skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm reminded of a message from The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen. When PCs first came out, no one wanted them. When Honda motorcycles first came out, no one wanted them. When email systems first came out, no one wanted them. These things all flew in the face of the established norms, moving upmarket and eventually overtaking the market leaders. There were no markets for these things then, but these products created their own markets.

Of course, as you said, we don't know who the exact winners will be, but like the Richter scale, there are some indicators that can be helpful in determining the magnitude and general location of the next earth-shaking market movements. Christensen's framework recommends examining several of a product's consumer utility curves for exploitable inefficiencies in niche (and usually low-end) markets. E.g., laptop manufacturers value 2.5" hard drives for their form-factor and are less sensitive to price per GB. E.g., teenagers value the speed, ease, and essentialism of Snapchat and are willing to forgo access to an extended peer network on Facebook.

While we'll never know exactly what will succeed or fail, thinking about the market is almost always a productive activity that can certainly have a dramatic impact on outcomes.
If Nazis have been reduced to superficiality through glib comparisons ("crying Nazi"), then it's worth pointing out that Godwin's law has suffered the same fate through its own glib application ("crying Godwin"). We need a Godwin's Law for Godwin's Law.

<edit>This has been dubbed Diddly's Law:</edit>

"As the years roll by on the internet, the probability of someone mentioning Godwin once Hitler has been mentioned, is approaching 1."
zounds
crikey
blimey
godamit
gadzooks
egad
darn

English ha[s,d] the same thing.
i would go as far to say if you dont use the tools/tech at your disposal to get the job done as effeciently as possible then you are suboptimal as a programmer. the entire concept of technology is building or gluing others' efforts before you to create something new. there are rare exceptions to this and these are the very ones you stand on.
The more I learn, the harder it gets to do anything
The idea that developers should be hidden from customers, like lepers, is offensive to me as a developer.
* write unit tests (I find nosetests or pytest as the test runners most useful and mock incredibly helpful).

* run unit tests and integration tests in an automated manner for every commit. (a.k.a use tox, jenkins or somesuch...).

* Depending on the software you are creating deploy a chaos monkey[1] kinda approach for disaster/HA testing.

* Read up on good Python practices :

http://python-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...
Doomsday argument
To expand on the patent issue, it not only about Monsanto patenting life but also how they go around and enforce it. Rather than selling a product that the farmer can use as they wish, monsanto demands payment for each harvest. Its if like a car manufacturer were to patent some new effective engine but then went to demand a cut each time the customer went and filled up the tank. Its not a deal that feels fair, and it makes people feel like someone got tricked.
I'd hope that some people, at least, actually want to fix problems and gain respect in their field. As opposed to engaging in criminal activity and selling out to the highest bidder.
I would like to require companies to provide a list of pesticides/fertilizers used, as well as what cultivar they are growing. Simply labeling GMO/non-GMO is not useful. It describes a process rather than an effect. It's like requiring people to label non-grafted plants.

Organic labeling is somewhat useful, since it does provide a list of prohibited fertilizers and pesticides, but I would prefer to simply have a list.
Announcing NetBSD 7.0.1
Saying no to joining an arms and weapons producer.

2 months later I got hired by a AAA firm.
This is the funniest take on dao/slock that I've seen so far
>About 30 admirals are under investigation

Couple of questions from a civilian. How many admirals the Navy has? How many they needed to win WWII? Is there a title inflation?
Quit my job in a company I was co-owner of, which wasn't going anywhere interesting. Moved country. Took a sabbatical. Studied environmental science at the university. Met a great person at a conference. Started an open source organisation together. Now running open source based data services in more than a dozen African and Asian countries tracking critical infrastructure, among other things.
Lower overhead if things go right, I think is the point.
>(I realize this might be hard to do given the reality of security these days, so there would need to be some nuance of course)

In my industry, the EPA produces technology forcing regulation, we will have to invest a few hundred million to meet the upcoming standards and continue selling our product in the US after 2020. To sell our product in 2027, we need technology that hasn't been commercialized yet.

Maybe computer security could use a technology forcing regulation to get real investment in secure software to happen.
RH may be dangerous, but not for the reasons this article presents.

While Torvalds holds the kernel devs to the mantra, higher layers are less stringent about not breaking.

For example compiler optimizations are a duel edged sword. There seems to not be a months without there being and article on the NH front page about C ambiguities that compilers will mangle as they see fit.

The article also gloss over that Fedora is backed by RH, it is pretty much their development branch. Many of the people working on Fedora are RH employees.

And that is perhaps the real danger of RH. So much that is happening above the kernel right now come straight out of Fedora.

The people involved there pretty much decide the course for Linux user space, and then supposedly independent orgs like Gnome and Freedesktop rubber-stamp that course.

This because they can devote their day to hammering out reams of code that solidifies that direction, while other distros have to rely on the spare time of their community members.
they are going to have to get _significantly_ more aggressive with advertising

Only if their monetization plan is being led by someone from a news site. Snapchat being what it is, they would be smarter to sell less for more. That is, if you don't have (much) advertising and a lot of demand, the little real estate you do cede to monetization is more valuable. They don't have to do takeovers.
Safe or not, I do not want to buy or support GMO food because I know there's probably a patent behind the seeds that can screw over farmers (and by proxy everyone else).
At least they claim that "VigLink is contractually obligated not to store any Reddit user information."
I dropped out of the workforce in 2003 for about a year, after I got laid off from a startup while I was working remotely from Austin. It was a tough time to be a somewhat junior developer in Austin, and after a couple of really bad experiences freelancing (I was pretty bad at a number of important skills you need to be freelance at the time) I decided to go back to school and pursue med school. I got a few worthwhile experiences out of going back to school, but a degree wasn't one them; I took a "break" to help a friend out with a short term contract for programming project which turned into full time work, and I never went back. I'm probably making pretty close to what I would have as a GP (assuming I would have been accepted to med school, which is hardly a foregone conclusion) with a lot more self direction.

It's not like my life would be drastically different had I stuck out the recession, but I would have no student loans to pay off and would have probably gotten my career on track five or six years sooner than I did.
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion only, not speaking for anybody else. I'm an SRE at Google.)

> I've also heard that at Google they require assert isinstance for every parameter of every function.

This is not true.
>It sounds like you weren't sufficiently brown to get media attention? "Public school bureaucracy run by bureaucrats" doesn't have the right mass appeal.

We're brown, I think colloquially "black".
What would you call a politician's maximum job performance?
It was a research OS. That by itself renders the entire article moot. It's akin to someone writing an article about how Minix "lost" vs. Linux- it's apples and oranges. You can't call something a failure if it was never intended to be the thing you claim it failed at being.
there are all kinds of "bad actor" and nuclear option moral clause. I personally (as a founder) once had to sign a "non-embarrassment clause" where I guaranteed not to embarrass the investor.

Since I am basically creating this with my lawyer, I am going to make it unambiguous- either a recorded conversation, a verifiable conversation on text/whatsapp/email, a photo or in extreme cases a rape kit.

In my opinion this should be a deterrent rather than something that would ever need to be enforced. But it can't be a "he said/she said" either
It is a strength of the U.S. system that outsiders to a case can contribute toward it. That's as true when the outsider is a private individual with a grudge as when they're the ACLU or Sierra Club. It is a weakness of the U.S. system that a jury has the power to destroy a company with excessive judgments, as in the Hulk Hogan case. I don't have the solutions to this, but I am clear that one of them is not to limit potential plaintiffs to their own resources.
You are missing the point - whether their motivation is purely profit, or altruistic, or whatever - if they do not want to fund a project, they have an incentive not to vote 'No' against it because as soon as they do they can no longer remove their money from the DAO, and have committed to funding the project if it passes.
Did you actually read the post? I think I make it pretty clear
Very sharp summary. I definitely recognise this.
If the people are upset with their Ford, they'll buy BMW! Nope, doesn't make any sense!
Well my intent here wasn't really to make a comparison of our situations as much as it was to highlight heavy handed bureaucracy within primary educational systems.
Should You Always Center a Predictor on the Mean?
I use my phone as a cycling computer and only need a $50 heart-rate monitor to make it as fully featured as I need.
Will this modify the underlying markdown?
Ask HN: Which GUI database client do you use?
Hello all,

Even though I'm pretty comfortable with cli clients for most of my daily tasks, when it comes to database queries' results visualisation I need some sort of table interface which I can easily interact with.

In this domain I find sequel for Mac my favourite. But it only works for MySQL databases.

Do you use GUI clients for database interaction? If so, which ones and what features do you like in which of them and what would you improve?

Best regards!
I've only ever taken over a large Python project, never written it from scratch, and I don't have many years under my belt as a python coder.

But my $.02: Documentation, python code itself is easy to read but if you have a large project, broken into many small code bases for libraries, services and front ends then you need solid documentation. Not only text but also diagrams showing how all the parts work together. Not sure if they're called diagrams in english but it's the stuff you make in MS Visio or Draw.io.
Can we call this the R-Diddly law, please?
Why was the title changed in this way? The new title is so generic, it has nothing to do with the actual problem.
Does it really require Yosemite+ ? I think there's still quite a bit of people still holding on to Mavericks.
Privacy whiz Max Schrems set to challenge other big firms
How about Diddly's Law. I'm fine with that, hah!
Just after my undergrad college I joined a startup hoping to learn and grow exponentially as a developer. The first day of work my girlfriend came to drop me off and she said, "you are changing your job in next 6 months". And 2 months working in I realized she was right, it was a dying startup with no future. I kept working hoping I would induce a change and inspire the team. Six months in I hated it so much and I got so frustrated that I quit.

The first week after quiting I just spent time questioning my decision. But next couple of weeks I spent time with myself and gained a better perspective about life and career.

Its been 2.5 months now since I quit. I have saved enough to keep me floating. And now I am preparing to get into Amazon. Let's see if I nail it.

It was a rightful decision that I took. One thing I did learn is "How not to run a startup".
If the are getting out of fitness trackers and jambox, what is remaining?
I would disagree. Understanding different tools helps me to understand how co workers may approach a problem or teach me about why they use specific tools. VI mode in sublime may not make sense to a developer who doesn't know what vim is and why someone may choose to use it.
Robocalls have triumphed over the Do Not Call list
First time seeing my province on HN. Swearing in Québec feels like an extension of your body and even the most well spoken people give in to the treat that are our swear words. I'm always reminded of this quote from the Matrix trilogy (although relating to French from France).

Merovingian: Yes, of course, who has time? Who has time? But then if we do not ever take time, how can we ever have time? Chiteau Haut-Brion 1959, magnificent wine, I love French wine, like I love the French language. I have sampled every language, French is my favourite - fantastic language, especially to curse with. Nom de Dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperies de connards d'enculis de ta mire. You see, it's like wiping your ass with silk, I love it.
Look at the original publication's header and footer. "Unclassified / For Official Use Only".

It was never classified to begin with.
> If an investor or employee of the investor/accelerator/incubator makes a sexual advance towards me or anyone in my company, then they are stripped of all of their shares in my company (even the ones that have vested) and there will be a public notice to shareholders as to the reason why.

Wow, yes. This is going into any investment agreement I would ever consider signing. This is powerful. It puts the emphasis where it belongs and give it teeth.

I see a parallel with the anti-smoking campaigns. I think it's pretty lame to pass a law telling, e.g. a bar owner they can't allow smoking in their own place, but I'm willing to let it slide for a few decades until many fewer people are dying of addictive poison (however voluntarily.)

In a healthy environment, people who are interested in each other shouldn't feel awkward about entering into a more familiar (than professional) relationship, even in this context. However, we are not there yet, and in the meantime investors and their employees making sexual advances at the people in the companies they are funding should be considered beyond the pale.
It's not the amount of knowledge that makes a programmer competent. It's whether this person has the potential to be great by having the drive for constant self improvement. A great programmer is someone who pays close attention to her work and always asks whether it can be even better.
At one place, we kept suits / formal office clothes in the closet for those times. No need to make it a regular thing.

On the other hand, at one place I worked it would have been illegal for the customer to interact with us in our office space, but we still had to wear formal office clothing.
If I were to meet a customer, I'd probably skip the t-shirt and shorts that day, no dress code required. But that depends on the customer, of course - with some customers, wearing a tie and suit as a developer may raise eyebrows.
Twitter and Snapchat are big projects based on small ideas. It's not necessarily a bad thing to narrow your focus.
Conventional cultivars are widely patented too.
Paper Processor – What is fetch, decode, and execute?
HAYAT GEZİNCE GÜZEL: UYKULUK YEMEK İSTİYORSANIZ BEYOĞLU ÖMÜR RESTAURANT
Saw that. Makes you wonder about other BS we see or hear when we call for support. "Our agents are busy with other customers. You are in #5 with a 25 min wait" hoping you'll hang up and drop the support request.
Thanks for posting. Haven't laughed out loud that much in a while.
Some songs to practice hearing the sacres :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM05U9rHdwY - Fourrer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2sClLoRFOM - Enfant de Chienne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daE5bOnYNNY - god bless the topless
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3Ol8wIYoPQ - la petite grenouille
I guess it's worth taking a look at some more complex open source Python projects. I think pandas [1] is a pretty good example, with a relatively large amount of Python and Cython code.

They start off with a pretty decent amount of unit tests (84% coverage) and make sure it's visible to developers using:

- Travis [2] (has to pass on pull requests too before contributions are accepted)

- Coverage [3]

There's also Code Climate [4] for some more introspection.

[1]: https://github.com/pydata/pandas

[2]: https://travis-ci.org

[3]: https://codecov.io/

[4]: https://codeclimate.com/
Why on Earth would they go through Viglink, rather than modifying the URLs themselves? Is it that hard to add `&tag=reddit` to the end of an amazon.com url?
Can't forget the polite yet still religious based versions.

Being very mad --> Être en saint s'il-vous-plaît
Plan 9 was not a product though. You seem to be arguing against the concept of research in the software world.
I've found my career to be a continuous ebb and flow of feeling incompetent.

Very early on, I started out by learning Perl programming on the job, writing CGI scripts for basic interactive websites. I had no clue what I was doing when I started, but after a while I was pretty good at it (and felt relatively competent). Then I got a job where most of the code was C, which I had done only a little of. After a few years of that, I think I was pretty solid, but then it was time to start learning about Java and its ecosystem. Later, I wanted to do some iOS work, so I had to dive head first into Objective-C and Cocoa - I was pretty lost to begin with, but eventually I got the hang of it. Somewhere along the lines I picked up Python. I struggled for a while (and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to get comfortable with significant whitespace), but I got there.

Now I'm working on updating my web dev skills by learning about React and all of the surrounding technologies. Once again, nearly 20 years into my career, I'm feeling pretty lost and incompetent. I've been through this enough times to know that I'll figure it out, but it can still be pretty frustrating and demoralizing to struggle to even get something basic working.

I think this is just a fundamental part of software development, and of continuing to learn and expand your skillset. It's good to remind ourselves that no one out there knows everything, everyone struggles from time to time, and if we're hitting speedbumps it means we're learning and improving.
I left from Europe to Australia because I drank before going to work (Java dev). Came back 3 years later not only with 7x savings because the startup had a successful exit, but also with a lifetime more of experience, I've learnt how startups worked (and Scala and product marketing and open source and HN, Howdy HN!) and I came back to successfully create mine, and I now own my job. Oh and it's a good step towards product management which I love.
I'm ok with boilerplate when it buys you something useful, like readability, explicitness, and security, as in Ada.
I'd rather go back to what came before Apple: Next cubes. They were sleek, black cubes with better usability and performance than many competitors. Xbox also did great-looking, black boxes. So, one can still differentiate with a good form of black.
Coercion is criminal. Should I stoop to the level of a common racist by FORCING him/her to speak a certain way? I've no right to tell people what they can and can not say, nor will I hold myself responsible for their thoughts and actions. It's their burden to bear.
Montréal will never become some kind of new San Francisco, if we could elect better politicians than fucking liberal party affiliates we could be more like portland, denver and seattle though.
Learned Python in a country where it's not very popular at all. Now I get good salary for the same reason :) and I have literally no competition when applying for a job.
I'm not sure I see it as conflicting meaning versus how C treats boolean expressions. Logical, I want to know if the strings are not equal and that uses boolean syntax to tell me that as opposed to comparing to zero which doesn't convey the meaning of the statement as fast.
Or it could be a sign that Trump is a fascist.
What Does It Mean to Be Poor in Germany?
http://haidrali.com
I have plans to write about topics which I have working including ROR, XMPP(open fire, Tigase ), VIOP ( Asterisk) and quite often Android
It was packaged into a product called Inferno later on.

And it was only "research" because AT&T (or Lucent at the time?) couldn't sell it.
First, large Python projects are much more manageable than C++ projects, even without any tools. It's way easier to debug, much less verbose, you have 100 less possible errors while stuff are easy to refactor.

Starting from here, unit tests will take you a long way. Tox + pytest + coverage.py is the defactor standard for tests now, and will give you peace of mind when editing your code. Tox can run flake8 as well so it's often done.

After that everything is a luxery. You can use mypy to get static typing, you can make sure to have a very good editor checking stuff for you such as PyCharm or Sublime Text + anaconda. You can use CI with something like Travis or buildbot.

I usually make sure to have a .editorconfig file and a clear style convention to easy team work. And I like to use sphinx to write the doc of the project, which you really, really need to do. This include docstring for modules, classes and functions (with Google style for me), comments, but also some manual rst files.

Last, but not least, experience matters a lot. You learn how to organize stuff in your dir tree. I like to split any file bigger than 500 lignes in Python because it's such an expressive language. Having one module for exceptions. Having proper unicode handling from the start. Etc.
“meta” the key to small talk for nerds
Before labeling: "Why wouldn't you label it? More information is better!"

After labeling: "If GMOs are so safe, then why are they labeled?"
The OpsDev manifesto
I don't see how GMO labeling could make the situation worse, as far as I can tell people are currently not looking at the potatoes in front of them wondering whether they may contain excessive amounts of alkaloids or not. People are buying their groceries according to price, past experiences, looking at the photo on the box and maybe reading the nutritional content. They are already eating a lot of stuff they better avoided and they do so knowingly. If they want to know whether it contains GMOs, tell them.
Deciding to finally start demanding bigger raises from my employers by firing them and joining new companies.
Failing to fully investigate allegations of human slavery while part of a large and underfunded bureaucracy !== being a human slaver, in terms of "level of fundamentally problematic cultural values."
It's interesting that a lot of companies complain about a shortage of programmers and applicants, but, at the same time, allow this sort of toxic environment to persist.
No doubt about it. My background is in the humanities! I started out working for a literature magazine and going to college to study philosophy. Then my brain wandered and decided that it wanted to learn about programming, machine translation and related stuff. I do like and value fiction, and you're right: fiction can give you 'big picture' ideas, metaphors and can shape the meaning of our whole experience.