skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: I'm developing a desktop app for local WP dev and deployment. Thoughts?
Note: This is an x-post from Reddit, https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/4kumnu/im_in_the_middle_of_developing_a_desktop. Trying to get multiple opinions and feedback. Thanks!

I'm trying to gauge interest. The app will likely be around $20-$30 and it will allow you to create local development sites via Vagrant with a click of a button, as well as deploy projects over SSH using Capistrano with a single click.

Would any of you guys be interested in an app like this? We're getting close to finished and will be having a closed beta. Would anybody be interested in joining the beta period?

The app is essentially a GUI for the tj command line utility (https://github.com/ezekg/theme-juice-cli). I wanted to do an app because I know a lot of people aren't comfortable with the command line and would benefit from the features tj offers.

Anyways, I'd love to hear your thoughts and if you'd be interested in joining the beta in a few weeks. You can just message me your email address if you are.
you aren't wrong. It was an off the cuff email I sent at 3am, it was purely a rediculous top down analysis comletely devoid of research, simply to ilustrate a point. The point is, if you were able to get a million people to use your service and pay you $9.99, you would be making decent money. This is important, because there is a strong revenue stream tied to a service you provide whereas many companies struggle to get to 1 million users which if achieved, will complicate engineering and increase costs. After those challeneges are faced, well, then they need to convert those users into some sort of payment scheme...
The big corporate old media (including the so-called MSM) has a conservative bias overall, individual outlets ranging from the rightward half of the space covered by the Republican Party through the rightward half of the space covered by the Democratic Party.

The far right considers everything but the most right-wing fringe of that to be the "liberal" mainstream media
I personally very recently migrated a large build system to Bamboo Cloud and am quite dishearted to find out I will have to migrate it to the self hosted version which doesn't seem like it is a super smooth process.
How to ask users for permission to use Location
Show HN: Raspberry Pi Solar Plant Watering System: 6th Grade Science Project
True, but I think a good chunk of the reason it is in such demand still is because it requires a high level of skill to be able to fill that demand. And I'm not sure that would change with exposure in schooling.
Yes, many of us choose hg. Its development is lively, it keeps innovating, it's pleasant to use. Vive la résistance!
Maybe they should just drop support for 7 then.
Almost certainly yes. I have taken apart many laptops, it's usually not more than 5 minutes reading a guide/video and another 5-10 minutes of work.
What's the battery life like? I heard it's not quite as good as reported and honestly it's a bit hard to believe a device without an e-ink display would fair as well.
There are web sites, and there are web apps. Most websites, think news sites, Wikipedia, etc.. just deliver static content and a whole bunch of ads, as someone noted here. Web applications are the ones that need all this functionality.

Why don't we do the following for HTML6, and introduce one profile for sites, and one for apps.

- Sites: HTML + CSS, Javascript if at all only for presentation purposes (like DHTML over a decade ago). Can be viewed with a radically stripped-down web browser. All you need is the layout engine and components for display and networking. No WebGL, no sound API, and no shenanigans like ambient light sensors or vibration (wtf!). Think of Google's AMP.

- Apps: The whole package that is offered nowadays. We can even go past this and rethink the division between web and native apps. Why can't a web app use sockets? Why can't a native app use the HTML layout engine or live in a tab? Google is planning to blur the gap between web and native with their new "instant apps".
> > What's the point of stock options?
>
> I know it's hip with the kids to be cynical these days, but surely you jest...

I've seen so many startups' career pages mention stock options as noteworthy alongside perks. Stock options are like a reservation at a poker table where you're allowed to join the game.

> agreeing to something they don't understand

it's more likely the bling of a startup overshadowing everything and that it's mostly less experienced and young people.
Toyota Will Invest in Uber to Explore Ride-Share Partnership
Of course. When we started making projects together, Anton was a designer and I was a programmer.
This list is exactly why I think developer bootcamps are crap. Touch typing? Really? That is something anyone who uses a computer regularly should already do.

Sorry, this is not a useful comment on the article. I am so tired of hearing the 'learning to code' crap. Don't learn to code. Code to learn.
You could sell one share to a third party in a private transaction. They could then exercise their inspection rights.
I haven't yet, but mine is underway.

The model I got has 8gb ram, 240gb SSD, 1tb HDD, Core2Duo processor, and is upgradeable to a Core2Quad.

However, I'm strongly considering just keeping it as a backup. To me it represents the best possible backup computer, durable and auditable.

It's backup for when my current computer breaks down, but also for when new sinister surveillance and encryption laws are passed. Or for when the web turns into even more of a wild-west with hackers and nation-states doing whatever they feel like.

I kinda feel like it was a bad idea to even discuss my ordering of this on a non-throwaway, from an IP vaguely linked to me.

.

That went kinda dark. Guess I haven't been taking enough Soma.
According to anti-trust law.
You are right, I spoke too fast.

If I could downvote my own comments I would do so.
There is no way to be certain without digging in to the particular code in question. But "optimization" isn't just some magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on to a project and it makes things faster. Some things can't be optimized because they are already optimal. Some things shouldn't be "optimized" (e.g. for speed) because it would make the code less optimal (e.g. for understanding, maintaining, etc.).

The number of APIs available should be orthogonal to the issue of system performance. If it is not in particular cases, it's via bad overall system design, not the existence of the API in general.
This seems specific to their use case. He shows an example with a subquery. I wonder why they don't break that to two queries. The should be fast enough if cached, and would prevent the need for both tables to be unlocked during query.
Ok, I don't disagree with that. So if they teach programmatic thinking in the ways you describe from a very young age, and they can apply it to realms outside software engineering, then it makes perfect sense to teach.
Could be, but I spent a huge amount of time on Omegle, stats from 10K conversations, and that kind of troll was almost non existant. American teens trying to spot sex seekers (to leverage in positive or negative ways) = 70% of the users over a 9 month period. The rest were mostly bored cubicle workers. Chinese users had recurrent pattern: struggling to type, low english level, similar center of interests. That girl was very similar (except for the english level). Maybe you're right but it didn't feel like this at the time.
Tommy Nicholas here - I run a company called Alloy that is not in the payments business at all.
Hipster is one of those words whose meanings have shifted over time towards their complete opposite.

In this case I believe it goes hand in hand with the "hipster look" growing into the mainstream a few years ago. With many people going for the "I'm not like other people" mindset, ironically they ended up looking like everyone else in the "hipster" group, thus kind of reversing the meaning of the word in the eyes of most people.

<flameshield>
In the case of the programming world, Ruby/RoR used to be the go-to hipster language/framework, but even as Rails grew into the mainstream with big actors like Microsoft adopting bits and pieces from it for their own tooling the label never really left, creating a situation where you have a big popular... hipster thing.
</flameshield>
So much to disagree with here ...

> Locks limit access to the table, so on a high throughput use case it may limit our performance.

Then use a proper database that implements MVCC.

> Do not use transactions, which introduce locks. Instead, use applicative transactions.

Or just use a database that handle transactions more efficiently.

> `site_id` varchar(50) NOT NULL,

Why varchar(50)? UUIDs are 16-bytes. The best way to store them would be the binary bytes (which is how postgres stores them). If it's hex without dashes, it'll be varchar(32). If it's hex with dashes, it'll be varchar(36). Why did they pick 50? Future growth? Smart keys? Schema designer doesn't know what a UUID actually is?

> Do not normalize.

Bullshit. Normalize as much as is practical and denormalize as necessary. It's much easier to denormalize and it greatly simplifies any transaction logic to deal with a normalized model.

> Fields only exist to be indexed. If a field is not needed for an index, store it in one blob/text field (such as JSON or XML).

This is terrible advice. Fields (in a table) exist to be read, filtered, and returned. If everything is in a BLOB then you have to deserialize that BLOB to do any of those. That doesn't mean you can't have JSON "meta" fields but if your entire schema id (id uuid, data json) you're probably doing it wrong. It's next to impossible to enforce proper data constraints and all your application logic becomes if/then/else/if/then/else... to deal with the N+1 possibilities of data. Oh and when you finally add a new one, you have to update the code in M+1 places.
Cloud Academy and AWS: How We Use AWS for Machine Learning and Data Collection
> Remembered one more: Juries deciding whether murderers are guilty or not. Simply unthinkable over here.

Can you clarify? A jury trial is supposed to benefit the defendant.
Toyota and Uber to Explore Ridesharing Collaboration
Kotlin/Go are really not more modern than Haskell/Scala or heck even OCaml.
> HTML 5 and JavaScript is fluff for most websites

Yeah but HN can be progressively enhanced and it's also one of the few exceptions to the rule.

<table id="hnmain"..

Indeed.

Worth noting the small eco-system of HN redesigns which all leverage HTML5+JS in some way :)

All sites should be like an electric stairs: the stairs still works when the power is cut off, but to the inconvenience of the users.
> You have to support a version with bugs you fixed months ago.

Technically, you do this with any serious SaaS. You cannot just update your service without regarding to existing integrations, and guess what? Those companies are already integrated with you. Having to integrate again is an additional cost, and I promise you, at that moment, they will investigate other options. After all, they are already having to spend additional time/money to update.
Kelly Slater Built the Perfect Wave. Can He Sell It to the World?
Yes, this is why one of the first medias you should "filter" is television news for this reason. I find US TV news (broadly speaking) fairly low quality to be honest. I also think US television news in particular is where you will find the strongest direct links between media and political figures.

If you look beyond TV, you'll find a fair selection of weekly-to-monthly magazines (and even a few independent papers) available, in addition to some foreign publications that are readily available. Honestly, just as an example, I'm looking at the Pulitzer Prize winners, and I'm not seeing too many owned by those 6 corporations / oligarchies mentioned in the Business Insider article. Sure there are "big national" papers outside the big 6 (NY Times, Boston Globe, etc.) that win, of course, but even some smaller regional papers with smaller independent ownership win their fair share.

Social / web media in the US allows instant links to this ecosystem, if you want. And, at the moment, this seems to be free of the mass censorship type efforts China employs. To be honest, I bet in certain demographics, more people get news from Google / Facebook / Reddit / etc. than anywhere else.

That's the good news. The bad news is that portions of the social web are flooded with a lot of low-quality "clickbait" that is more populist. Propaganda? Perhaps sometimes. If not, it's still annoying either way. This you have to filter as well.
I was an original Pebble backer, but since moved to an Apple Watch. Though it's not Pebble's fault, the lack of proper iOS integration (iMessage, HealthKit, etc.) is really a bummer after using Apple's complete package. I wish my Apple Watch had some of the features that Pebble does (water resistance, long battery life), but the Apple ecosystem lock-in is a powerful force...

I wish Eric & the rest of Pebble the best of luck-- they really are one of only three viable smartwatch platforms, which is pretty incredible for such a small company. It'll be interesting to see how they can fit the core into the activity monitor space as well.
I never thought about this until I tried the tool. Really interesting results and definitely makes me rethink how I use my time. Thanks for the helpful tool!
In some ways Fortran is more advanced than C and even C++, e.g. had modules since Fortran 90, pure functions and so on ...

It is a very different language from the original Fortran.
My suspicion is that the answer is "learning isn't doing".

These are two different functional modes. The mastery of acting without conscious thought is very hard to attain. See also flow (Cziczentmihaly) and related topics.

Learning incrementally can help, and I'd structured my own career such that I was doing that. I ultimately opted out of it when that stopped being an option. I was simply spending all my time catching up, and not finding myself (nor, to a very large extent, any of my peers) actually proficient with the New Hawtness.
Robocalls have triumphed over the Do Not Call list. Whose fault is it?
I'm not so sure that countries will be all that enthused to follow China's example. Aside from the technical and infrastructure costs, it's evident that they're using a huge amount of human manpower. A lot of countries don't have the knowhow or billions to do it.

At this point, I suspect the lesson will be to block all sites except those that force people to use their real names, and arrest them if they say something unapproved. Intimidation is pretty cheap.
This is the direction I try to take. Every time I hear about a new technology I go and read the basics of it and try to understand where I might use it. Then when an opportunity comes up, I investigate and see if it's truly applicable and worth learning. In my experience, trying to dive right in to something you don't have a relatively immediate use for tends to produce a lot of wasted time and make learning slower and harder given the lack of direction.
It's not perfect, but I just use an iPod shuffle for audio while I run. I find that preferable to bringing my phone. I don't do audible books, but it is supported.
Reminds me of this: http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/09/man-builds-house-the...
CodeWorld's Big Decisions (web-based Haskell games written by kids at the end)
with google fi you can also order extra data sim's with no monthly fee. And they use your phone's $10/gb plan.
> Sure, many people don't read dialogs or notifications, but that's not Microsoft's fault - it's user's that can't be bothered to actually understand what they're doing.

Your response is either disingenuous or naive.

Changing how software behaves as established by previous UI conventions with the differences restricted to changes in text labels is a known dark pattern. Furthermore, it is well known that an increasing percentage of users will not read to the end of a notification as they attempt to return to their initial task. [0]

> As we all know, people tend to start reading at the beginning of a piece of text and as they advance, an increasing percentage of people give up and do not read to the end.

Unquestionably, the effect of dismissing the notice is different and, also unquestionably, the people responsible for this behavioral change are well aware of how such a change would affect users who have no intention of upgrading.

What such a change achieves, in addition to tricking unwitting users into upgrading, is plausible deniability.

[0] http://alistapart.com/article/dark-patterns-deception-vs.-ho...

EDIT: Supply missing object. Rhetorical emphasis in last sentence.
What laptop do you have? Truecrypt doesn't support UEFI which seems to be the only option every laptop has these days.
You're right. Least significant _set_ bit is (x & -x).

Got confused by the (x & (x-1)) and thought rosstex must have meant something more complicated, because it doesn't seem to result in the usual LSB either :/
I startup a Windows Store Analytics based startup - sometimes you take a bet on a technology taking off and it doesn't work out. Look at how many people ate shit building startups on top of Facebook's platforms over the years. Don't judge us too harshly ;)
> I agree, back when the UK was complaining about Google I was hoping that would push them into unifying tax policy.

It's not just tax policy. The countries that have less well educated workers or less wealthy consumers want to give companies some incentive to come there. If the tax rules were the same they would use lower rates. If the rates were also the same then would use the tax revenue to fund subsidies or projects that act as de facto tax breaks.

Your choices are essentially "countries compete with each other for investment capital" and "world government with completely uniform laws." And the second one is Very Bad: Monoculture, nowhere to run if it goes wrong, single target for corruption and capture, etc.
Please not the trickle down theory again.
Shifting is used to define masks. Did you mean you actually type out mask values in base 10?
Wouldn't Aerospike be a cheaper, lower maintenance, and more robust solution to this problem?
> On top of that, MySQL is well-documented

I seriously disagree with that. Documentation is one of MySQL's weakness, especially compared to PostgreSQL which is known to have one of the best documentation in the open source world.
According to me. On the grounds I'd like other species to exist other than humans and their domesticated animals.

http://xkcd.com/1338/

This in some ways even understates the problem e.g. Fish stocks.

There are different kinds of limits other than say, the Soylent Green limit. One is whether our planet is cooler with wild animals or having a few percent more cows.

Cows are cool but not as much as that!

We can have billions more people on Earth but in order for that to happen we need radical, radical technology changes. The most obvious step forward is Vat Meat. No animals required.
Speed up JavaScript crypto
You are being too European. Not serving scalding-hot coffee is a very reasonable safety precaution. Not only can it cause third-degree burns, but it can cause severe damage to the inside of your mouth. Note that McDonalds was heating up its coffee to be higher a higher temperature than it would be straight from brewing (during which a lot of heat energy is lost).

Every coffee you've ever had in your life was a lower temperature than what McDonald's was serving up. They were serving super-heated coffee that is hotter and thus more dangerous than what you would make at home. A typical temperature for coffee is 75C -- that's the temperature it'll come out as from your standard automatic drip coffee maker. McDonald's was serving it at 95C, which required serious post-brewing heating to achieve. They admitted that this was wrong and stopped doing it, and to really drive that point home, no one else serves coffee that dangerously hot. You could burn a layer off your tongue in one ill-conceived first sip. The only reason you think this isn't a big deal is because you haven't been exposed to it.
Well for now their top priority is to make a binary compatible way to run pre-existing (parts of) Linux distro, and it works quite well for beta software (I would not have said the same if it was released software in the same state, but they seem to very actively be working on it and fixing bugs, and progress is shown between builds)

Some technical console details are far from perfect IMO, but already good enough for common scenarios and given the context they are in its quite impressive (even if shortcuts are taken in regard with Windows interop)

What will come after will largely depend upon the reception on the first release, I guess. Loads of people already want to at least be able to spawn Windows processes from the WSL env, but that's quite understandable and present no serious risk of extinguishing the GNU/Linux ecosystem by some kind of miracle. I would not see any point of MS going further; they have their own complete ecosystem which in some aspect is technically far more advanced and/or has far more potential than competing solutions (UWP is all about convergence and unless they reboot once again, which I think they have no reason to do anymore, they will eventually get it right on mobile, now maybe from a time to market point of view this will be too late but I highly doubt that the android subsystem will be resuscitated so I don't see what WSL could bring to that story anyway), most people are not even going to want to run WSL in production for server workloads (and would have not wanted to even if MS told them it's OK, which they did not).

The dev target is a very good choice and the approach solve 90% of the issues previous attempts (Posix subsys, SUA) had (not used enough, separate target with small ecosystem, eventually buggy because of that), and for some other applications Cygwin is already available right now and good enough for what it does and how it does it. The Posix subsys had actually been instrumental for MS to a wide take over of US public markets in an impressive bad faith stunt (and that actually was the only reason for its very presence), but the situation is radically different now and the expectation have moved to higher layers, so if they manage to use it like that again I think it will only be in anecdotal proportions.
I agree with everything you said except for this part:

> "Not directly, no. Neither is health insurance, 401k, company provided meals or other benefits, but all of these things are perceived by most to have at least some marginal value."

Stock options are, 99% of the time, worth $0. Perks, benefits, retirement options, all have intrinsic monetary value.
Lest we forget: this is the company that let anyone on the internet log in to any Dropbox user account they wanted with any arbitrary value for the password.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2011/06/yesterdays-authent...