skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Large internet companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter have shown that single monolithic codebases do not scale to large numbers of users, and crucially large numbers of developers.

How is that true? These companies have shown that you can scale well if you don't have monolithic approaches, but that doesn't mean that you cannot scale if you have one. Just because someone is successful by using approach B doesn't make approach A unsuitable.

Quite the opposite. Some banks handle more than a billion transactions per day on monolithic infrastructure (think of big investment banks with a sizeable amount of trades per day). It's very costly, but it does work reliably.

EDIT: One thing I don't get: Most banks use a central database somewhere because you need to have accounting values that you can rely on (e.g. how much money you have on your account). How do they do that? They must use some synchronization with locking that works across all services which rely on them, but how will that scale well when they get dozens of transactions per second? How do they guarantee the integrity of their data?
It sounds like you're about to re-invent the failures of "One Laptop Per Child".

The one thing people in poor countries do not want is special weird incompatible systems designed for the poor. They want a solution which is adequately close to the western ones, just cheaper. Look at cellphones: http://qz.com/451844/africas-smartphone-market-is-on-the-ris...
What you'll often find however, is that in the last step ("make it fast") you have limited room to maneuver, because of the stuff you did in the first 2 steps. If you really need high performance, you need to design for high performance, not just leave it as an afterthought.
I honestly can't see why people care so much about having long update windows. Batteries simply aren't good for many cycles so it doesn't make sense to support a phone for longer than its battery will last.

Also, it's a pretty reasonable assumption that users who don't care to be on the latest hardware don't care to be on the latest software.
I don't like this idea because it sacrifices ease of use in order to make small savings during the development phase. You shouldn't subject your users to extra grate where possible, and I think this is especially true for a government site.
Magical Thinking
http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/...

In Chrome Canary 55.0.2866.0 the noscript element contains a text node and a link element. This matches the spec as far as I can tell; whitespace is allowed in noscript in head.
> it's to encourage people to actually visit the link.

You read the links? I'm just here for the commenting. If the comments imply the article is good enough I'll read it.

(This effect used to be very strong on the Guardian's commentisfree site, where the top comments often contained valuable correction/context to the tritness of the article)

> Next, we'll have people just copy-pasting the entire article body as a comment

I've seen that done a few times; it's useful if it's paywalled/adwalled/unusuable-crashy-javascript-walled.
I work at Monzo.

I agree that using microservices and kubernetes is not what allows us to provide a good user experience. We could provide the same user experience if we had built everything on rails and postgres. In fact, that would have been much easier.

The reason we are investing so heavily in a rock solid platform is that we want to still be able to offer the best possible user experience in 10 years time. This is what we mean when we say we want the platform to be "extensible".

Many large banks IT systems are not extensible, in the sense that it is very expensive to make changes. Take, for example, the ability to freeze a card in the app at the tap of a button. A friend at RBS told me that they considered this feature many times, but it took a long time to work out which 20 IT systems would need changing and some of them had been under change freeze for a few years. So eventually the idea was discarded as too expensive.

The freeze card feature would be easy to implement for a startup, regardless of their stack. The key is to still be able to implement such a feature easily in 10 years time :)
Thanks gus_massa, I'll keep this in mind :)
This is where I first saw it, it's a nice form for sharing with other people: http://zenpencils.com/comic/90-ira-glass-advice-for-beginner...
http://xkcd.com/1735/
5 Common Mistakes That Lead to Bad Data Visualization
They are an assault on my visual field. I'd just rather not see them. And I don't like what they stand for. I'm aware that a lot of thought goes into their design, though often it doesn't seem like it. I guess all they have to be is eyecatching, which is what makes them particularly annoying.

Yes I know Nike exists already, thanks very much. I'll choose my alcohol when it's in front of me, thanks very much. I'll search for products when I actually need something, thanks very much. No, your attractive models will not make me buy your products, thanks very much.
PokemonGo player brutally beaten in Central Park
I think you're being unfair on the whole tone there, it's the intro to 'Take the A Train', and people will often substitute it in a dominant chord when improvising.
Should Index Funds be illegal?
They have many talented individuals who could probably figure out what does what with the code they just bought
Edx launches new MicroMasters programs
> But if you have 関係 with somebody in Japan, then that simply means there's some sort of relationship (vendor/customer, former schoolmates, whatever), not necessarily the kind that lets you call in favours.

That's the same as Chinese, though. If you want to say two people you'd use guanxi (”关系不好“ "guanxi bu hao" “have a bad relationship"). Even your above example is used in pretty much the same way guanxi is used. Here's an example from the Baidu entry on guanxi: "小王跟这件事没有关系" "Xiao Wang has no connection to that thing."

From what you write, it sounds like the Japanese use of the word is fairly similar to the Chinese use of it.
Slide – Minimal presentation tool for the web
It's going to be streamed at 9AM PDT (UTC -07:00), which is 2:00 AM the next morning in Sydney (UTC +10:00)
What's sanitized about /r/nosleep? I've poked through that sub a little, but I haven't gone specifically searching for creepypasta elsewhere, so I haven't been able to see a difference.
I want to give Dart a chance, because most of it's features seem quite appealing. I decided to start learning JS/Jquery and then move onto to Dart. The fact that everything comes bundled into Dart as a whole dev environment (IDE, compiling,packaging,) and the interoperability with JS make it quite attractive.
What is your experience doing web dev with and without Dart (JS vs Dart, pros and cons)? I'd be really interested in your feedback!
The Issus genus of jumping insects (planthoppers)[0] have a gear mechanism connecting their rear legs. The gear synchronizes the motion of the two back legs; thereby reducing 'yaw rotation' when jumping[1]. The gear communicates motion faster than a purely neurological system.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issus_(genus)#Gear_mechanism

[1] "Interacting Gears Synchronize Propulsive Leg Movements in a Jumping Insect," by M. Burrows et al Science, 2013.
I can write Perl code in Clojure before I know how not to write Perl code in Clojure.

Actually that saying goes back at least to old FORTRAN programmers from the 60s vs C programmers in the 70s and their ability to write recognizable FORTRAN in C (whaddya mean that in C a variable named i isn't implicitly defined as an int by its very name? and so on).

Thats the pessimistic view. The optimistic view is writing A in B gives you a chance to learn B by replacing small parts of emulated A with bare metal B. Good luck when you scale up and the major architecture of the problem is different when written in A vs B, that won't be as simple as swapping out things.
As a former transportation engineer, I always notice and despise whenever we get overly creative. Could that intersection make us safer? Yes, for all the experienced locals, but absolutely not when you factor in a handful of old, drunk, texting or otherwise unfamiliar drivers, for which it looks like a head-on-collision demolition derby.
Well, I see a lot of problems that are made trivial when you understand certain parts of math.

You can definitely "brute force" a portion of the problems... but some problems just get simple when you can see certain math parts.

I honestly wouldn't say its more math or programming - it's deeply both. More as you get past the first few problems.

My point was more that there are, these days, a good collection of more directed practice tools that don't rely on knowing or learning math.

HackerRank for example is one that has many languages and many problems that don't rely on "math". I like it and it's ilk because you can learn/practice basics without having to know the Pythagoras theorem or Fibonacci's sequence.

I think Euler has a special place in these kinds of conversations because it's one of the leading sites that did this kind of thing. That's why people are always like "Oh, you want Euler". It's what programmers immediately think of with these kinds of questions.
This is really an overly simplistic way to code. I urge people to think deeper up front about performance.

Know your performance goals going in and code accordingly. If you require 100 micro average latency and you coded in Node.js, step 3 will be a rewrite.

Every single line of code I write, I can tell you my performance goals. If indeed it is a simple crud screen by a user, the goal may be "meh, document.ready called when viewed from 100ms browser lag within 1 second". Backend trading code would have different goals..
absolutely agree with your last sentence. But thats not a majority of software written in my experience.

"If you really need *high performance*, you need to design for high performance, not just leave it as an afterthought."

Emphasis, mine.
I'm sure you mean well. You need to pare back the jargon and focus these blog posts on user experience, IMO. As an engineer dealing with all the usual bullshit from higher ups that learned a new buzzword and have to have it right now (even though it doesn't do what they think it does...), an article like this is always going to get a response like mine. And on this forum, I'm not alone.
Disruptor is nonblocking. I think the OP is talking about actual blocking queues which are generally bad in high performance code.
Interesting, although I'd suggest that the problems for RBS in implementing such a system are more a reflection of the complexity and age of their systems than than technology used.

I'm interested that you say you were looking for "rock solid" when you're using what is a pretty new stack. CoreOS and Kubernetes are very new products, innovative, exciting yes, seems early days to describe them as "rock solid".

Out of curiousity did you consider using a more conservative stack (e.g. ASP.NET ?)
Anecdotally, at Bloomberg we're in the middle of ramping up TypeScript support in our core server-side stack. Our custom IDE is Windows based, so it was very straightforward to integrate the tserver into the workflow to give developers the choice of writing vanilla JS or TS with additional annotations we send down to the IDE for the core stack. We have the largest single collection of JS I'm aware of and we're eager to see TS take off as we iron out a few corner cases and really get 2,000+ devs using it daily. This isn't the web or Node, so make of it what you will -- but the tserver integration and ease of layering on top of the existing vanilla JS in a progressive manner made it a simple decision.
TS seemed more willing to interoperate with the rest of the JS ecosystem - gradual typing, external .d.ts files for popular libraries, working with existing build tools and module systems. Whereas Dart felt like more of a gated community where you were expected to do things the Dart way and there wasn't much support for traditional JS.
I'm not so sure. My bank would accept an address change over the phone for 'telephone banking' customers, which is no more secure than an in-app chat. Even if they required me to upload proof via the in-app chat, that would still be 100x easier than the process I had to go through with my bank.

Obviously banks have a lot of regulation they have to comply with but I think a lot of it is simply a case of "that's how it's always been" and a lack of competition due to the high barriers to entry.
They built one of these jughandle intersections near me. Maybe when we have self-driving cars it'll make sense. It takes much longer to get through it, I feel, and it backs up often. Not a fan.
This patent is almost surely invalid under Alice v. CLS Bank, but nevertheless, the patent office granted it so the troll is using to extort companies.
One thing I find surprising is that most geeks seem to be all for Self-Driving cars, yet are heavily against government surveillance. Yet self-driving cars are not only going to offer up much more surveillance data, but also offer a potential 'kill switch' backdoor that would allow nefarious agencies to drive you into a brick wall at 80mph and make it look like an accident.

Once manual cars go away completely, you will not only loose control of your data, but also the certainty that your motor vehicle isn't going to act against you.
In Georgia our fascination is now with Diverging Diamond Interchanges, one is active and another is being placed at Windy Hill and I75. Should be interesting at that location as currently traffic in the area is just murder. Some smaller roads have gotten roundabouts where traffic lights didn't make sense and four way stops were impeding the flow
I'm really fascinated by the idea that physics might be completed in my lifetime. I know it's a naive point of view - people thought the same around 1900, just before quantum mechanics and special relativity were discovered.

I also realise that CERN hasn't made the breakthrough researchers hoped for.

But what if the idea of long-lived particles, or another theory, comes good? It reconciles the standard model with relativity and explains dark matter, and then... it's all over. The rest is tidying up details.

Wouldn't that be the strangest time to be alive? I think some people would be disappointed, but I'd be thrilled.
Nobody knows how long it will take and what it will take to fix the broken patent system. Meanwhile, real businesses are getting extorted.

The cost of unpatenting seems a lot lower than the gross extortion amount. And long-term it just might work as deterrent against patent trolls. Without politicians getting involved.
Illumina, Secret Giant of DNA Sequencing, Is Bringing Its Tech to the Masses
I was also surprised to not see any familiar names from the superrich industrialists in 19th and early 20th century America. Where are the Vanderbilts and Carnagies? I know the industrialists donated hugely to charity and public works, but I'd expect wealth to remain.
Gaussian Processes for predicting the US election
I do TypeScript every day for work, and honestly I don't see the point of it. I'm also of the opinion that the iterator pattern nonsense has ruined generated code quality for ES6 transpilers, and that ES5 getters and setters have made it considerably harder for JS engines to do high level optimizations (dead store elimination, invariant hoisting, load merging, etc.).

The sky is falling.

Anyway, you're not going to dissuade anyone. TypeScript looks visually similar to Java and C# enough that managers will think they can adapt Java and C# teams to it in a couple of days; and they won't know how wrong they are until a month or two have passed.
Usually it's almost impossible to predict where your design flaws would be until you actually use the thing in production. Because you make a lot of assumptions and some of them will inevitably be false. So, make it fast is mostly about changing design.
The authors don‘t draw any conclusions either way ("Our study, being field work, could not establish causation"), but they seem to lean toward the former with this:

Traders in the financial world often speak of the importance of gut feelings for choosing profitable trades. By this they mean that subtle physiological changes in their bodies provide cues helping them rapidly select from a range of possible trades the one that just ‘feels right’. Our findings suggest that the gut feelings informing this decision are more than the mythical entities of financial lore - they are real physiological signals, valuable ones at that.

The suggestion here is that there is a way in which the mind/body are able to rapidly process large amounts of information, beyond conscious analysis/calculation, and report an answer as a "gut feeling", and that the people who have a stronger ability to sense their physiological functions are the people for whom this mechanism is more accurate.

This notion seems analogous with the thinking behind practices like meditation and other mind+body "tuning in" exercises that have long been used in martial arts training to develop better spatial awareness and more precise reflexes.
"I think it’s a bad question because we’re just not good enough at predicting our desires over the long term to be able to answer it. We’re capricious animals. We’re generally fickle and impulsive. We’re maddeningly mercurial"

The conclusion is — motivation is complex. It's hard to understand what makes people stick and no set of objective questions can possibly answer if people will be resilient if things fall apart (which usually do in a startup). Gabriel Weinberg worked for more than five years on DuckDuckGo before getting the first taste of real traction[1]. Some may have worked on a similar scale without even getting any significant success.

Although, humans are fickle by design, it seems some motivation is sticky. That's probably the difference between doing Supply Chain Management and building a Google competitor. The former seems to be an impulsive idea triggered by recently gained facts but the latter seems to be working on something you actually believe in.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/motivation-being-cusp-somethi...
> It's better to have something like "Flow" that does static analysis of the code as you write.

What do you think is the advantage of such a thing? IME they tend to end up as an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a type system.
Patagonia's Philosopher King
I think all the explanations of MCMC are really bad. There is a fantastic visual explanation that I came up with that's really intuitive. It involves the graph of the probability distribution, and walking around the area of it. Unfortunately explaining it in text is hard, I need a whiteboard.
"Yes, especially doing things that are useful to you."

I'd also expand that to say things that lead you in the direction you want to go.

Game development? Healthcare software? Big business? Small business? Big Data and report writing? Database management?

Once you get past the basics there is a plethora of tools and sites... its important to try and veer towards something that meets those goals.

Euler and Math is good - math crosses all boundaries. But Fibonacci isn't as important to UI or Game programming (depending on the game types, of course)
As another commentor said, it very much depends on how much you're paying for support. If you pay enough you can get a much better response than that.

Your open source case is also perhaps a touch optimistic, it implies you have technologists capable of debugging and patching every single part of your tech. stack.

As companies grow and need more software and also as the tech ages that gets less and less likely to be the case in my experience.
6 years! It's a lot of time if you keep in mind that some trolls wait until patents are expired in order to ask for all the infringement fees during the whole term of the patent. They sued a lot of businesses already, more to come during these years for sure.
I think you could have mut visible at the language level, but otherwise have all parameter passing look and feel like Java, without any pointer noise or implicit copying.
I only know about what I see of that guy, plus a knowledge of human nature. Just an observation. Been true since grade school, held true all my life. Why would it change now?
Vimeo is horrible
> caching (and cache-invalidation) is really difficult

That's an urban legend.

Needlessly complicated or over-abstracted general-purpose caching frameworks are difficult, but your dumbest imaginable linear LRU fast lookup is both exceptionally useful and can indeed be done in 10 LoC in a lot of cases.
Self-Driving Cars Must Meet 15 Benchmarks in U.S. Guidance
My first thought looking at the long ramp for right turns is that people are going to miss them and then make their right turns where they normally would (the "dangerous" way).

New Jersey has a lot of this and it results in people reacting by whipping U-turns either in the middle of the road or needing to whip around in random parking lots and then try to cross 2 lanes of traffic to go the other way to get back to the turn they missed.
user’s company has a proxy that blocks some or all JavaScript

This one bites me every day. Websites with their social button / analytics scripts before the main feature JS become unusable if the 3rd party JS errors or fails to load.
Warewolf V1.2.0.1 Has a Test Engine Upgrade Now
It's not just that it transpiles into JS, if you target ES6 pretty much all tsc does besides validation is stripping type information, access modifiers etc. while basically preserving the code structure, including whitespace. Which means that if you ever want to migrate away from TypeScript you simply run tsc one last time and then you'll have a fairly usable JS codebase.
She's spent her life struggling to help children and single parents. Donations fund her charity that has helped millions worldwide. To twist that into something bad is just more of the political smokescreen that plagues any woman in public office.
I would like to see a price for "Natural Gas + Carbon Capture"
Is this function pure?

function make_pair(x, y) {
return { former: x, latter: y };
}
I've seen more performance problems caused by people not having clean code than I ever have from people not thinking about performance from the get go.

I've also seen plenty of performance issues ironically caused by performance hacks wedged in early on.
I would use my dynamic type checker/enforcer to make it pure:

var types= require( 'types.js' );

function sum(arr) {

arr = types.forceArray( arr );
var z = 0;
for (var i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
z += types.forceNumber( arr[i], 0 );
}
return z;
}
I don't think the point of WebAssembly is to target the DOM. I think it it's to provide a common low level API across browsers that many languages can target.
It really depends on what you're trying to cache. Caching expensive calculations e.g. is trivial to get right (use all arguments as cache key) and often you don't even need invalidation (unless your algorithm changes at runtime).
This is the UK. We have a wide variety of terrible national level IT projects provided by private companies.

There's the post office stuff, where errors made it look like sub-postmasters were stealing stuff. Several of those people died by suicide; others went to jail, before the company accepted their software was wrong. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23233573

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32377013

There was the software for the probation service which was abandoned after the budget tripled:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8339084.stm

And there's the health stuff, which cost billions.