skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For anyone as confused as I was as to why the conclusion is 'inescapable', he seems to actually explain things in the previous blog post[1] and this one appears to just be an additional tidbit on top of that.

[1]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...
s/fragmentation/fragments/

FTFY ;)
Emacs 19 was a model of low-defect, stable software, and my experiences reinforced that widespread notion. Over time and subsequent major releases, it grew and grew, and the complexity got too big to perform adequate QA, now nearing the point of unmaintainability. I also love it and use it daily, but I really wish the developers would show some restraint when considering whether to add new features (i.e., packages).

Having said that, the very core text editing engine, i.e., the part that's written in C and the basic Elisp editing functions around that are still rock solid as always, and for me this is still the ultimate model of what a text processing engine should be. It handles large files beautifully (and errors gracefully when it cannot), does file locking well, goes to great lengths to ensure the integrity of your file, all of that basic core stuff is just superb and well thought out, by a lot of brilliant people over a long time, and that's all very well optimized. I think the problem is that too many third-party extensions are included with the core release.
Monitor your infrastructure with OctoPerf
Been watching this train wreck in slow motion for years.

This has been a long time coming and I am positioned to profit from it.
And cloudflare let's you add free SSL/https to your custom domain.

Github pages supports auto-redirect between www and apex domains (redirecting from whichever you make the primary approach from the other) does that cover your 301 needs or are you needing it more broadly than that?
You have to have the Enterprise Edition to setup a cluster and then it starts to get expensive.
Berlin is also very ethnically white compared to more global cities.
There was an interesting developer talk during the recent TwitchCon where they talked briefly about this.

Also remember that even Amazon has running costs, and I suspect as the autoscaling goes up, the profit margins drop.
Same experience here.

My battery lasted from 100% in the morning down to about 15-20% just after lunch. Thats crazy.

Then I removed all Google apps, Play services, everything to do with Google gone, wiped with a reinstall. Replaced with free open source alternatives, such as OsmAnd and K-9 Mail.

Now the battery lasts 2 days! Yes, 2 whole days! Yesterday morning I had a full charge, now more than 24 hours later it is still at 46%.
But that is the crux of the problem isn't it?

Device/OS proliferation has made android dev pretty complicated these days.
Regardless of the platform, for any application with a non-trivial amount of complexity, iterative development is the best approach. I don't understand how anyone could "write it all down, read through the code a few times and test" and not produce a buggier application that doesn't meet most expectations. It does help to do some initial design work, create abstractions, loose coupling, etc. Iterative development does not mean jumping into coding without a high level plan on how to create the application pieces and how things would work (or do what's called as "cowboy coding").

With the amount of complexity involved in developing applications, considering the architecture, design, interactions between application components, error handling, different classes of platform APIs, UI, UX, state management, concurrency, hardware configurations to support, and many other things, I doubt if any human could really keep all that in one's head and really work through all the possible ways that assumptions during coding would get beaten, when compared to a real execution of the application and using that practical feedback in changing, fixing and improving things.
> Developers do need to pick a set of core technologies, and stick to it or a career can fall apart I bet.

Over time any set of "core technologies" will be legacy and your career will be over. In this business, you'll always need to absorb and learn new ideas, platforms, technologies, languages, etc. or eventually you'll have to do something else.
> Good luck my good friend with having tied your professional fortune to a small company that you are not affiliated with. This is not politics, this is simply dangerous and I do feel that way every time I see someone with a copy of Sublime.

This is just wild exaggeration. It doesn't take more than a few weeks or so to become reasonably productive with another text editor. We like to think that the many plugins and shortcuts we build up over years of using an editor adds like 100% speed increases, while at best its increments of a few fractions of a percent.

And most of us developers are probably familiar with at least two editors anyway. Personally I'm intimately familiar and productive with both emacs and sublime, but still prefer sublime. If sublime were to suddenly close down shop and not release their sources, I could switch on a dime.

> As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything.

In theory, yes. In practice, I've found it much more complex to work with emacs plugins than with Sublime plugins. My conclusion is that overly simple languages like LISP just transfer complexity from the language itself to the code that you're writing.

I'm sure some people find a kind of simplicity there that they like, but people are different.

VIM modal editing is also a thing that may be nice to some people, but personally I find modes to be annoying. It's this state that I always have to keep in sync between me and the editor, and I don't like it. I get the point and the benefits, and I've tried several times, but it just doesn't click for me. So I don't experience that as a simplicity.

> Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex.

I wouldn't call Sublimes GUI shiny. In fact it's quite minimalistic. Even more so than Emacs' GUI if you ask me, especially once you've added all the plugins to match functionality.

Again, it's something about the transfer of complexity. In theory, in its base implementation, Emacs is simpler because it makes few assumptions. But this transfers a lot of complexity to plug-in writers, because you get conventions instead, which often causes problems when plug-ins interact.
Are you shorting or going long? Cause stuff is unpredictable!
Why do you think that everybody is inspired from javascript tech? It is probably the other way around. For example there were very good build tools long before npm which are still used today and unmeasurably better (like Maven or Gradle).
Why do you think they are good? Serious question - would you comfortably hire an attorney based solely on a pass/fail credential?
I know many math teachers who are using latex because there was too many problems with word (bad editor and incompatibilities with previous versions with no upgrade path).
Not at all. A low probabilty does not make the prediction invalid because of the result.
Actually Nate Silver did criticize polls like this on his podcast. At least the choice of weighting based on who they voted for in the past election. Which is known to be very biased. 538 does grade the quality of polls and excludes/weights polls that have lots of problems.
You can't put Breitbart in the same category as the NYT, true, but you could put it in the same category as the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Mother Jones etc.
well, if the bottom rung gets 10%, the next one up gets 5%, then 2.5% and so on till you hit the top, where you probably get 20-50%. which sounds horrible but is a tiny fraction in an organization with tens of thousands of people.

But again, that only affects prices to a degree that labor is a component. 10% across the board at Ford is .1% increase in the price of a car.
but why use an ANN for tasks involving symbolic logic? I don't get it. It's like ANNs are jumping the shark
It's the unofficial of "Jack Dorsey is fired!"
This Is How the First Three Weeks of #FeesMustFall Played Out on Twitter
Android should drop Java.

It's nothing like writing 'normal' Java, and the baggage that is bought along isn't worth the effort.

I like Java. I hate Android development.
Would it be possible to create hardlinks or symlinks to a particular package/version pair shared as a dependency between other packages? I know this only works on unix-like OSes but otherwise it could revert to the old behaviour of duplicating the dependency.
Pipelines PM here. The model is a bit different, it's a pay as you go per blocks of 1,000 minutes. So if you normally use an extra 2,800 minutes per month you'll pay $30/month usually, but if for some reasons youd don't use it as much and drop to 1,500 extra minutes the next month you'll pay $20 for that month instead of $30/month every month of the year. For this reason we don't carry over minutes month to month.

Sten
> I don't see any fundamental change in scarcity in the last few years.

I do. There have always been economies of scale, but the first shipment of Call of Duty costs tens of millions of dollars. Shipments #2 to #1000000 over the wire cost next to nothing.

A movie like The Avengers exhibits the same behavior.

Sixty years ago, a new car rolling off an assembly line of a Detroit factory was the epitome of the world economy, technology and engineering. Which was not all that different from the process of a weave rolling off a flying shuttle in 1740. This is a new thing, where piece #1 of a piece of IP is very costly, but the next few million pieces are cheap to produce.

To have a focus on the old thing of a scarcity of materials as this goes on seems to be missing the boat on what is happening. Not that I put much creedence in the scarcity focus before, but it has just become completely ridiculous.
I suspect the lack of management focus is causing all of the waste. All of this investment in video, the various API services Twitter created and then discontinued, working on various Scala frameworks, probably a lot of internal data analysis tools, tweaks to the timeline format that nobody seemed to want...

I just don't think a lot of what Twitter is doing is necessary to running a core business. The problem is that they don't have a core business -- they have several factions pushing competing visions of a core business and none of them can gain the upper hand. They need to decide what their core business is and focus on it.

If you look at their list of active users, it's really something a lot of companies would kill for: almost every major politician, journalist, and celebrity in the US, and a similar presence in several other countries. It's just amazing that they can't figure out how to make a profit serving that kind of user base.

I should add that aside from the exceptional success of Steve Jobs at Apple, bringing a founder back to run the company is not a very good sign.
Something happening after being given a statistically low chance of happening doesn't automatically mean the statistical model was wrong.

If we are standing at a roulette table and I tell you there is a 2.7% chance the ball will land on 4 and it lands on 4, it doesn't mean my low % was incorrect.
When I started development on Android platform I was told that we should not do IO on UI thread. Fine enough. What is the alternative? Every tutorial out there including Google's suggested AsyncTask.

Only after few weeks I learned that we should never use AsyncTask for IO because internally it uses a threadpool of hold your breath 2 threads !

So how do I make all my REST requests ? Through something like Volley.
This library is even more disgusting as it does not support some simple urls such as http://example.org/?id=1&id=2.

So I turned by focus on Services only to learn later that Services are meant for background tasks but run on UI thread.

The best approach to do your own IO is through IntentServices. Something that should have appeared in the first tutorial.
DeepMind Invented a Computer That Learns How to Use Its Own Memory
> why does it zip the whole thing again

Maybe fragmented zip files with holes inside are undesired? Because that's what you get when modifying zip files in-place.
> As for simplicity, there is nothing that I have seen in any editor that is simpler than VIM modal editing or a LISP-machine to do everything. Having a shiny GUI is inherently not simple, but complex.

I'm a Vim user. But it's exactly this kind of thing that pushes newbies away. Yes, Vim is "simple" conceptually. But in this real world we live in, Vim often makes things more complicated. It's one more thing to learn - and a weird one.

On top of that, Vim's architecture is ancient and not everything has aged gracefully.
Unfortunately, estimating future value is fundamental to the nature of all start ups. Of course it's often going to be wrong. The difference here is Wellsfargo has been around for ever. Their market value should be mature, stable, and reliable by comparison.
This (and the original post[0]) sum up how I feel about Twitter. Every few months (since joining in 2009), I jump on and attempt to curate my feed to only get stuff I care about. I stick around for a few weeks, then get overwhelmed by the deluge. So I constantly curate and trim and it all becomes very tiresome.

I want Twitter to be a feed of news and opinions from organisations and people I care about, but it is far too hard to jump in and see how a conversation started or evolved. It is far too hard to filter out the noise.

Honestly, my RSS feeds give me everything I need and they've been going strong for over 10 years. Sprinkle in a bit of Apple News to fill in the blanks and Twitter quickly finds itself in the "too hard" basket.

The financial state of Twitter highlighted by this article is mind-blowing. How on earth have costs crept up so much with no meaningful improvement in product? As a very astute tech-savvy person, I cannot see anything that Twitter has done in years that have made it better. That stands in stark contrast to Facebook.

I'm sad about this because Twitter has been such an integral part of the modern internet, in democratising information. It's role in the Arab Spring alone was world-changing. It's a pity it hasn't been able to harness this.

[0]http://brontecapital.blogspot.ca/2016/10/some-comment-on-twi...
Some views on crowdfunding
Why do R&D for a new type of engine when the one you already have is good enough and people buy them?

Because the emissions limits start forcing you to sell them if you hope to sell a single truck or SUV?

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/california-and-western-...
> If I worked for such a company, all my traffic would be flowing over a VPN, full-stop.

When you work for such a company, all VPNs are blocked and prohibited, full-stop.

Source: worked for such a company
Some languages actually have standard libraries so don't need bazookas..
This form appears to be required by government. No matter what you think about libertarianism, this isn't it.
You're aware that mercury is tidally locked, as is our moon, mars' moons, and others? I would call those real, physical effects, not negligible.

As to running the numbers - agreed - but one can get an answer which is correct but incorrect if your premises are incorrect.

At a galactic scale the perturbations are likely tiny, but a tiny force applied over enough time adds up.

Anyway. It's a poor example that's almost certainly wrong but my point was more about how a single incorrect assumption can wreck a model.
Why does he believe that only one in three employees will be keeping a job post-acquisition? Not that the engineers will have to worry.

They have a very talented engineering team that will be sought out by every headhunter if that's the case but it all seems baseless.
Popular science books and coursework for applied physics degree are generally not expected to have the same level of difficulty.
- defaults matter and shape behaviour/expectations
- disabling these options is often difficult
- other people's phones listen to me as well
- ...
Clients promote your business themselves
5 reasons why trump will win
Nothing surprising from a company that notoriously fumbles removal of content (minor nudity gets removed while violence, abuse, fake pages and graphical gore (not in a journalistic sense) remains)
Here's a map of them. Corrections and additions welcome.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1bebA9E6kTb3G9g5GEeezYPzvwH...

Based on the map from wikipedia, which had 84 locations, this has 120.
if VMWare Fusion provides the Virtualization features to the guest, then yes. If not, no.

But then again, that is true for all VM-nested software.
Does anyone have a readcube link/similar for the paper?

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
Bufferbloat/Make wifi fast project removes order of magnitude latency from WiFi
All my apps (responsive HTML) are served via HTTP and rendered via WebView() api for both iOS and Android
As an Android only Dev I cant disagree with any of his reasons, the tools especially are just terrible, its not unusual to spend hours trying to figure out why my project will not build, this is compounded if you live in a country with poor internet connectivity, GB sized updates to the tools are not fun.
I'd argue that in 2016 a well designed system has a way to make sure that its extensions can't slow it down, can't bring it down and can't step on each other's toes.

On the other hand, I can't really think about a system that fulfills those conditions. But I wouldn't call anything "ultimate" if it doesn't :)
Yes, it's the new windows.

I think some things like replacing bitfields with Enums could maybe be done transparently with a little ART modification.
That's the one. It hasn't been updated since Meteor 0.6(?) a few years ago, so I'd be amazed if it still worked.
Just like the web platform, Android is hugely improved when you leverage the community libraries and tools they provided. Gradle actually helps a lot with that, since its clear dependency management makes use of external libraries a breeze.

If in 2016 you're still complaining about AsyncTasks and its management, you certanly have missed a lot of progress in the last few years. It's not unlike having people complain about JavaScript issues without ever looking at jQuery, React or newer tooling.

The most useful things you can do for yourself currently are:

* Adopt Kotlin as a language. It's not all that different from Swift, comes with IDE support, tiny standard library and really fixes the pain of Java 6.

* Use MVP patterns and its friends. There are a few libraries which take most of the pain of lifecycles away.

* Use RxJava, Retrofit, Glide, etc. libraries that make your life easier with concurrency. A lot of these tools are better and easier to use than what even exists on iOS. Using AsyncTask in 2016 is just silly, it was never a good API.

* Use Gradle! Driven by its scripting language, you can do so much to script and automatize your build.

Other than that, I agree, after years of development:

* Some Android APIs just aren't well thought out.

* Gradle badly needs performance improvement.

* State of NDK is just sad. Fixable, but sad.

* MultiDEX is a result of a very very dumb decision in Android 1.0 and it's going to hurt us for a long time :/

All-in-all, I honestly think the author didn't really look into Android all that much to have complaints that he had. The blog post is somewhere on the level of someone complaining about IE6 JavaScript bugs when we've already moved on to React and are dealing now with very different issues.

(And no I'm not saying Android is great or even a great platform. It's not. It's just that, just like on Web, you can do a lot to fix major pains.)
Freelancer.com like platform with Blockchain Idea
more poignantly: would you ever hire an attorney who could not pass the bar exam?
>> When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.

You list three left-leaning news organisations, and expect their biases to cancel out? Wouldn't they reinforce each other?
It has almost nothing to do with raw materials.

Resource consumption is growing, but as economies have long ago shifted to services and advanced products, it's less a part of the equation.

Your mac, your iPhone, your 'Internet' your 'wireless mobile' , your Netflix, your 500 channels - these are all new services which everyone pays for and consume very little 'resources' in the classical sense.

Even as we switched from drip coffee to Lattes, from crappy restaurants to better ones - this does not affect 'resources' so much.
Also, they envisioned tablets to be used mostly in landscape. That's why we got everything on a single bar at the bottom.

The basic concept behind Fragments was pretty much the same as WebOS' Enyo framework. I recall one of the big Enyo demo moments was when a browser window was resized, and the email app ui went from multiple columns to a single column, and back, without missing a beat.

Then again i wonder if Android was partially designed, before Fragments, to rekindle the experience of using Apple's Newton tablet. This in that one app would extend the functionality of another app in a virtually seamless manner via intents.

But as best i can tell, Android left too much of the plumbing in the hands of the app devs. Thus for every app that handled cross-app intents properly, you got 100+ that would jump back through the in-app activity history rather than roll back the intent chain.

And with fragments you got a in-app way to do the activity history backtracking, while still having the intent focused back button of the Android UI.
favourite line from the article -

"the plural of anecdote is data"

nice.
arguments in point.
And that's about all it does. Gradle has proper dependency managment with Maven repository support (add one line and your library is in, no fsckery with JARs and whatnot), has scripting in an imperative language instead of craziness of XML (we use it to automate releases, uploads, Git commits, etc.) and really good plugin support.

It's also slow as arse unfortunately.
"Basically Google and AWS make 90% gross margin on the electrons they convert from electrical power to search advertising or web services."

Nobody on earth would suggest that google's margins are derived from their revenues minus the cost of 'electricity'.

They are a services company, pure and simple. Their 'gross margins' are their revenues, minus royalties to web-sites - that's it.

Their costs are R&D and Sales & Marketing - and a little bit of ops - that's it.

Agreed they could do it with 1/3 the staff, but it's not an issue of 'gross margins'.
I use Fragments as "Content View Controller", phone / tablet whatever, it's just a reusable piece of UI / Logic for me.
You have to weight it against the gain at the other end. I'm nearly certain that more lives would be saved from inability to exceed speed limit, than would be lost by speeding away from something.
It's not YouPorn but there's this gem of a tumblr: http://pornhubcommentsonstockphotos.tumblr.com/
If one get the driver side sorted, it will be easier for Google to push for a scheme similar to Windows.

On top of that Google could implement a standardized UI themeing system, allowing companies to give their products a distinct experience without having to muck with the code as much.