skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is HARC currently working on? Is it for now a continuation of the old CDG Labs / VPRI projects or are there already new projects planned / underway?

Also, how do you organize and record your ideas? Pen and paper? Some kind of software? What system do you use? I ask because I'm fascinated by the idea of software that aids in thought, collaboration, and programming - meshing them all together.

I've seen elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940007) that you agreed that many mainstream "paradigms" should be "retired". Retiring implies that you replace. In particular, I'm curious what you would like to see filesystems or the Unix terminal replaced with?
This sounds like something that social network sites such as FB could get into.
What are your thoughts on Ethereum and DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)? Do you believe they will lead to a new way to think about and distribute software? It kind of reminds me of the "fifth generation computer", with constraint/logic programming, smart contracts and smart agents.
Show HN: ViziCities 0.3 – Framework for geospatial visualisation in the browser
Yes, been 10 years since the turning point of web development! Prior, I just call it the dark days. =p
Whenever I've gone to an anime con, it seems like the older genre masters like Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam) were always urging the audience to get to know something besides anime/manga. Specifically to go out and get involved in something to create media about, so as to avoid producing something completely self-referential and navel-gazing. That also seems to apply to the medium of programming. (As in: Do we really need another To-Do app?)

It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.
The UK would probably see that the other way around: let the US join the Commonwealth.
For everyone loving SQLite, you should consider donating to them. I remember a post this last year about the maintainers working on it full time, but making much less than most of us probably do.
I put the "dead" in quotes!

My freshman year I asked my professor why we had to do this one program in Fortran, and after that response, I will never refer to Fortran as "dead" without quotes.
Huh? People have been working on chat bots since forever.

I mean, especially on IRC, with Eggdrop. My favourite was always: https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion

Example: https://github.com/jamesoff/bmotion/wiki/Examples
I've always found this guide[1] to be tremendously helpful to people looking for a good primer on SaaS business metrics.

Important to remember here is that VC funding is not the path for everyone, and what a VC wants may not always fully align with what a business owner wants. If someone has a small SaaS product where the 3x multiple is lower, perhaps that is ok with them if it still allows them to run it as a lifestyle business. Ultimately these things are flexible (with the exception of CAC < CLTV).

[1] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2/
EU is probably more democratic than the USA.
I don't think this is an attempt by Docker to sell tools to make money. They are improving their ecosystem to make their company more relevant which may or may not snowball into other companies actually paying for their services (Docker Cloud, etc).

Few companies are investing in making money by selling tools. Instead, you see Google/Amazon/Microsoft improving their cloud offerings and hoping you will your money there. They are giving away their tools (Kubernetes, Visual Studio, etc) hoping their environments become more attractive to you.

I hope we are not repeating history with the "DAB" the same way the container spec in the past. The industry is tired of these format fights and we need standardization to move things forward. I would put more faith in the "DAB" format if it was announced as something coming from the CNCF or similar. During the keynote the Atomic Nulecule [1] format came to mind... I don't know how it compares but it looks similar.

1 - https://github.com/projectatomic/nulecule
Ansible Container
TIL low level in web dev world means interacting with the file system.

Huh.
Very nice. How long did it take you?
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=A%20Brief,%20Incomplete,%20and...
Alan, while trying come up with a good question, I learned you are a musician. Great! As a fellow musician (also jazz and classical) I'm curious whether you feel this has influenced your engineering.
Picking SQL or NoSQL
There apparently is no visible sign of progress on the Nicaraguan canal project from people in the country (government even).
I doubt it will ever get built, unless the Chinese market goes bananas and they feel its worth financing this.
France: one of the most bureaucratic (borderline kafkaesque) countries, with surveillance laws which are only trumped by the UK is poised to become the next SV?
In person, cash transaction, crowded place? Pfft, then you get arrested because the cops think you're selling stolen goods.
But that's the thing, there's no clear definition of 'exploiting' in the law right now, just a fuzzy mess that judges are supposed to sort out on some ad hoc basis. If you want to go back to physical property law, it'd be more like 'trespass to chattels' anyhow, which is not a good basis to decide these things.

The fact that users are supposed to just guess about what access sites have or have not authorized, with felony charges for anyone who gets it wrong, does not make sense to me when they have the means to express their rules for authorization in code.

That's why I say you should have to intentionally deceive those rules (or their people) to get in.
It sounds like you are attributing this to some sort of surreptitious attempt to "seem relevant", where really it's much simpler. Unless you are working directly on IE/Edge, there is absolutely no "top-down" direction as to which browser you must use.

Truth is, you use what browser you like. On my team (MSFT employee) this is a mixture of Chrome, FF, IE, and Edge, based on personal preference.
What is Jurisdiction?
In a normal company (as in not a startup) you'll work 8 to 16 year round and have at least 5 weeks of vacation, most of them usually to be spent during the common vacation time (Fellesferien) which is in july.

If you're lucky you can expect at a good chunk of extra days days of in may when we celebrate different christian days and of course constitution day on the 17th.

Oh, and at easter you'll have 3 days of. Most people (at least families) take the whole easter week of. Working in the government you'll often find a concept of summer time, where you work from 8 to 15 from around may to sometime in august. Those hours are to be worked extra during the rest of the year though.
Interesting. I'd be curious why they'd do that given the high quality soil available...
Brilliant idea for the theory. It's sort of like, wrap your code in a high-level exception handler, and if it gets triggered for some reason, take your end user to a web page where they might be able to get some help with it. It could take the end user to a Google Search, or a custom "I got this exception in your app and need help with this" form on your web page. Or it could start an "I need help with this" as a new forum topic in a help forum. Or search for a similar topic in a forum. The possibilities for getting your end-user help are limitless...
I think it's really more that the bad "hens" lay many bad eggs, and the good ones only lay one good egg at a time.
It doesn't apply to startup/companies.
I was underclocking when everyone else was overclocking. Because I wanted quiet!
It does seem like upstream scamming would be a huge risk for anyone engaging in drop-shipping or multi-sourced buying. There are a lot of places (e.g. Craigslist) where selling clay iPhones could be pretty safe and lucrative, at which point some of the fake phones will hit secondary markets like Amazon where the middle man gets stuck with the costs.
I've been thinking similar things. Also, diagrams are underrated.

Maybe "reading" is a low tech invention that we just don't have the patience for anymore. Instead we want to "explore" a theory or network of statements or social graph.

It's pleasant to click around in Wikipedia and get a sense for how different topics relate, but reading the (often turgid and boring) prose seems like work.
The problem with Kik's version of bots is that they will face the same problems as apps do right now. Discoverability of bots, 100 bots that do the same small thing vying for user's time, bot overload, etc.

What Kik seems to have is essentially a web browser with a chat interface overlay where instead of typing in a URL you "mention" (summon?) a bot and the bot then gives you a "button" (link?) you can tap to open the web content.

One thing they do get right though is the idea that the bot should disappear once done and not bother you, however keeping marketers from not abusing that is going to require them to restrict that via code (e.g. session timeout)

Ideally I would want a single conversational chat bot that I can summon, ask to perform a task (regardless of what service is chosen to perform the task), select from the options provided, have the task performed. The bot can select an app to perform the task (deep link) or if no app can do it then some bot (if a bot exists to do that task) or a web link.
Would you rather fight one horse-sized ducks, or one hundred duck-sized horses?
Honestly, if nothing else, someone will make it their pet project as a sick joke. Of course, that doesn't mean there'll necessarily be a high-quality or impactful evil AI, mind you... but barring global thermonuclear annihilation it will happen sooner or later.

Your lottery numbers are 23skidoo. Your I Ching reading is ䷍ (Wealth, great treasures, supreme success).
Divide the company 50/50. Share success and failure equally. At 51/49 less than full commitment is structurally expressed both for the minority partner and the controlling one.
Hi Alan,

I'm preparing a presentation on how to build a mental model of computing by learning different computer languages. It would be great to include some of your feedback.

* What programming language maps most closely to the way that you think?

* What concept would you reify into a popular language such
that it would more closely fit that mapping?

* What one existing reified language feature do you find impacts the way you write code the most, especially even in languages where it is not available?
That's a nasty corner case of PA state law, combined with a defendant who failed to respond to claims.
What do you think about a "digital Sabbath," [1] specifically in the context of touchstones like:

Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect [2]
Edge's annual question, How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think? [3]
Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? [4]
...and other common criticisms of "information overload"

[1] http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/
[2] http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html
[3] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/how-is-the-internet-cha...
[4] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...
btw, if anyone has some time (i don't unfortunately, since the env setup is pretty lengthy [1]), it would be great to be able to disable the always-on semantic highlighting [2].

[1] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/wiki/How-to-Contribute

[2] https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/5351
Theory and Practice of Source Code Parsing with ANTLR and Roslyn
I think that's a fair call. CF is an already assembled kit and we're constantly looking for ways to have better and better fit-and-finish. The whole point is to allow operators and developers to have smooth "Day 0", "Day 1" and "Day 2" experiences.

For those who really want a prebuilt Kubernete PaaS, Red Hat built OpenShift 3.

That said, Diego (our scheduler tech) was deliberately architected to be ignorant of Cloud Foundry. Right now it's pretty much serving the historical bias of Cloud Foundry's initial architecture -- applications -- but as the v3 API arrives we're breaking it down into finer grained concepts, some familiar to Kubernetes folk.

At one point, Diego was extracted out into a Kubernetes-like package with the Lattice project, which Pivotal supported for a while. But once we went and talked to developers, they said "well I don't really trust it because it's not a real Cloud Foundry". Hence we pivoted to PCFDev.

If Docker and Kubernetes or Mesos had emerged earlier, it's likely we'd have used them as our building blocks (as we've adopted other components). But when Cloud Foundry was born, none of these components really existed outside of private systems owned by Google or Facebook, or in some respects at Heroku.

Disclaimer: I was not responsible for any of these decisions, or even near to them, so take it all of the above with a grain of salt.
The thing that makes Silicon Valley a hotspot for tech is just a boatload of money controlled by people willing to put it into tech.

Literally any city could be "like silicon valley" if a bunch of rich people start a fund and hand out cash to people creating technology companies. Anything else is just window dressing.
>Chicago

Yeah this isn't happening. We're way too corrupt and taxation heavy for any serious entrepreneurs. Hell, pretty soon Uber and Lyft will be illegal here as the Aldermen just passed a bill to pretty much elimated them via punitive regulation. The tech talent in the midwest immediatly leaves for the coasts, leaving second stringers and die-hards. I can't think of any reason of staying here once you get something off the ground and have basic funding. Even if its a wash economically being this far away from East and West coast tech investors is unpleasant, not to mention the horrible winter and crime epidemic.

>Russia

Skolkovo, Russians SV, failed: In 2009, Moscow unveiled an ambitious plan to build a world-class technology incubator. Then corruption, brain drain, and Putin killed it.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/05/06/the-short-life-and-speed...
Raleigh-Durham-RTP, NC were missing. Edit: Someone added it.
You can get service from a 're-shipper' to mask your address and use gift cards or other prepaid cards to hide the credit card info.
The main point of this, to me (from the README):

A Dockerfile is not much more than a script with hand-crafted shell commands.
We're well past the point where we should be managing build processes with
manually maintained series of shell scripts. That's why we wrote Ansible in
the first place, and this is just as applicable to containers.

I have tried building Docker-based infrastructure solely with Dockerfiles and shell scripts, and for anything but toy apps and really simple microservices, you end up with 90's-era kludge of fragile build steps, and managing, tagging, and updating Docker images becomes a nightmare.

I think using Ansible to build/manage images is a great idea—the actual deployment/orchestration might be better managed by another tool, highly dependent on your service and/or workflow, but Ansible can do that too, for many use cases.

People setting up Kubernetes and a manually-managed Docker image pipeline for simple one-page-apps or brochureware or CRUD apps seems like insanity to me... am I the only one?
Hi, I have a few questions about your STEPS project:

- Is there a project that is the continuation of the STEPS project?

- What is your opinion of the Elm language?

- How do you envision all the good research from the STEPS model could be used for building practical systems?

- STEPS focused on personal computing, do you have a vision on how something similar could be done for server-side programming?

- Where can I find all the source code for the Frank system and the DSLs described in the STEPS report?
If you start with "desirable process" you can eventually work your way back to the power plug in the wall. If you start with something already plugged in, you might miss a lot of truly desirable processes.

Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware.

There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel could make its first level caches large enough to make real HLL emulators (and they could look at what else would help). Right now a plug-in or available FPGA could be of great use in many areas. From another direction, one could think of much better ways to organize memory architectures, especially for multi-core chips where they are quite starved.

And so on. We've gone very far down the road of "not very good" matchups, and of vendors getting programmers to make their CPUs useful rather than the exact opposite approach. This is too large a subject for today's AMA.
Inside a phishing attack
FYI: You presumably meant to write “superseded”. I spent more than a few seconds wondering how the verb, “to seed” would make sense in this context before figuring it out. :)
What do you think of Bret Victor's work? (http://worrydream.com/) Or Rich Hickey?

Who do you think are the people doing the most interesting work in user interface design today?
Have you tried SpiceWorks? What did you think?
Linux and China rule supercomputing's TOP500 in 2016
According to 'Dealers in Lightning' they did not license it when Apple asked the first time. They did when they licensed it to everyone else. This was all pre-Squeak.
Yes. That's how Mint, Digit, and all the other "connect your bank account" apps tend to do it. I've yet to find a major US bank that has anything resembling an OAuth style flow - the closest I've seen is Wells Fargo offering generation of read-only credentials.
If you have ever been a victim of any online scam, Bank account hack and you want to get your funds back as much as possible and even Gather enough evidence to prosecute as well as identify these actual identities or need to check on your partners Criminal records or Investigate a cheating spouse (consultanthackers@outlook.com) he just helps you out with whatever hack or spying activity, anything ! all you need do is get in touch .
classified, certified,and highly professional . call (302) 365-0294 and Thank me later..
rkt does this: https://coreos.com/blog/rocket
Alan,

What do you think of the Pharo project?
Why is storage an issue? With databases, for example, you store data upstream (on the host) and keep the dockerised app/thing mostly stateless, or at least capped with regards to storage. More details about your environment would be appreciated.
The FCC will start to make 5G a reality this week
Lots of prestigious journalism fails at this, or has different goals. Most magazine articles don't start with a concise thesis statement, instead they try to hook the reader with something like "As I made my way up the stairs in the convention center, a stocky man with pale blonde hair stopped to ask me for directions to the men's room." and keeps going with this kind of enticing pseudo-fictional storytelling.
Do you like the culture of Silicon Valley?
Statically typed programming languages or Dynamically typed programming languages?
I'm not sure if your team is large enough for the following question but: do you find that usage ratios are comparable to general (global) browser share stats?
I think I kind of get this. Sounds like Steam accounts. Cheaters galore with family accounts? Rust (game) nailed this by recently deciding to nuke the hen and its eggs.
> Plain text is friendly towards developers. But it’s neither interop-friendly nor user friendly.

Kind of got off track here. You can process a lot of formats as text (html, css, xml, etc). So a BOM there is unnecessary and sometimes detrimental. On the unix side there are a lot of text utilities that do useful things that you can do on these formats. That's probably why BOMs are non existent there.

> MS can’t change the compiler because backward compatibility.

You care to tell MS that? Every single time I've done a major VS upgrade my code had to be changed because something that was valid before stopped being valid.

> And there aren’t any.

If you can't see any benefit of using UTF-8 then I'm done debating with you.
How about hurting the record companies, who front most of the capital for artists, pay them salaries, etc.
> They put up so many procedural barriers to effective takedown that content owners gave up and accepted YouTube's licensing terms, because you'd rather make something than nothing.

Lol what? Have you not experienced the Content ID stuff taking down completely unrelated items and routing ad traffic revenue to the claiming company with little to no appeal process?

There are even groups out there fraudulently claiming to represent a particular copyright owner just to get some money flowing their way (and Google allows it apparently).
Hey Plaid, interested user here! I'm curious why you don't have any pricing on your web page. I'm just trying to do a back of the envelope calculation on how much it would cost to use your service.
I remember a few weeks back, you said that you wanted to take a closer look at the Urbit project (www.urbit.org). Just wondering if you had gotten the chance to do so, and, if so, what your thoughts were.
Maybe i'm not uptodate or misunderstanding, but doesn't Mesos/Mesosphere do something similar?
Depends on cracking this code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUUyCrt7aEE

And enjoying this http://www.orklafoods.no/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/sels...
I think I'd ask "What programming language design would help us think a lot better than we do now (we are currently terrible!)

Certainly, in this day and age, the lack of safe meta-definition is pretty much shocking.
Would love to know more about why you think AdWords and FB is a waste of time and money. Please don't take this the wrong way, but as someone who has managed many accounts of all sizes (up to the multi-million dollar/year range), often times most accounts just aren't setup very well. Not that I can always blame people as there's always work to do, and things constantly change, but the point stands that you may not be able to dial-in a profitable campaign even after spending $5k depending on what your conversion rates are like.

Just as often, the problem is on the website and not the ads as well. For example--and not meaning to knock you here, but perhaps the cartoony graphics are a turnoff to prospects. I don't know, but testing would find that out (which you may have done).

All of that said, sometimes it does not make sense to focus marketing efforts on paid advertising channels like paid search/social, but you can usually do things profitably at a small scale, even if you're just focusing on smart use of retargeting with RLSA or something like that.
I tend to do both in parallel and the first one done wins.

That is, if I have a problem that requires a library or program, and I don't know of one, I semi-simultaneously try to find a library/program that exists out there (scanning forums, googling around, reading stack overflow, searching github, going to language repositories for the languages I care about, etc) and also in parallel try to formulate in my mind what the ideal solution would look like for my particular problem.

As time goes by, I get closer to finding a good enough library/program and closer to being able to picture what a solution would look like if I wrote it.

At some point I either find what I need (it's good enough or it's perfect) or I get to the point where I understand enough about the solution I'm envisioning that I write it up myself.
What role do people like Terry A. Davis (and his TempleOS) serve in imaging what's possible in computing? I'm thinking of Jaron Lanier's idea of society getting "locked in" after certain technical decisions become seemingly irreversible (like the MIDI standard).
London already is the tech capital of Europe so it's not giant leap to imagine "France" to gain some ground
Move more, eat mostly vegetables, sleep enough.