skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ive got a similar problem, dealing with a rails app i inhereted that collects telemetry data from thousands of remote units traveling out in the field.
Basically there is no separation at all of active record and buisness logic. You end up with connections to ftp servers and other application layer adapters down in active record models.
With all of the application layer in the AR models its only a matter of time before the developers end up weaveing a thick carpet of spaghetti dependency through everything.

On top of that changing the database becomes a royal nightmare because the database is what defines this AR model that all of your buisness logic and application layer spaghetti dependency relies on. The databases usually end up full of garbage because without complex validations and lots and lots of tests which by the way were never written ruby and rails will dump any trash into your db whenever. So you end up with columns with like 10 variations of the definition of NULL or FALSE.

Usually around this point your app just slips into a state of quantum uncertainty. It essentially ceases to behave deterministically at least when viewed from within the bounds of human perception.

Its hard for experienced developers to bend rails in away so that things don't become overly dependent on each other and neigh impossible for average or beginner rails developers to manage.

Im just really not impressed with rails at all especially coming off of 6 years of development time on huge enterprise apps written with the c# .net libraries. I mean really they are light years ahead using IOC dependency injection for injecting service apis into controllers while using mapping patterns for keeping buisness and database logic separate. Its the only way to break up large apps and keep them sane and maintainable. Additionally static typing is the only thing that keeps things sane in really large applications doing complex business logic through many layers of interfaces.
Generally speaking better to go that route anyway.
More than that, in the case of cards that use the credit card numbering system, instead of just ordinary bank cards, the number itself is algorithmically generated and the last 4 digits (specifically the very last one) act as a kind of hash check (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm). Not that police or cashiers are likely to know that.
I recommend you read the Mr. Money Mustache site[1], it has some great tips (although a bit US related). But one of the insights which is relevant to your question is this: Why work alone? Let your excess money work along side of you.

So yes, you have to learn to invest your savings so that they are growing in value while you don't need that money to live on. And because the rate at which they grow is proportional to how much you have saved, the more you have saved the more "extra" money you will get each year. Let's say you're 25 and you are banking $50K of your $155K salary every year, ($22K into 401k, and $38K into savings). If you're savings makes an average of 5 - 6% per year, then after the first year you are "earning" an extra $1,900, the second year ($39,900 + $38) an extra $3,895. Etc. 20 years later you are earning an extra $63K a year in interest on $1.3M in savings. Plus your 401K is worth another $1.3M so you're net worth is $2.6M and if you can start paying yourself about $100,000 a year for ever (nearly all money you keep since its taxed differently than regular income).

But if you want to live a lavish lifestyle and own a jet etc, better shoot for becoming an overpaid member of the C suite (CEO, COO, CTO, CIO, Etc).

[1] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
Basically this. Certainly not the worst language (SAS), but intangibly less pleasurable than python or most other common languages I've used. Maybe that's because I'm not a 'real' stats person though and ~ notation still takes me a minute to grok. And there is no challenger on he horizon for it's dominance in available packages. And at least it's not SAS.

My theories:

A) Stat people use R because because they don't know any better
B) Stat people use R because code monkeys use python
C) Stat people use R because stat people use R (probably this)
Is this a result of "hacker culture"? I.e. there seems to be a a pathological trend on HN of "fuck a CS degree, I can learn to code in a week" type of mentality. You have people who believe they can "hack" their way through complex fields without having a theoretical underpinning in it. No need to learn mathematics, you just need to "understand the main idea", code something up, run a bunch of simulations and tweak constants, run more simulations, etc. until you have some incremental improvement, write it up and publish.

It's the difference between giving a "brute force" computer proof like the four color theorem than try and come up with new theory where it's just a result from it.
I am interested. Sending you my resume.
The license for prototyping seems to be the same one for release. And Qt isn't offering me a free product, their terms are pay then develop your software. At least in my context.

In any event the only issue is the weird quirk of the Qt commercial license preventing you from switching to commercial from LGPL. Which I and apparently a few other people in the thread really didn't get at first.
In cultures where it is "considered woman's animal" the chickens provided by Heifer will most likely be raised by them. These woman will help bring in money for their families. That is what is empowering.
D) Stat people use R and Python, depending on what best fits the use case.
Cambly (YC W14) is hiring software engineers who are passionate about education
Ask HN: What do you think about an online startup competition like Venture Hunt?
Venture Hunt is giving away $300,000 and has amazing judges ready to give actionable feedback to founders. How can this succeed? What will it take to make a digital competition like this valuable to founders? See : venturehunt.org
New Free Version of SQL Server Performance Monitor
> I left my job in January so i could work on ContractBeast 70+ hours a week. The rest of the team kept their day jobs. That was fine. It made my final decision easier.

Reading between the lines here, I'm picking up some resentment. I think an underlying cause of the decision to walk away from ContractBeast might have been a specific subtype of founder burnout -- the kind that happens when you feel like you're pulling more than your share of the weight, and/or you feel like you're more committed to the company/project than the rest of your team is.

There's a downvoted comment at the bottom of this thread stating that the commenter would never give this guy money. That's a bit harsh, but at another point in the comment he makes a very (IMO) valid observation that burnout is at play here and the author should have taken some time off. That rings true to me.

Also,

> Weeks of brainstorming and dozens of hypotheses later, we had nothing. Not a single, plausible way of providing our users with the instant gratification their cerebella so desperately crave.

> With no clear path forward, investors ready to wire funds, and the team ready to quit their day jobs, I decided to pull the plug.

Is it just me or does this seem like there's a big hole in the plot here? The whole team spent several weeks trying to figure out how the product was going to get traction, came up with zero good ideas, and everyone's still ready to quit their jobs and work on this full-time?

Assuming this is accurate and absent further details, I can think of two non-mutually-exclusive hypotheses for how this might have actually happened:

1) "We had nothing" was really "I had nothing". Either because of a failure on the part of the author to communicate with the team, or their indifference upon hearing the author's description of the problem in question, the only person really working on solving the problem was the author. To the extent that this was the case, it would certainly have exacerbated the "I'm working way harder on this than my cofounders are" burnout described above.

2) It's also possible that the other prospective cofounders and/or early team members were aware of the headwinds facing ContractBeast and just really, really hated their day jobs and were thinking, "I honestly don't even give a shit if this company works out, I just want to go somewhere I can get paid while not having to deal with my current boss, and if it fails it's not a big deal, it's a startup, they fail all the time and I'll be able at a minimum to use the newfound flexibility in my schedule and relative seniority in the organization to make myself much more available for interviews at other companies."
Project yourself as a highly skilled wage slave
"It was designed to make it easy to write quick, "one-off" programs in C."

OK, so it just so happens this is what I love to do. I like writing small programs and continually trying to improve them.

So I guess I should be a UNIX user?

Is NT not good for this too?

BTW, I do like VMS. But despite the NT kernel, using NT feels nothing like using VMS.
I think he refers to this meaning of mocking: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mock
> They feed practically on everything (cows are a lot more picky)

While technically true, if they don't get their preferred foods they are a lot more prone to parasites which decreases the amount of goats you can hold on the same plot.
Flask-Konch: An improved shell command for the new Flask CLI
Demo mattermost server you can create an account on
If you have heard about slack alternative mattermost but haven't tried it yet... I setup a server:

https://utc24.org/signup_user_complete/?id=cfzmajmnaiybigpemska9mk16e

HN programmers welcome.
> It's 100% about accessibility over aesthetics.

That surprises me, since when I visit Amazon's UK homepage my fan kicks-in and there's a noticable delay before I can start typing-in the product for which I want to search; all so that they can load an enormous Prime promotion carousel and rows upon rows of 'product suggestions' in which I have never shown any interest. Today it includes pearl ear-rings.
World’s most elite conference this year will discuss “precariat”
> All of these languages have libraries that produce the same results, the difficulty is mangling the data into the correct input format. Python's list comprehensions are much, much easier to use than MATLAB matrices, R's data frames, Java's ArrayLists, etc.

At the end of the day, for machine learning applications, your data is in a tabular format. (in Python, a pandas data frame) Yes, Python has a few tricks like list comprehensions for speeding up data processing into that analyzable form. R has a few tricks for processing tabular data as well. (e.g. dplyr).

There are tradeoffs and the skill is finding which works best. Using a single programming language is a bad philosophy even for non-statistical developers.
It's possible, sure. I haven't been involved in the negotiation phase of any of the candidates so I couldn't tell you for sure how much back-and-forth there was. I can only tell you that the company I work for is very competitive here (think top 5 bay area companies.)

But when you see that it's literally Netflix's message that employees should go interview somewhere and bring in the offer to get their salary bumped, it starts making you not trust that the candidates are actually serious.

(Also I edited my comment after, but before I saw yours: We didn't just develop a theory about it, but there was a rumor that Netflix had this internal policy. I didn't believe it at first but here it is.)
When PayPal started, they were beaming money between PDAs. Then after a while when their curves were no good, they noticed that some confused users thought that their Confinity website that described how to beam money, was actually the place itself to transfer money to others. Then they pivoted. Then this new product was not viral. Then they started paying $10 when you open the account.
> More importantly, subscriptions are immoral because the end result is robbing users of any sense of ownership.

I don't know why people allowed this transition from software ownership to subscription to happen (although they really weren't given the choice). It's ridiculous that the customer is giving away his MS Office ownership in exchange for the marginal improvements that MS has been doing in the last couple of releases.

Most people here on HN (me included) would benefit from this development but I agree with you: subscriptions are immoral.

PS: IntelliJ IDEA it's great but it is ridiculously expensive imho.
Four Elements on the Periodic Table Get New Names
The other issue with Adobe's shift to subscriptions that upset many is that you absolutely did not need a subscription for Lightroom and Photoshop for most users. The small incremental changes were not needed by many, and if a new feature came along worth paying for they would upgrade. This was very forced.

Sure, charge a subscription for Creative Cloud but taking software that worked fine without a subscription, tacking one on under the guise of perpetual updates and killing access if they stop paying stinks of doing what is best for the business, not what is best for the customers.
> Why do many enterprise software companies offer free (or low cost) trials then?

So does Qt. So much so in fact, they even offer an entire free product; evaluate it all you want. Just don't use it to build a commercial product while paying zero dollars and then come back when it's half-built and expect to dictate pricing terms after the fact.

> Does the company that you work for (or yours if you're a founder) take the same "take it or leave it" attitude towards potential customers?

I'm not going to talk about my work here. I'm writing on my anonymous behalf only. I've worked at places that were more or less liberal with evaluations and more or less tolerant of tiny accounts. I have never worked somewhere that salespeople loved customers who wasted their time asking for freebies and handouts with illusory promises of future money that never seems to materialize.
Build it on some cloud server.

I built my own images for the emulator and an Odroid mini computer, but never for any phone. The source tree is some 9 or 10 GBs, and I realized somewhere around the 2 GB mark that cloning it on my home connection is a waste of time and bandwidth.

So I built them on a Linode 4GB server. Network and hard disk speeds were magnitudes better than anything at home. Took around 4-5 hours of reading and understanding the process (see links below) + 2-3 hours for each build.

Removing vendor apps from the image is a simple matter of removing them from the correct config files. Since HTC seems to be a good open source citizen and makes their source code changes available, removing vendor apps and rebuilding an image is probably not very difficult.

[1] http://source.android.com/source/index.html

[2] Building Custom ROM (2 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_H4AlQaNa0

[3] Karim Yaghmour's Embedded Android series (4 videos): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLUXPxxJc5c
90s were all about JS, how could we forget Doc Ozone? (http://www.ozones.com/)
I think once they've degraded a bomb is apt. Not in the hollywood exploding car sense, but like a more realistic anti-personnel explosive complete with shrapnel. In most real bombs its the shrapnel that kills not the blast itself.
Microsoft has published its own distribution of FreeBSD 10.3
Life in Circadia
I haven't done much real work on Windows in like 10 years (before which it was most of what I did) and I'd still kill for an IDE for C++ half as usable as even VS6 was on Linux.

Particularly when it comes to integrated debugging, what we have on other platforms pales in comparison imo.
The naming for particles in particle physics is much more fun.
Redis web down
Please don't down vote this comment. He is making a salient point about why it might not be a good idea to quit at such an early stage. Whether it was the right decision for Contract Beast or not, he is trying to provide a counterpoint to the idea of giving up by providing an alternative anecdote. Some people in a similar situation could use the boost.
If you haven't looked at the R ecosystem in awhile, there is a package for each of those use cases. (scraping/API: rvest; database: dplyr; parsing text: stringr, etc).

Yes, Hadley Wickham is primarily responsible for the popularity of R.
> He who controls the quicklisp controls the universe!

Too true, that's my main complaint about ql since day 1. Give me a simple way to define a ql-repo hierarchy and I'll be fine with it. I did invest a few hours maybe 3 years ago but realized that it's too much work (research and patching) to allow for that. Recent developments (author pitching for money in ql context) make me even more worried :(.
I feel like I've had a chance to be on both sides of this issue. I hate visiting a site and having the page jump around a bunch while all the ads load. And then dodge the ads. I also pay a lot for advertising. I get that it sucks for every body. I have sympathy for NYT. This stuff doesn't get written for free. I don't have any ideas to contribute yet but they aren't wrong to need to put their foot down and readers aren't wrong to want an alternative. It's a weird time for the net.
I believe it will pay dividends for Microsoft that they're being more encouraging of this kind of thing. There's a few reasons so many of the best developers work at Google (for example), and one of them is that Google opens a lot of stuff, and actively encourages open development. I, personally, wouldn't work anywhere where I couldn't contribute to Open Source communities at least part of my work day.

Microsoft knows how important developers are for a platform company, both inside and outside of the company (as evidenced by very good salaries, real offices, etc.). I just think it took them a few years to notice that one of the things good developers value is community. Now that they've figured it out, they've begun making changes. If you'd asked me 10-20 years ago, "Hey, would you ever consider working for Microsoft", I would have laughed. Today, I'd probably still say no, but I wouldn't laugh, and I'd probably even think about it for a minute or two.
App Store Subscription Uncertainty
I came here to say those words exactly.
It's not even the licencing fees in my opinion. It's that it has had the equivalent of 200 Potterings run amok in it for 30 years. There are so many things that will eclipse any advantage from IO completion ports.
Actually, it mainly just assumes the author knows C. If they had they could have simply taken cURL and written some wrapper functions to do the JSON query part and the syntax highlighting, then submitted their modifications. No extra project needed, no grand vision required.
I think it's best to play it when you have something you want to do, build or prove and to read about others playing it when you want a story.

I haven't really played the game itself for a while now, but I still love reading the stories of others playing in it.
Terrible. It's just a list. No examples, no feature comparison, no analysis.

After reading this article, did you know that FakeItEasy is very slow, so is unsuitable for fuzz testing? Or that NSubstitute can't mock statics, but Microsoft Moles (absent from this list) can?

I do, because I had a developer in my team do that investigation before we decided to standardise our unit testing stack.
Indeed, I do. Thank you.
The Linus myth makes an appearance. Nobody's heard of GNU.
Perhaps they are on senior status: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_status
Why not go to any Western country with a functional police force? e.g. the UK, Australia, Sweden
Passwords for 32M Twitter accounts may have been hacked and leaked
It's currently getting the best results, which isn't exactly the same.

Deep learning undeniably works well. It works so well that it has almost completely taken over the field, sucking the oxygen out of other parts of the field. This is a little disconcerting since no one really understands how much of deep learning's success is due to a) the algorithms themselves vs. b) the massive amount of data and computational power being thrown at vision problems.

There is something to be said for some "counter-cyclical" efforts to encourage people to keep exploring approaches that aren't just slightly different network topologies, or least to ensure that they're not totally forgotten. That's the message I took away from the article.
A Rubidium reference gets you down to the 1us/day range, cesium gets you down to a tenth of that. It all depends how much you're willing to pay.
Plus a lot of headaches of maintaining a machine and an OS running on that machine that cost you if you value your time. Static sites + platform = stateless.

I'd compare this service to CDNs + HTTP Object storage combos like CloudFront+S3. (Still makes this look expensive since those cost cents/GB)
> The license for prototyping seems to be the same one for release. And Qt isn't offering me a free product, their terms are pay then develop your software. At least in my context.

Their standard Qt for Application Development license gives you a free 30 day evaluation period. Also, I don't think any of this encompasses simply examining the free product without use in product development, e.g., reading the APIs, documentation, and source code. That's a lot of freebies, that you don't necessarily get with other commercial products.

> In any event the only issue is the weird quirk of the Qt commercial license preventing you from switching to commercial from LGPL. Which I and apparently a few other people in the thread really didn't get at first.

There's no weird quirk. As they state, "If you have already started the development with an open-source version of Qt, please contact The Qt Company to resolve the issue." If you have money, they will take your money. But if you want to develop a commercial product and use Qt up front then you have to budget for it. If you can't afford it then use something else. No one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to develop a proprietary product with Qt.
What makes you assume that the cURL project wants to support features like syntax highlighting, a second style of command line arguments, ... and would accept such contributions?
OpenNIC is a user controlled Network Information Center offering a democratic and non-national alternative to the traditional Top-Level Domain registries. http://wiki.opennicproject.org/HomePage
https://existentialtype.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/haskell-is-...
Yeah, it's mind-blowing that a guy who refers to himself as a "UNIX Historian" doesn't mention Stallman even once.
Soldiers aren't allowed to unionize. Some tried it during the Vietnam war. It didn't work.
How to be Big on YouTube (overwatch gameplay)
The world isn’t ready for Google’s Instant Apps
N queens on fpga [pdf]
I'm sure the fact that this was in private beta had nothing to do with the fact customers weren't using it all the time.
This isnt unique to 2016; it has been true since the invention of copyright.
Wouldn't the practice of "A" players only hiring other "A" players imply a certain monoculture to your team?

Do you hire junior "A" players who aren't really at the levels of skill or professionalism as their senior counterparts, but who have the potential to be and can still be given economically viable work to do? Do you call these people "lowercase 'a' players" or something?

How do you count on your "A" players to recognize top talent in slightly different domains or areas of expertise?

How do you account for people being creative and unique, like the person who has a background in something else but who adds value by being able to bridge cultures and bring new, unfamiliar ideas to your existing "A" players?
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Effective Ways to Improve Customer Experience in Call Center