skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, to me it was just an inferior RE4 set in space with an inconvenient-to-frustrating limb-removal gimmick.
I don't know who would want to use this by choice.
Docker project: Can you have overlay2 speed and density with devicemapper? Yep
A thought: would it be possible with some kind of feedback like the touchpad or iPhone 6S uses to simulate the feel not only of pressing keys but also the feeling of your finger sliding over them without actually pressing them?

I mean I can find the ESC key blindly even if it isn't actually there anymore, but the brightness up key is for me goes like "find ESC key, slide two to the right".
That's actually not true in Chrome https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=457409 although it's not clear if that is a bug in Chrome or in other browsers. It would be nice to have more clarity on that, or an explicit promise API like https://github.com/inexorabletash/indexeddb-promises because until then it's really shitty to use - you have to constantly worry about cross-browser compatibility.
True, I love magit. Most people here in the office use magit or one of the available GUI's. But none of them change the underlying metaphor in the way that stacked git did.
>By "quite a spike" you mean a change from 8 min to 10 min in a value with a relatively high variance?

Please don't put words in my mouth.
Except that in software 1000's of groups have already dug 1000's of canals and yet the next group that will build a canal will insist on doing it their way.

If our profession would only be able to simply collect lessons learned and to pass those on to the next generation then we'd be moving faster on average and we'd produce better software. we don't need 500 crappy, slightly different ways of doing the same thing, we need maybe 5, battle tested and hardened bullet proof solutions that are well engineered. Fragmentation is going to be open source's death at some point if this continues, that's one area where closed source actually has an edge: focus.

In part the problem is that software producers have managed to convince the buyers of their goods and services that they are never ever liable for their product (something no other industry has managed to do), in part it is because it seems superficially easy to re-invent until you reach the same level of complexity (which inevitably happens) as what those 'archaic' solutions were already addressing.

I don't have any answers on how to solve this, unfortunately, but there are software eco-systems that really get this right and others that seem to be totally lost in ever expanding cycles of endless rewrites.
Is this what is considered as an opinion article, these days ?

Two paragraphs of loose one-line sentences with no information whatsoever besides what already comes in the title ?

Why is the author not surprised ? It comes from some deeper analysis done at time ?
Now that's a professional TL;DR. Thank you. Is there already a good TLDRAAS out there?
I think it's premature to say smartwatches are done. Apple's new watch was only available for the last two weeks in September, and people knew it was coming. I wrote a brief blog on this yesterday:

https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2016/10/25/smartwatch-sales-are...
Perhaps someone will make their controls mobile-friendly now.
Here's the discussion on promises: https://github.com/inexorabletash/indexeddb-promises

The 2.0 spec is just a bunch of minor changes. Promises will be a big change - although I would argue it's way more important than all this other stuff combined.
> there's no point in putting one in the contract when there's 95% chance you'll get big fat middle finger in whatever labor court has jurisdiction if you try to activate it.

There's potentially plenty of point if you don't expect your employees to understand that (or be able to count on it)
Is anyone surprised at this? You have to charge it every day like a phone, except it can't function in it's intended purpose while charging. It's a huge block of watch strapped to your wrist. Honestly they aren't even that pretty, nor fashionable.

I was saying this was a dumb fad when they came out, and now with the release of Watch 2 + the upgraded Watch 1, they've given a gigantic middle finger to the early adopters who now have the only option of unloading them on eBay for half what they paid.

Also, as any Apple regular customer knows: Never buy Gen 1 of ANYTHING made by Apple.

The only watch I've seen that is somewhat compelling is the Pebble series, but even then it's not native integration so the colleague I know who has one constantly has issues with it, and yes it has week long battery life but that's because the screen is a monochrome one that looks like it was pulled from an old flip phone. None of these options are as attractive to me as just pulling my phone out of my pocket.
Its impossible to accurately estimate an unknown. Once you have experience, a rough sketch of the solution will pop into your head right away, but as you go along all these devilish little details will pop up. Also, meetings run by people who can't write code who just want to talk to people for an hour because it breaks up their dull day will eat a decent chunk of time. When starting a new project and in the "give me estimates phase", I do my best, but, I know they are essentially made up numbers. If I were in charge, I would eliminate time estimates. Just have high level goals, keep breaking them down (or up, in bottom up dev) and have lots of automated test cases. I guess like that continuous dev (which I have never done, just read about) style.
China has no NIMBY problem. They can convince anyone with ease. Same with financing.
Docker Plus Virtual Machines, is Equal to Better Productivity
I realize there is a lot of politics etc involved - but would it be technically feasible to just drastically improve the performance? Could bitcoin be changed into a system that could e.g. handle the scale and throughput of some of the non-cryptocurrency money transfer systems (e.g. 10million transactions/day)?

If not - is there something fundamental about cryptocurrencies that limits their throughput or could another system be scaling much better than Bitcoin? E.g. does a cryptocurrency always need proof-of-work and does that always need to be time consmuing?
Kudos on taking the risk to release a bit later and delivering something that meets your higher standards, that's going against accepted business wisdom but it is only because 'everybody else releases barely functional crap too' that that became the norm for competition.
How do you handle backups? I have a similar structure but on Google Drive (minus TODOs, for which I use Google Keep)
A man that never digged a canal don't really master it until he digs some. Software craftmanship isn't something you learn by osmosis.
If you are looking for a "framework" in the php/rails mode go is likely not a great fit.

The best I can point to would be Gorilla.
I think between 2x and 20x, depending on things like whether you're wearing a long-sleeved shirt, what other stuff you have in your pocket, etc. I can't see how it could ever be 100x and even the 20x end of the range I gave is probably too high.

I suspect you're greatly underestimating how quickly you can check the time with a watch on your wrist. Even if literally no thought were required, human reflexes are on the order of 200ms latency; 100x more than that would be 20 seconds. In reality, there's a conscious element and that always slows things way down. I don't think the actual effective time taken to check the time by any means at all is ever less than about a second, even if it feels faster. Maaaybe half a second if you truly don't need to move anything but your eyeballs.

On the other hand, I find that it usually takes me 3-4s to get my phone out of my pocket and check the time on it.
This is in fact the correct answer.
I think the analysis in the article is a big simplistic.

My own impression is not that the execution of the Apple Watch is flawed, but that the idea simply doesn't deliver enough value to make it worthwhile. A device for controlling my phone on my wrist just doesn't solve a problem I have to the extent I'm willing to pays hundreds of currency units for one. Maybe for some people, but it appears not a sufficient number to make a mass market.
Because software development is actually research disguised as engineering.

(And that's why "engineering" when related to software is filled with mumbo-jumbo and cargo-cultism.)
This is a valid non compete reason, and also a TV news anchor who a company invests in marketing shouldn't be able to jump to a cross town rival. Out of market sure, but not cross town.
I am kinda ok with 10-20% of the money going towards greasing the system. As long as the other 90-80% get shit done and fast.
This Reddit.TV alternative reached 1M daily users after 1 week
> By 9 months [traveling], I'm pretty much ready to commit to a real job in a real office just so that I can start using my brain again.

I use my brain intensively while traveling. Lot's of brain functions are running at full throttle: cognition, language, problem solving, spacial, to name a few. I don't understand how can the OP feel that he's not using his brain while roaming the planet, specially developing countries where your day-to-day "templates" tend to apply the least.
Nice idea. Is there a self-hosted option?
Thank you all for the comments. They were very helpful in feeding into this article I wrote on the topic:

https://www.internetsociety.org/blog/tech-matters/2016/10/ho...

Thank you!
Don't forget that Douglas Adams always was a huge Apple fan. Bearing this in mind, I read comments like that one as a dig at non-Apple computers of the time.
I tried one of their few demos, and all the interaction is incredibly laggy. Arguably pretty, but not something I would ever use for work (FF50 on i7!).
On a desktop Mac with a lot of RAM, would you pick Safari over Chrome for general browsing?

I've been using Chrome for a while but I'm thinking of switching back to Safari.

I no longer have a big need for extensions that are not available for Safari (I miss uBlock, but I think I can make do with a Safari Content Blocker list and dnsmasq) I don't have a Macbook but I might start using it soon, so it'd nice to use the same browser in both devices.
I should clarify, no recorded media in the home or with a mobile device. It wasn’t a protest of strictly modern technology, as some of these things have been around for ages in other forms.

If I wanted to listen to music, I went to local shows. That was the mentality.
I have nextCloud with Calendar, Contacts and Tasks plugins. I have my meetings, schedules, todo-lists. It contains a lot of different types of lists, like washing, shopping, todo, list of ideas, contact birthdays, I've go dozens of it. It really works, I have reminders, notes, scheduling, tasks, progress meters.

I sync most important files between 3-5 devices with Syncthing. Devices are small and portable, 2x laptop, raspberry pi, netbook, I'm going to replace it with external drive connected to my Omnia Turris soon.

I have a few external drives with photos, music, films I liked, everything is evaporating online, torrent trackers are disappearing, content on Netflix is expensive and getting worse and worse, so I 'data-hoard' everything and backup at least twice once per month.

Like a year ago I opened a spredhseet where I log all my bills and it works for me as financial database, ~20 categories of expenses, each has some subcategories.

* Kanban boards
Yellow sticky notes on a fridge.
Why is C++ considered a bad language?
I have never been involved with one, directly or indirectly, so I can't comment on the culture. I am planning to start one though.

However, as a strict outsider looking at things, I find it amusing that every startup claims to disrupt something or the other, many times things that have already been claimed to be disrupted by others, and there is hardly anything to separate one from its competitors in terms of technology. I find it no different than every bigco claiming they are leader in something or the other (which could be arguably true in some cases) but often simply recreating the same technology the competitors have for any number of reasons. In both cases there is tremendous amount of cliche in the way they talk or present their ideas while overselling themselves, which sometimes amuses and sometimes annoys.
I'm still with 10.11. I don't plan to update soon, since the benefit of Siri, Photos and the other major features is quite small, compared to the risk that I might loose working days if something goes wrong ( I'm a freelancer ).

As far as I read in the article there will be 10.12.1 ( the final fix ) which will have that part of the kernel refactored. I hope Apple will also support 10.11 and issue an update with the same fix.
Garry & Alexis are two of my favorite investors. They came on early in our startup and did everything you would want from a good investor. Besides being 2 of the nicest people on earth they're smart, connected, and will do everything they can to help. Love these guys.
It's not Apple consumers, so much as the general public. I guarantee you that the average Android smartphone owner (if they even knew that dual cameras exist) thought Apple was the first to do so too. It's marketing. Positively for Apple, and negatively for the brands who have this tech and don't manage to get the word to the average person.

You make a big mistake in assuming owners of Android phones are more informed than Apple owners. Especially since Android owners outnumber Apple by quite a margin. You may be correct in assuming that the more informed consumer tends to purchase an Android device (though maybe not), but that doesn't lead to your conclusion.
>> and 75% procrastination.

I laughed at this and it's true. But I would like to champion a bit of procrastination in creative pursuits. I know the way my mind works and the simple truth is that sometimes it pays to wait until my head has worked through what feels like an incessant cycle of building up possible approaches and relentlessly tearing them down.

So lets say I'm given an assignment (or a stand-along idea occurs to me). I immediately start to visualize possible outcomes and the approaches that I would need to take to get there. I throw out 99% of these subconsciously. Some of these ideas don't even make it into a full-blown thought, but they are there lurking below the surface. All of this takes some time. Subjectively, it just doesn't feel like the right time to start yet.

This may look like procrastination, but it isn't. I'm not arguing for always waiting until every detail is mapped out in my mind to begin an effort, but sometimes it pays to let your head work through stuff for a bit.

Of course, moderation in everything (including moderation).
Software craftsmanship isn't something you learn by ignoring the state of the art either.

And as for digging canals, the civil engineering profession is lightyears ahead of the software people because there are lives on the line and they do have a way to pass knowledge on in a way that lessons stay learned. (Most of the time, anyway, forget about the dark ages for a moment please.)
Often, yes. In this case, no not really. Zero days are pretty universally considered harmful.
I concur. I could never use Chrome because I'd despise having to go through all my tabs just to get back to the last one I used. I tried a few plugins to get it to work but it never did. I can't remember what it was, but there were a few things about FF I could not get used to so I always went back to Opera.
Are you part of the Zcash team?
I think the specific example can create a distraction because of the use of indirection, but that there is a more general point to discuss: at what point is a chunk of code "too clever?"

One argument is that code should be written so that junior or average (or even below average) developers can be put to work on it. Another view is that part of a junior developer's learning experience ought to include not shielding him from alleged complexity or "clever" constructs, because sometimes they really are better or even unavoidable.

Cleverness for its own sake is one thing to avoid, but I think that's almost too subjective a standard to use.
That's true in some cases, and in those cases time/budget overruns are probably more acceptable than in CRUD app #34.
Surely it has nothing to do with the buyers of our goods and services insisting that the problem they need solving is unique, so trivial it should be done yesterday, and so clear that they dont really need detailed written specifications? To say nothing of IP concerns making it difficult to actually reuse solutions.
that gesture does work on the glass surface book trackpad
"Why does software development take so long?"

I can see this as a valid question for a subset of problems. For example, the basic database CRUD applications that get built over and over.

The closest solutions I've seen were DabbleDB (acquired by Twitter and shuttered) and Quickbase (laudable, but the pricing model doesn't work for many).
This is my own article I'm submitting. I would be very interested in any feedback on the points I raise from HN readers. I'll note that a discussion here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12772993 ) helped in some of my thinking around the topic.

Thanks in advance.
Fastly: A/B testing at the edge
I'd be tempted to say that a lot depends on being clear on what needs to be achieved. I've personally seen deadlines slip mostly for the lack of clarity on what needs to be done. An analogy might be to say that what was initially described as an elephant turned out to be a giraffe.

Of course, there are instances when the actual approach, implementation or choice of technologies tend to weigh. But the latter is much less frequent.
> In a sense, programming is all about what your program should do in the first place. The “how” question is just the “what”, moved down the chain of abstractions until it ends up where a computer can understand it, and at that point, the three words “multichannel audio support” have become those 9,000 lines that describe in perfect detail what's going on.

This closing paragraph is excellent.

While I do wonder if the author's progress along these wouldn't have been accelerated if more of this evolution took place before the first line of code, the overall message here is very true and very well put.

When I made this realization for myself, it was a major turning point in the quality, speed, maintainability, and usability of the code I produce, especially when I can successfully define the final code structure to directly reflect this progressive refinement from intent to implementation.
You're just asking for it:

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Closed source often has the edge of 'focus' because it's working on a very specific type of 'canal'. It doesn't need to handle all types of boat.

We used to have very well engineered software - bespoke for each customer.
Then businessmen came along and said "Hey - we could save time (money) if we re-used existing things".
Eventually businesses didn't have anyone who understood the things they were re-using, which were often designed for a slightly different purpose, and things started going wrong.

There is no correct answer, other than do you want speed or quality (I leave the cost aspect out, as some things cannot be done faster or better irrespective of the money thrown at them).
CrowdStrike is very close to the FBI. I would take anything they say with a grain of salt.
It's not simplifying it though, it's just hiding the complexity in syntactic sugar. I prefer the first way of doing things vastly over the second. Yeah, it's more code, but it's also more or less "what is actually happening", instead of an euphemism which has to be unpacked.
I get a vision in my head of what the software should be and I'm compelled as though by force to make it match the vision. I don't seem to have much choice.
Disclosure: I work at Fitbit but don't speak for Fitbit.

I've often heard predictions that Fitbit was doomed because its special-purpose devices would be subsumed by general-purpose devices the way MP3 players were subsumed by smart phones. My retort has often been, "Yeah, just like Palm Pilot killed iPods".

Timing is important. The technology has to reach a certain level before it can have wide consumer appeal. Smart watches today are a niche tech toy, not something everybody wants to use. We're at the iPod stage, not the iPhone stage, in wearable computing.
Same with Scala.
You can think of your grid array as a contiguous piece of memory. I would do:

bzero(grid, sizeof(int) * COLS);
bzero(grid + COLS * (ROWS - 1), sizeof(int) * COLS);

for (int i=1; i < ROWS-1; i++) {
*(grid + (i * COLS)) = 0; /* set left col to 0 */
*(grid + (i * COLS) + COLS - 1) = 0; /* set right col to 0 */
}
It's not as difficult as it seems. Actually I'd say that if you already know GNU Readline shortcuts (which are very helpful on e.g. Bash), it's an afternoon of work to learn the basics.

The problem is that most tutorials depict emacs as a bag of keyboard shortcuts. But in reality, there are some simple principles that are quite understandable.

And org-mode is so underappreciated. You can turn it into anything. I use it as a wiki and a kanban board. And it's amazing.
Yeah, who would do such a thing! Especially in a piece of code written for the International Obfuscated C Code Contest! I demand that all code submitted for that contest be readable and unobfuscated!
What about "Big Ball of Mud"

http://www.laputan.org/mud/

Some of the pictures are brilliant.
>In quite a few cases non-trivial code doubles as filter for less skilled devs

Right, until the less skilled dev it's you, months later after you moved on to other stuff, and have to get back and fix some clever shit you wrote but don't understand anymore.

Unless you're doing numeric or performance critical work, code should be optimized for readability and maintainability.
It's correct. I've noticed that when I work in a team I work with maybe 10% of my solo efficiency. Just because of this whole team work bullshit and because of legacy code (it takes me often more time to understand how code written by someone works than it would take to write such code from scratch).
This is just an idea, but can you introduce some "staitic friction" to the interruption process of interrupting another developer?

Classic example: Suppose developer "A" can turn to his/her right and whisper a question to developer "B" to save themselves 15 seconds instead of looking it up. Perhaps making it necessary for "A" to stand up and walk over to ask "B" would cause "A" to look it up and leave "B" undisturbed?
Some of the Best Workout Memes of 2016
With Love from International Space Station
Apple's new MacBook Pro has no escape key
I was just about to post something similar that I've had a number of repairs I've needed to do on things that will "outlast the vehicle", and as a result have been an absolute PITA to get to - parts of a Focus 1.8 TDDI engine spring to mind, where one inaccessible bolt led to needing to remove the engine to do something that could otherwise have been done in situ in about 90 minutes...
Hack the Planet: The State of IoT Security
Well the second snippet hides the loop and conditional which surely are implemented in "Where". Is that a code smell by proxy?
To me the hope isn't that self driving cars will fix transit problems, it's that they push more people away from car-first life decisions.

(that's maybe a slightly hyperbolic phrase, but people that aren't dependent on owning a personal vehicle will make different choices)
Yeah. Germany is a big one on this. If ask you for a non compete, they have to basically pay you for the full duration of it.

As a consequence, almost no one ever does, except for very high level executives.
Much like linking to xkcd 927, this is more tiresome than the 'offences' themselves.
I'm not sure I understand, is there some special casing going on with "(== 10)"? As I'm admittedly not aware of it.