), so ELI5: How is that possible? How can a cell not have a cell wall?
I find the concept of a TV show that can only be seen on certain devices and OSes to be sad.

I guess we've been trending in this direction for a while (no Amazon Prime Streaming app on Apple TV, for instance).
Im not really sure how this is an argument against DCE. If theres no way to tell at compile time if these functions will be used, then you have to include them in the final delivered code, whether or not you are using monolithic or micro packages or dead code elimination.

DCE will help you if you pull in huge-monolithic-package and only use one function from it. In that case its basically the same as if you had used the micro package.
Google has already complied in France - google.fr has been censored. The issue is whether a French court can require global censorship of the information.
The first obviously. As an analogy, imagine if we let people use knives freely. They might kill other people with them! Can you imagine if such things were not regulated by the government? Now imagine, words. They are, as the saying goes, even more dangerous than swords. So we need laws to regulate their usage. This will bring us one step closer to true utopia.
On the flipside, reverse the sense of how that tool generates EDL and you've got a "shorten Hollywood blockbusters to the good bits" system... ;)
While sharing movies over torrents does not incur a cost to the producer, running servers for a game does. The model is different, and thus i do not believe your points apply.
It would be cool to play with this idea using the OpenWorm platform.
I agree. I am uncomfortable at the idea that people feel compelled to sanitize their realities so they only see the narratives they want to see.

Social media already makes this far too easy.

For art, this can make a movie have a very different meaning. Violence and sexuality can be very critical to the message of a movie, and editing it to make it mean something else just feels disingenuous to the original art.

This is like people covering statues of naked people because they're uncomfortable around nudity.

Still, I think individuals have a right to do this, whether for themselves or for their kids. I just view it like people's right to smoke cigarettes or go tanning. This is an inherently dangerous approach to life.
And a CLA in place also means many contributors will shy away from doing so because they have no idea what happens with their contribution in the next version. Either it's a community project owned by everyone under an agreed upon license or it's more like a record deal for new artists.
I had this exact same idea but using API keys and socket.io

jQuery is old :p

Nice job!
> So if you're going to start arguing that the US's 1st amendment should apply in France then I'm going to argue that the US's 4th amendment should too!

I would support that; while that's not a universal position among American civil libertarians, it's not particularly unheard of.
My answer would be more like "fucking never, my god!" I thought this was one of the reasons to use free software: none of this paternalistic phone-home bullshit.
(Marco from Citus Data)

It seems at least theoretically possible.

Since the Citus master executes distributed queries by sending regular SQL queries to the Citus workers, you could already use BDR servers as workers and replicate the data between pairs of workers in different data centers and copy over the metadata on the master manually. However, some distributed joins and data loading features wouldn't work.

For all features to work, and to replicate the master, you would have to compile Citus against BDR, which probably requires a few code changes.
Yes, you're right this doesn't solve all the issues with spreadsheets as a programming environment. The "averaging over the right data" is a big one, and yes, being able to diff a text file won't help that.

Thanks a lot for the suggested syntax - it's really good to get some feedback. I need more time to think it through and work out exactly how this would work.

In the meantime, one solution to the problem, that I would like to implement soon, is cell mapping - in effect projecting native data structures onto grid cells. That way you can still display and modify your data in the spreadsheet but use a sensible formula like `mean(data$height)` instead of `mean(A2:A5)`. Would love comments on that idea - there's an issue on it https://github.com/stencila/stencila/issues/118
I think you guys are missing the point a bit. The important thing here is that there's a minimal genome in a working organism that can be used as a research platform. The "from scratchness" level is purely for bragging as once the cell divides a few times and fails to maintain components, it'll be working from the set of things its genome specifies. Whether you consider that cheating isn't really relevant for the potential experiments you can run.

EDIT: For a CS example, imagine trying to reverse engineer a computer system and make it do things it wasn't supposed to do. It's a lot easier to tinker with hardware from an Apple ][ than with a modern x86 chip. The advance here is that we are finding the Apple ][ in the x86 chip and doing a run of those for people who want to play with them.
I call this a "grief" economy. The more grief you want to skip, the more expensive it is. The problem being that the maker is intentionally adding grief. To me that sounds annoying at best and malicious at worst.
Sadly, this market is very limited. iRobot, who had a lot traction here, just sold off these robots for peanuts relative to what they make on vacuums.

http://media.irobot.com/2016-02-04-iRobot-Announces-Sale-of-...
How would the casino business stay afloat if 99% of its customers didn't spend money?
First thing that came to mind: Game of Thrones.

I imagine episodes would be 10 minutes long and you'd have no idea what's happening. Not saying they don't go over the top at times, but the brutality of a show like GoT is a very powerful illustration tool, and filtering out bits and pieces because they make you uncomfortable would ruin the entire purpose of the show.

I'm sure some people will find use for this tool, but I will likely forgo.
Fracturing of content-delivery-devices, hooray.

TV set in 2019: Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, Settop from Cable provider, Kodi box, PS4 with Vue, all hooked in to a Roku-branded Smart TV. And also that Harmony Remote no longer works because each of those devices have proprietary APIs for their now-mandatory voice interface mics.
> An expert baker will bake cheaper and better cakes than I ever could.

An expert baker can bake better and (possibly) cheaper cakes, but it is not necessarily in his or her interest to do so. It may be more practical to make the worst cakes that will sell, and then sell them for as much as the market can bear. (For example, McDonald's employs expert chefs.)
Currently waiting for updates to install.
But the spanish newspaper hosting the article in the case that lead to this law _is_ under EU regulation, so I think in this case the library is 'all websites hosted in the EU' and google is just the card index.
Microsoft Created a Bot to Learn from Users. It Quickly Became a Racist Jerk
TCP and UDP aren't the perfect solutions [for everything] and there's no shortage of proposed alternatives to TCP; Besides already mentioned QUIC, there's CurveCP (https://curvecp.org/), MinimaLT (https://www.ethos-os.org/), or even more extreme Named Data Networking (http://named-data.net).

For a background on why TCP is this way, look up "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols", by David D. Clark, however knowing is little comfort.
The objected results are being removed from search results page only for specified queries (name of the individual...). The documents themselves stay in search index and can be found via other queries not specified in the removal request.
Indeed. Oblig. hyperphysics: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene/nucbin.htm...
Looking at a political speech... just skipping to some of it is an abhorrent idea. That's how you lose context and likely meaning to words.

Without condoning or condemning Trump's speeches, skipping to just parts can radically change your impression of the man and his policies.

This is a problem journalism faces when covering events. They try to edit down to the meaningful parts while retaining the meaning of the whole. I can't imagine that filtering out certain triggering phrases/words would allow you paint a fair picture of him or his policies.
The blog Post rings a tune with me. I've started organizing all the work related projects into Trello boards,and have iterated quite a bit on my workflow.

Next to a board for scrum, I also have a board reserved for planning work things to do in the long term future, like a backlog, but coverings many different aspects of company mostly related to software dev, but also some hardware and marketing.

Eventually I wanted to be able to measure how long would it take to complete some tasks, and prioritize them across lists.

The way I solved this way with a plugin for sublime text, the editor I use all day long [0]. The plugin reads metadata I add to each task on Trello like (backend 1d design 4h) and uses it to compute a schedule for all my tasks. It is also able to prioritize between posts, which in in my case are fucus areas.

When I need to prepare the next sprint, all I have to to is use the plugin to tell me which tasks have the highest priorities, and occasionally review the Planning board.

The plugin was initially developed for Trello, but I found it really useful also for offline task scheduling between different projects.

You can read more about how I use it on my blog [1].

[0]https://github.com/pedrokost/STProjectPlanner
[1]http://blog.pedro.si/2015/11/project-planning-in-file.html?m...
Sure, Ansible works in it's OpenSSH client mode, check out

https://gravitational.com/teleport/docs/admin-guide/#using-t... - Ansible section

We are also thinking about deeper integration with state of the art automation and deployment tools.
I'd much rather see it in pkgsrc than brew. Then it can easily be applied to the *BSDs and SmartOS.
Not sure I follow the analogy. The blinds protect a private space (your home), as opposed to some publicly accessible internet website.
My sister just moved to Wyoming and has a daughter in school there. They live a few blocks from a school, but she's not able to attend that school because it's in high demand. Apparently parents are able to apply to go to any (public) school in the district, and are accepted based on a lottery with no preference given to proximity to the school. (I could be wrong about these details, this is just what she told me.)

I guess that system is designed in part to account for the effect you're describing - if one school starts to become known as a better school, the kids in the poor parts of town are just as likely to be able to get in as anyone else. I have no idea if it actually works that way, but I do know it's a pain for my sister who now has to drive her kids to school several miles away when they could easily walk to the closer one. Can't please everyone, I guess.
They make sound insulating and deadening foam. Put the piano in a small internal room and line the room with acoustic foam: http://amzn.to/1o9CGjb Living closer to work must be worth 2 of these for $160?
Sure, but this is more like an armchair environmentalist shouting "Hey people ride the effing train!" while sitting in a traffic jam.
> "it is unacceptable to monitor Americans, but fine to spy on foreigners!"

Btw, the US isn't the only country that does this. Spying on foreign countries is something most other countries try to do as well. France is doing the same thing[0][1].

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/04/france-electron...

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/09/frances-government-aim...
One thing you get from org mode is agendas. They are generated according to your specifications (e.g. "all tasks this week" or "all items tagged NEXT") from the clutter of a directory full of org files. I was never much into org mode until I found that I don't actually need to keep order as long as I just tag items.

I'm using org mode to implement some form of GTD.
How Nike Lost Steph Curry to Under Armour
Another option would be pricing by weight. Big trucks currently get giant subsidies from the rest of us, just measuring by how much they damage the roads. Fixing that would probably drive up the costs of many goods that are transported by truck, although it would also probably cause a redistribution of which goods are sold, to favor lighter or more local goods. In any case, it would keep the roads in better condition. On the interstate near where I live, it's often a 10:1 ratio between trucks and cars.
I think you're forgetting the cost of operating a road, and in particular, freeway network, which is entirely paid for by tax payers.
> National Association of Realtors

Sounds like a group interested in a supply crunch. Afterall, prices rise in low supply, and fear can drive more sales in the shortrun. Two incentives for Realtors to push a false spin of reality.

How about this headline? "Empty homes outnumber homless 6:1"
http://www.mintpressnews.com/empty-homes-outnumber-the-homel...
Very useful - my citibank credit card used to have a feature like this many years ago (I believe called "virtual card numbers"), but they got rid of it for some reason.

Though I am more likely to give my personal details to citibank than some startup. Trust is a big issue with payment startups.
My TLDR was that the guy had a break by hitching up the person who would eventually become CEO. It could have been powerpoint, golf or birdspotting, the end result would have been the same. Moral of the story is "kiss corporate ass and you'll go places", which I guess has to be expected from such a publication.
Valencia (between 14th and 26th) is timed at 13mph northbound in the morning, and southbound in the evening.
That's great to hear!
Is it just me or has the frequency of celebrity deaths made an uptick recently?

I'm wondering if this is just observational bias or a complication of the dense baby boomer population aging into their mortality.
Argus: Time-Series Monitoring and Alerting
Europe always doubles down on stupid, but they are in no position to dictate what happens in the US.
...what? She is a professor of CS & Engineering according to the byline in the article, and upon Googling her, I find no reference to her teaching economics or any other non-CS/Engineering discipline elsewhere. And unless ctrl+f is failing me, "econ" isn't mentioned anywhere in the article (except "economically" once in someone else's comment) or in this comment thread. So I have no idea what you're talking about.
I wasn't aware I had to explain how the crypto works in order to advise my clients that they should be disabling outdated SSL versions on their servers and returing RC4 ciphers.

Evidently I don't have the brains for cybersecurity. My clients should be just fine with their telnet-enabled/remote-root-accessible servers until someone who can descramble Wingdings riddles can save them.
> or a complication of the density baby boomer population aging into their mortality.

I'd wager its this. In emotionless, clinical terms, the Boomer cohort is "aging out". :(
Unless Google wants do withdraw its business from France and potentially all Europe, it will comply. I think it is quite probable it will comply, it is in its financial interests.
Show HN: Find quality startup jobs in other countries