skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, remember that this is effectively Schwab scoring how well a country agrees with them on policy. There's quite a bit of depth to it, but it's not 'directly' measuring competitiveness. It's more like racing form vs. race results.

I also wonder if the very high value of the Swiss Franc artificially inflates the number, but I wasn't able to figure this out from a cursory reading.
Previous discussion, same article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12597442
Refining customer service with better experiences
I would guess that in every instance where these are popular that the local currency is fiat money issued by an unreliable government.
Why not just use a hash of the server list to query whether or not you're up to date? You ping the server with your hash and it replies OK or it sends you the latest one.
what is the best OSM powered navigation app for Android?
The Plot to Put Conceptual Art on ‘Melrose Place.’
>take an average of past block times, compare that with cpu time, and derive a best guess at the current time

But how does that work if the attacker controls your network and prevents you from receiving any blocks newer than the first of april? He can even send you the next (still ancient) block from the blockchain every ten minutes, making everything look legitimate.

If you are cold-starting and have only a vague idea of the date, then you can't defend against this. If you have a sufficiently good idea of the current time that this doesn't impact your threat model, you have already solved your timekeeping problem and don't need the blockchain technique anymore.
ZEIº – the most simple time tracking solution
Awesome, inspiring story. Congrats.
Zarfund Review.. A New Bitcoin Gold Mine or Total Scam?
Ask HN: What is the most robust web app framework?
Kind of disappointed with Node error handling and resilience to crashes. It is bad enough that JS weak typing makes your app vulnerable to whole classes of errors that would not be an issue with other environments. Also, async programming in Node seems full of pitfalls.

What have you found to be the most robust web app framework? The one which allows one to program in the most simple, error-free manner
This is interesting. On one hand it discontinued the iAd product and allowed Developers to go to third party Ad networks. On the other hand it provides a better experience for the user by serving ads when the intent of the user is clear and generating revenue off of it.

I think if Apple prices correctly it has the potential to reduce in-app ads considerably at the same time increasing revenue for Apple because most ads in apps are to download other apps and if relevant apps are served up via Search Ads it could be a better business model than iAds.
I treat pair programming as another tool in my toolkit.

- It can be great when starting out on a project (where I have someone to talk to about patterns for the code and bounce ideas off of).

- I also like it as a means of quickly introducing someone to
an area of the codebase that they're not familiar with.

- Some days my ADHD is way out of whack. I've found that pairing ping-pong style (I write the test, they make it pass, they write the test, I make it pass) can help me when I'm losing focus by making it more into a game.

- Sometimes I get stuck on something, like a weird bug or a complicated problem. I'll grab a pair, and we'll think through it together. It helps a lot to grease my mental wheels.

I don't think that most people advocate pair programming for everyone at all times, but for some people, it works really well for them. If you work at a 24/7 pairing company like Pivotal Labs, they understand and appreciate that not everyone likes working that way, and they hire accordingly.
Cool, finally a use case for the Commodore 64. I had one but it always seemed like an answer looking for a problem. Mine ended up being a game machine and my introduction to tech but I always thought there should have been a better use for it in the business world. Someone really found a use for it. Great!
No, I was not being hyperbolic. When I tried asking a question, the site told me I had to answer a number of other people's questions first (or something along those lines) before I could post my question. It happened on a couple of separate occasions, and then I just stopped trying. Maybe they've removed this restriction since then, but it was sure annoying (and discouraging).
That's certainly possible, but then I still prefer something tangible in response, "Here is the homework you failed to do." You know?

It's too easy just to imply that someone didn't do it, and then sneak a claim in on the side.
The effect of QE on inflation can be seen on Bay Area housing prices. Isn't it roughly a 20% increase YoY? That's the inflation rate.
Apple already has this information, so this is only putting it to use. Plus, they continue below:

> Advertisers have the ability to select user segments based on this information when setting up their campaigns to guide the delivery of their ads. However, no user segment can be smaller than 5,000 people. No individual user data may be exported from Search Ads, ensuring that only aggregate campaign delivery information is available and no individual user data is ever exposed to advertisers.

So individual developers don't have access to this information.
True that Apple's App Store search sucks. I'll give an example: search for Get@ and see the results. Now search for GetAt and you'll see an app called Get@. If you allow @ symbol in the app name then your search should return that app when searched for it.
> a traffic jam increases GDP

What? No, it doesn't, in any possible measure. Those are lost hours of productivity.
Definitely. Especially anytime that food was likely to spoil rapidly and was incredibly valuable, like dairy. It also explains things like pemmican, which clearly evolved from a, "What if I add some berries and pound the ever loving crap out of it?" experimental lineage.
This is...insane. The whole point of the App Store is to help in discovery and I already pay a 30% cut for my app. And now they want to charge me for promoting my app in their store. This should just be a built-in part of the App Store story for the customers. This is why Apple customers pay a premium. Instead Apple sees an opportunity here to make even more money off me / the app authors?

Hats off to Apple. First, they charge developers to even develop for their platform (though this has become free off late). They only allow developing on their Macs. Then they take 30% cut of apps and also in-app purchases. And now they want more money to promote stuff in their store. I don't know what to say. I am sure this will be a raging success as well :/
On Being a Fish
I assumed that he was asserting it to be true, because as my updated comments shows, the metrics do exist. But Apple neither releases them nor does it discloses the architecture/technology (if any) used.
How to Be Innovative Without Inventing
You probably mean Urs Hölzle:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urs_H%C3%B6lzle

ps: expats usually remain expats almost everywhere (as they tend to stick together), what's so inflexible about .ch in particular?
Oh god I know what you mean.
Do you have any evidence for this or is it pure speculation? One counter-example I can think of is Modern Family, which was a less smart, rebellious child who is female -- the Haley character -- and has not to my knowledge received any criticism for "attacking women".
Wired headphones aren't going anywhere, Apple or no.
From their ad copy they say 65% of all downloads come from app store search. If this is true, this is bad news for FB. A huge chunk of FB revenue comes from mobile app install ads bc that was the only method large app developers had to send users to their apps. I previously worked at a gaming firm that spent $5M/month on these types of ads.

If App Store search is effective, this will swing ad budgets away. FB still has all the demographic and audience info, but arguably none of that is important bc all you want to do in those types of ads is attract users who spent. Apple is at the top of the chain, they can do this better than FB bc they have reliable transaction data and FB has to rely on properly instrumented SDKs, then use machine learning to figure out who "might" be a spender, then have the marketing person optimize those ads. Wouldn't you rather just say, target anyone who has previously made a purchase in a game and be done with it?

Another note. I once created a niche utility app that I eventually had to takedown because as an indie dev it was difficult to rise above the ranks, even if the apps above mine were super shitty. I'm going to resurrect that app tonight bc for the first time this might be an effective form of user acquisition. FB ads were terrible bc it is not intent-based and Adwords were terrible because people don't search Google for apps then pull out their phones to download apps (or search in Safari then switch to App Store).
This isn't low compared to much of the country, but is pretty good for the relative quality of life and high salary that we are talking about. This is within walking distance of Pike Place and Melrose Market, music venues (Neumo's, Crocodile, numerous jazz clubs), theaters (Paramount, Moore), light rail to the airport, retail, high paying employment (Amazon, Redfin, Facebook, etc), and some great food/drink options.
A valiant attempt. In practice, I find most discussions with Libertarians quickly devolve into endless whack-a-mole sessions (whereby once you've finished deflating one of their arguments, they just change the subject and move onto another) -- never acknowledging that there might, ultimately, be problem with the thought system as a whole. And that even after essentially banking a good chunk of their adult life on it, it still isn't too late to cut their losses, and move on.
So your plan is to buy a new machine as a result of a software issue, a network issue, or another problem that has nothing to do with the hardware like a corrupted image?

When you have 100 machines, you can probably afford to do this. It would be silly, because when you only have 100 machines, most of your problems will be software or network issues. Still, you can do it and it probably won't cost you a kidney. When you have ten thousand, you can't.

And this is even assuming that your monitoring system notices the problem. All too frequently, you'll notice the problem in some other way. Monitoring systems are designed to detect the things you knew might happen, and problems similar to those. There will be blind spots, it's just unavoidable.
Also, I think it's worth combining this news with the fact that they restricted the length of app titles in order to combat app store seo. Why not just fix search in the first place? This definitely feels like an engineering shortcoming on Apple's behalf.
Google Shopping Express Finally Launches East Coast Service
That's awesome! Male or female?
As an older(40+) female single founder in EdTech, I find it very difficult to attract investment and so have others with the same profile as me. How should we approach fund raising?
> In lua it is customary to bring along your own main loop.
> People often start with one based on select, but later move to libevent, libev, cqueues, luv (libuv), glib or others.

And that is what we provide - yes the toolkit is built around the mainloop we provide. It's a core design concept. It's a necessary thing to have a working UI to drive I/O. Trying to avoid a mainloop is just an order of magnitude more painful and leads to pretty bad design. UI updates are tied in great detail to the mainloop where they actually time themselves to vsync updates invisibly to the programmer for example.

> Neither is there for C.

Yes, and thus a toolkit brings one along. This is the case for sure for GTK+ - that mainloop is glib. That's how this works. Trying to avoid a mainloop or just choose whatever one you like is also like asking "well I want to use GTK+ for this widget and Qt for this one, and maybe EFL for this other one... in my window". If you jump through enough hoops and create enough ugliness it might be possible, BUT it comes at a cost. Trying to avoid this pushes everyone into the loweest common denominator design which basically means "assume X11, a window and draw commands and you call a 'draw me' function, then have more functions to push in events etc." ... this gets insanely complex once you start dealing with sizing, layout logic which differ, and not to mention you just screwed the pooch on deferred rendering, trying to to real acceleration e.g. via OpenGL because this is no longer even close to optimal etc. ... and mainloops are similar (though simpler). you can squeeze them together with some effort but trying to design without one and "well go bring your own" just leads to incredibly horrible API as well as overhead for the developer.

> The 'sample' lua application is quite often used as a runtime; if your library can't be used from it, it won't be useful for the majority of developers.

that's not of much if any concern to us as we provide a runtime already.

> In elua you still have to load in the bindings yourself (via require).

that will change as its simply boilerplate someone shouldn't need to go from zero to working app.

> I have no idea how this is related. lua already has tools to pack resources into one executable (e.g. srlua). but you can use any tool/method you want. This doesn't dictate the main loop used in any way.

If your source and resources are packed into a single file then the executor needs to be able to read from that file and unpack stuff from it FIRST before a single line of any lua code is run. it has nothing to do with mainloop etc. - it has to do with features existing before any lua code is run.

> you just use #!/usr/bin/env lua. Which will pick up whatever the user/distro has picked (e.g. a user might use debian update-alternatives). If you need a particular version of lua, use `#!/usr/bin/env lua5.1` which is the generally accepted shebang.

perhaps ONLY on debian... because on arch i can have both lua and luajit installed and /usr/bin/lua is PUC lua ALWAYS and /user/bin/luajit is from luajit - always. env will not work here as the command is actually totally different.
So I was under the impression that most non-functional fireplaces were once functional. But I also am used to older houses, I grew up in a town with a lot of older construction.
That's a very engineering-oriented viewpoint. But it won't matter. As soon as the $$$ factor tips in automation favor including potential for lawsuit payouts it will happen.
I only use the search when I know what app I'm looking for. Wouldn't that would drive up the numbers artificially -- as I had the intention of downloading the app before I began searching.
People are already paying to promote apps though. I've heard of plenty of app developers paying for huge numbers of app installs in bulk in order to get them to the App Store's top downloaded lists. This is Apple trying to capture some of that market and bring it away from these kinds of shady practices.
> This is the attitude and experience of a misanthropic person, not a left-brained person.

Disagree with both you and the author here. This is simply being "heavy" on the introvert scale. It really depends on when the aggravation is invoked. If it's invoked before the draining part then yeah probably misanthropic but if it's invoked after the draining part, that's definitely a "natural process" that could occur in any compu..human :)
Do any of the big ad companies sell your data? Google? Facebook? It's the same thing. I don't want them to need to learn everything about me. What they want to do with that info is secondary.
> Compare this to Hieroglyphics, where the glyph representive of a loaf of bread could mean either an actual loaf of bread or the abstract phoneme /t/. Specifically, a logogram represents an idea regardless of its pronunciation. This is not what we see in "text-speak"

"u" does not have the pronunciation /ju/, it has the name /ju/.

And we specifically don't see that egyptian glyphs "represent an idea regardless of its pronunciation". Look at the story of the decipherment:

> Champollion focussed on a cartouche containing just four hieroglyphs: the first two symbols were unknown, but the repeated pair at the end signified 's-s'. This meant that the cartouche represented ('?-?-s-s').

> Champollion wondered if the first hieroglyph in the cartouche, the disc, might represent the sun, and then he assumed its sound value to be that of the Coptic word for sun, 'ra'. This gave him the sequence ('ra-?-s-s'). Only one pharaonic name seemed to fit. Allowing for the omission of vowels and the unknown letter, surely this was Rameses.

( http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians/decipherment_... )

That's the glyph "sun" being used because of the phonetic value of the word "sun" coinciding with part of a name. The idea goes unused (at least, the glyph is not marked with the logograph mark). That's precisely what we see in text-speak.

(Side note: while the vowel of Coptic "sun" might be /a/, this is a rare case where the ancient Egyptian vowel is known, and it is /i/. Fortunately, the general omission of vowels makes this mistake irrelevant.)

> "2" and "two" and "to" and "too" all have exactly the same pronunciation /tu/

This is not correct. "to" is a clitic; its pronunciation differs from the others, which means in particular that "to" and "2" have different pronunciations. That doesn't stop "2" from substituting for "to" on occasion.
It only seems not to be a joke when you discount that we're taking on societal debt in the form of looming healthcare/retirement/education expenses. This will reach an end.
It is a built-in part of the App Store. But the app store is so crowded that once you fall off the front page, there's not much you can do within the store (besides hope that Apple decides to feature you after some big update). The reason why search ads are actually good for customers is because it promotes apps that are backed by companies that a) still care about their app, and b) can afford to actually promote the app. This means the app is much more likely to be under active development and to be usable in the future. And surely any company that's interested in search ads is already purchasing ads on web search engines and whatnot, so it really shouldn't be a big deal.
I understand what microservices are, but I can't understand what 1700 pieces of unique functionality of Uber could be abstracted into their own services. I am struggling to even think of 100, so I was curious what exactly some of these things were, and how they structured things to need so many service dependencies.
Can you elaborate? I am not familiar with the specifics of Diebold's problems and how a voluntary audit (which they could choose to keep private and use for internal assessment) would hurt them more than not knowing the risks.
Hmm - some teams are just toxic and there's nothing much to be done. Although having said that, there is abook about turning around a toxic team: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/206309.Fish_

I would either wait until the worst people have moved on (if there is a high turnover) or find a similar job elsewhere. If you explain this in job interviews, people should understand.
I drink alcohol once per week, give or take. I drank a bottle of wine on Saturday and it didn't bump me out of Ketosis. You have 50 carbs to spare typically without completely exiting. A bottle of wine is about 20-25.

Liquor has 0 carbs unless it's infused with something.
I tried this – on a visit to Iceland, my (older) family friend / impromptu tour guide made me and my traveling companions taste it. The young Icelandic locals in the rest area laughed their asses off and snapchatted the whole thing, because "no one eats that anymore, it's for old people obsessed with traditions." Makes sense, it was truly disgusting. The Hvalspik (https://guidetoiceland.is/history-culture/the-worlds-most-di...) really was quite interesting though.
W3C will enable one click payments with Bitcoins in all web browsers
> "while the optimistic bunch is too busy building their own interesting stuff."

I am also dismayed by the general pessimism in this thread, though I think there is a third (and IMO most likely scenario):

Anyone who has actual direct, inside knowledge of this field will not write publicly about it for a litany of incredibly obvious competition/secrecy reasons. The people most qualified to speak on these matters are staying silent.
We recently decided to move away from leaflet for our indoor mapping component. There are some things that we discovered that leaflet is not good for:

1. Drawing annotations

There are plugin options but Leaflet editable is quite buggy and convoluted, and leaflet draw is still on 0.7 and we couldn't wait for their 1.0 upgrade.

2. Large image overlays

There is an awkward space between an image that the browser should be able to handle even if it's quite large, and one that requires tiling. We fell into that space and there are some seriously nasty bugs in Chrome when imgs are huge. Since leaflet just uses an <img> tag for overlays this was a killer.

3. Lack of map rotation

There is a fork that implements rotation, but we couldn't rely on that to stay up to date with mainline.

Overall I still really like leaflet and would use it in a heartbeat for any more normal mapping application.
Ahh yes, more fees for developers.

> it's basically impossible for an unknown developer to get noticed

They could improve the search algorithm to solve this. Perhaps redesign the app store UI to better accommodate new apps. Or they could stagnate for years and then solve the problem by charging developers more.

I'm not a hater though.
> Honestly it is the first time in my life that I hear the association computer science - Switzerland..

Some names you might recognize:

* Niklaus Wirth (Pascal, Modula-II, Oberon etc.; retired professor at ETHZ)

* Jurg Gutknecht (Oberon; EHTZ)

* Erich Gamma (one of the "Gang of Four" behind the Design Patterns book; co-wrote JUnit; studied at University of Zurich)

* Urs Hölzle (Google SVP of Technical Infrastructure at Google; studied at ETHZ)

A lot of people can also be traced back to Wirth. E.g. Andreas Gal that did his thesis on trace trees for JIT compilation is German, and did his thesis at UC Irvine, but his advisor was professor Michael Franz who did his thesis on runtime code generation before Java was released under Niklaus Wirth.
Traffic Is Fake, Audience Numbers Are Garbage
I can't find the benchmarks that I'd based my comments on to be honest, and I have to get back to work. :|

From what I remember, the final version of Angular 2 added a lot of performance, which pushed it ahead of the latest React in performance.

I did find this:

http://webscripts.softpedia.com/blog/recent-benchmark-shows-...

But the Auth0 benchmarks disagree and show React is faster:

https://auth0.com/blog/more-benchmarks-virtual-dom-vs-angula...

Angular 1 is terrible performance-wise; that much is certain.
I can see the argument though; the Egyptians had very different cities from the rest of their contemporaries, much more spread out and, well... planned. "First" though, is clearly hyperbole.
THROW MORE BUZZWORDS AT IT
the appeal _should_ be the same as reddit/hackernews

some people post a piece lots of people should see, some people chat publicly, and the rest lurk and ingest passively. instead of the same conversation happening over and over and over in isolation, you can see and learn from what other people are talking about.
>Ahh yes, more fees for developers.

Developers (including myself) are already paying these fees to Google, Facebook and Bing in the form of app install ads. We'll likely get more more bang for the buck directly on the App Store though, so IMO it's a win for developers.
App Store Search Ads Now Available
This is poor logic. Promoting has nothing to do with how well supported the app is. All we will see is people with money push their apps and trying to make up for that money at the cost of the customer.