skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When was the last time you tried Scala? I just left a Scala/scalaz job after around 2 years and everyone I worked with was extremely happy with the language. We gradually moved to a more Haskell-like approach to programming, which I feel Scala is more capable of than any other mature general-purpose language (except Haskell ofc)

I'll address your issues one-by-one.

> A bewildering standard library

What about it troubled you? The main things I use in the stdlib are collections (CanBuildFrom aside, they're pretty solid), Future (although I prefer scalaz.concurrent.Task), and Option. In 2.12, Either is finally usable too!

> a type system that crashes

I've only run into a single type checker crash (NPE) in my 2 years. Aside from that, the type system has become my best friend. I write implicit-heavy code that leans on scalaz and shapeless too.

> glacial compilation

A full compile of our ~250 file (idr loc) service took like 2 minutes. But I pretty much never did full compiles. Sbt incremental compilation of a handful of files would take a coupe seconds. This makes the feedback loop of running tests/the repl pretty quick, and unlike with other fast-feedback-loop languages (like Ruby), I get really strong checks from the compiler in each loop.

> the sbt repl leaks memory every time you type a command.

Are you referring to the Scala repl (sbt console) or the sbt build tool prompt? It's true that the repl leaks memory but that's by design: every repl evaluation is stored in a variable (res0, res1, etc). I've run into memory trouble once or twice when loading large production data into the repl, which would store it in one of these variables. I worked around it by loading it but then in a block extracting what I needed. This smaller data would in turn be stored in resX.
so what? i want to search based on keyword, not know ahead-of-time what i'm going to find important in 6 months.
Same with the "data saver" toggle, I turned it on when I first got my phone and haven't turned it off since.
Saving on the commute time and costs is a big deal.
When you hover on the links they flash like a 90's era webpage horror, why? is this what the cool kids do now?
Pregnancy Announcement Parody Video to Taylor Swift's “22”
Why is it that its always people who have not achieved a goal that want to teach people how to achieve that goal.
I think "boring" is another word for "not frustrating".

I recently did a project where I wrote the same API in Ruby/Sinatra, Node/Express and PHP/Slim; Connected it to S3, GCloud and Azure for assets and MongoDb for data; and then deployed each permutation to Heroku, Azure, App Engine and EB.

For "under the api barrier", Heroku was the only one that ran everything smoothly; S3 is the easiest to interact with, and as I worked through the project, I switched from Ruby to Node as the prefered platform.

For "over the api barrier", where users actually use the project, it depends on the project requirements. In this case no dependancies was a hard requirement, hence Vanilla JS. But if you have a lot of UI, you'd need a lib for both JS and CSS and it depends on teammates pref, organization pref and legacy.

My 2 cents.
Managers don't win MVP awards.
And what Slack's numerous competitors are proving is that Slack's total absence of any new or challenging technology has made it easy pickings for duplication. Slack remains competitive in the face of copy cats only because of its current user engagement. Thus, the threat from Microsoft and other behemoths who can effectively purchase users is very real.
> (he just likes Orcas)

Haha touché :-)
I guess I'll have to look into that again then.
The persistence layer is also a thing, and the boring choice is something like Postgres or MySQL.
Historically, most things have been terrible. There is no historical era I would like to live in more than the one we have now.

Taking recent history, America has been enormously successful and prominent, especially in technology. And America, as a nation of immigrants, has unusually high levels of diversity and inclusion. What in modern America qualifies as non-diverse would still historically be very diverse.

> Nobody wants to do the study that [...]

It must be nice to be able to read the minds of thousands of academics around the world. I'd probably use my powers differently, but I guess you have to start somewhere.

> hiring whoever's the most qualified

Yes, I'm hiring the most qualified team for the problems we're tackling.

> I also feel like it's a false equivalency

It's nice when people share their feelings. Do you feel better? If so, good.

That aside, I'm not sure why you think the feelings of J Random Commenter would be relevant to me as compared with my years of experience building and running teams. Given the throwaway account, even you don't appear to take your opinions very seriously.
That makes sense. You're looking "where" the reason for something is (for). Makes sense in that context.
It's called Focus https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/focus
Why haven't they built a native UI toolkit for JS, though? What will WebAssembly give them that makes it worthwhile?
They are absolutely a vice tax.

Every time you drive your car, you damage the road, increase traffic congestion, and put toxic chemicals into the air.

The purpose of a gas tax is to discourage marginal usage.

Since driving is more expensive, it makes that person who was deciding between driving their car or taking a bike to work and makes them just a little bit more likely to use the bike.
Nice reference. Thanks for sharing.
Integrating things outside the MS stack yes. But if Slack ever decides to target the enterprise in a big way there is simply no way they'll out-compete MS with the offering they have at the moment and no way they'll integrate enterprise grade tools with the level of security and scalability that MS would be able to provide.
That question doesn't make any sense. They don't do the same thing, so you can't compare their relative performance. What's faster: an Intel i7 or a BMW i8?

Malloc is potentially troublesome for two reasons. First, its performance is potentially unpredictable. It depends on the current state of the heap at the time of the call, which you can't know in advance except in some very rare situations. It can also fail entirely, and that is likewise unpredictable.

memcpy and memmove, ultimately being byte-copying loops, don't suffer from these problems. Their performance is consistent and they always succeed if your pointers and lengths are valid.

On PCs these days, the troubles of malloc don't matter much. You have so much performance margin that occasional slow calls don't matter, and virtual memory with a big address space means that it almost never fails. If it does fail, it's OK if the program crashes and you have to restart it. But many systems are much more constrained.
> Failure is not an option

There's guaranteed gonna be a catastrophic event outside of our control on Earth given a large enough timescale, be it climate change consequences, glaciation, collision with large meteorite, fatal epidemy, etc etc.

Mars makes for a shitty backup plan, sure, but we can't pretend that the Earth is gonna last forever either. A shitty backup plan is still better than simply sitting on our ass and hoping that no natural catastrophes ever happen; taking good care of Earth is not enough on the long term.
Having worked with a lot of Javascript frameworks aimed at creating web applications/SPAs (used Cappuccino to build a wireframing tool, Backbone.js to build a dashboard for a payments provider, React/Relay to build a phone calling tool and events platform, and now React/Apollo to build a peer-to-peer texting tool), I can say that React/Apollo/GraphQL is my new go-to stack for new JS projects. It's a pleasure to work with, and a lot of the pain points of creating large apps with JS in the past are handled very well. Congrats to the Apollo team!
The Three Stage Model of Skill Acquisition
But you can go from a lower division to the premiership its not a closed shop with no penalty for failure in the way the American football teams are.

For example Leicester's run from third tier to the championship 09 - 16
Jobs didn't do Pixar. Ed Catmull did Pixar. Jobs was the investor.

The real payoff for Jobs with Pixar was that it made the iPod possible. Others had done MP3 players, but nobody had a good deal with the music industry. Jobs was able to do that for a Hollywood reason - as a studio owner, he outranked the music execs, and they had to take his calls. Hollywood is very hierarchical like that.[1] At the time, Apple was a nobody in the music industry, had no consumer electronics products, and was not doing all that well in desktop computers. It was heading Pixar that got him in the door at Warner, Sony, and Universal.

[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/itunes-10th-anniversa...
I do believe that Metal Gear Solid 2 predicted this back in, what, 2001?

"At this point, Raiden is contacted by AIs of the Colonel and Rosemary, introducing themselves as representatives of the Patriots, who reveal that the true purpose of the simulation was to see how they could simulate and control human behavior in order to prevent society from dumbing down due to trivial information drowning valuable knowledge and inconvenient truths."
I think the intended audience of this ad is people who haven't heard of or use Slack but are interested in this new thing Microsoft is doing with the hope of poaching some users. It's not actually intended to convince Microsoft of anything, obviously.
CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION SYSTEMS PART 2
"The only real issue seems one of cost."

But that is a real issue. A tiny ship is billions of dollars. A ship big enough to provide even half a G is more like a trillion dollars. It can't simply be a tiny spinning wheel. It has to be dozens of meters across.

Of course, trashing Iraq cost us over a trillion so far, and will likely exceed 2 trillion before all is done, but that's different.
First, I once worked for a small business, with 12 employees, that was a defense contractor and as such was obligated to provide insurance. Their insurance was the cheapest I've ever had ($40 per month) and had the best coverage I've ever had. It's why the only small businesses I will ever work for again will be defense contractors.

Second, I live in Texas. PPOs are no longer offered on the private exchanges here. Unless you have employer-provided insurance, you have to have an HMO, which I refuse to do for moral reasons. Even if it was legal, I wouldn't work at any company whose sole insurance option is to reimburse employees for the cost of individual plans because individual plans are not an option here.

This is simply the result of stingy, greedy owners trying to keep everything for themselves. The company I worked at before the defense contractor was about the same size, but not only did they not provide benefits, but they provided laughably low salaries (I was making $47k/year when recruiters were telling me I should be making $60-65k, and the defense contractor I jumped ship to paid me $65k), refused to provide any equity to anyone except to maybe the first two technical hires, and refused to seek any investment above the angel level because the owner wanted to keep ownership for himself.

If a business cannot afford to properly compensate their employees, they should not be in business. Period. Size isn't an excuse. And that means the <50-employee exception needs to go. And so does the <15-employee exception for EEOC (and some cities, including my own, have the same exception for their local non-discrimination laws).

If you're a small business, you should have three options: 1) offer full benefits and pay a competitive salary, 2) treat your staff as co-founders and give us both equity and public recognition as co-founders, or 3) you close your doors.
Well, we can't even send a non-spinny ship full of people to Mars, so sending a ship that would be more complex, and much larger is out of the question, no?
I recommend using a traffic analysis tool for Windows 10 (GlassWire is a nice and easy to use one). I think I must've blocked like 15 different connections to Microsoft.

Beyond all the new "expected" (yet still annoying) Windows 10 telemetry, feedback, etc server connections, you get to see stuff that will piss you off - like Windows Explorer connecting to Microsoft's servers, or Web Search and Cortana connecting to its servers, even though I disabled both of them (first thing I do when installing Windows 10).

Oh, and all of that with all the options in the Privacy settings being disabled. I like Windows 10 as an OS, but it's ridiculous how much tracking and data sharing Microsoft does behind the scenes. It also makes using your phone as mobile data hotspot useless, because it's going to use a ton of your data quickly.

If I couldn't block most of this stuff I wouldn't touch Windows 10.

https://www.glasswire.com/
Instacart CEO: Some Workers Must Earn Less for the Company to Grow
Eight Nobel Laureates in Economics: ‘Do Not Vote for Donald Trump’
Interesting! How does it work behind the scenes? How do you discover new companies?
Any live demos of this playing H264 or RTMP?
If you're familiar with Haskell, you can probably dive into the "Typelevel Scala" approach. Once you learn how to do ADTs and typeclasses in Scala, you'll be able to make use of scalaz or cats effectively and feel relatively at home.
Yes the other professions don't like it when us greasy engineers start getting a slightly bigger share of the pie.

And remember the Economist is a UK publication and the status of engineering is now where near what it is in the USA
"Failure is not an option" is not even in the same reality as "sitting on our ass". It is exactly the opposite.
It would be far more specific - you'd collect all their medical details, their ethnicity, age, etc., and then you end up with:

'Salt consumption can increase the risk of liver consumption for middle-aged males of African descent'
"Wisdom of crowds" might be the correct term.
It all comes down to the age-old question of "who watches the watchmen?" We can never be sure that the tools a corporation is providing are truly "agnostic" because corporations exist for only one reason: to maximize profits. We can't expect them to look out for "voters' values" because voters are not their shareholders. Even vote.org, which is an nonprofit, raises questions of impartiality. Where do they get the phone numbers of unregistered voters and how do we know they won't attempt to sway them toward a particular candidate or political party (look into social architecture)? There is no way to know without 100% transparency and I personally don't trust this organization as far as I can throw it.

Collusion between corporations and politics is an anathema to democracy. Your vote doesn't mean shit unless you have the capital to back it up. Take a look at WikiLeaks or the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Our political voices are falling on deaf ears because most of our representatives are bought and paid for. I would rather not go down this road when it comes to the core mechanisms of our electoral system (but I'm sure that's already well underway).
I don't believe wine is considered unhealthy in small amounts either.
My primary reason is that I don't view a page on the same display and machine as the author, so more often than not the presentation is sub-optimal or entirely unreadable locally. Custom fonts are similarly abused like low-contrast text (grey on white).

Also loading via JavaScript and changing the fonts of an already rendered page disrupts my reading. If you want remote fonts, load them from the beginning, or if this isn't possible, just don't, please.

Another justification for disabling remote fonts is that it's one security critical interpreter of complex data which, when disabled, doesn't adversely affect the presentation, whereas on most pages disabling images does and cannot reasonably be disabled. The latter justification may go away with Mozilla's Oxidation efforts with time, leaving just loading time and readability as arguments.
Just checked this for my domain. Looks like CloudFlare requested about 3-4 dozen certificates for my domain. It does worry my that this many certs are going around, but given that they already manage my DNS, I've already given them enough power anyway.
I spent a day or so with relay and kept being blocked by mysteries or tired out from the amount of code you need to set up for a mutation. Branched and tried it with Apollo and everything has been pretty easy going.

Merging Fragments in the style of relay were my main concern with Apollo but they do have this now.

All in all much more flexible and readable than relay.
Newest 2-in-1: Intel-backed, crowd-designed Eve V fleshes out its spec
Note that the VC didn't go on record other wise his firms might get boycotted which would be no bad thing
How long does it take an "old steel-wheeled" train to get to 200 mph? How long does it take it to stop?

Why don't you look at a train schedule in the US and tell me how many trains go 200 mph. Hint: zero! Most trains average less than 50 mph.

As for a bus, you aren't going to drive it at 70 through the streets of LA or Manhattan. In fact, it's probably going to be tough getting it to 60 in this traffic:

http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/sjm-co...

A maglev carries 200-300 people? Your average bus holds 50?
Following the Venture Capital Cycle, Patterson Cycle
I think that may be more compact, if the IDE can reflect the algebra beneath the SQL clauses.
Must confess that 10 years ago I lost around 5 years in deep linux setup & programming, and I know all that you say. Neither [1] nor [2] do not list recent specific hardware models, I mean, notebooks and PCs, not chips or boards. Regular user has to unpack the device and `lspci -vnn -d 14e4:` (amazingly clear for regular user?), or something in live-usb system console at the store under manager's sight to maybe estimate whether this wifi is able to work with specific distro, which alone is a big question until you try it. Repeat these steps for all the hardware in potential purchase, and good luck to find all the specs, because often it is just i5/16Gb/13". There also are unresearchable timebombs like fast battery discharge and sleep issues under non-supported OSes.

"Product" is at least a site like easylinux.com, where you see that in late 2016 you can buy compatible X,Y and almost compatible Z (bios-only fan control), and in 2015 there were A,B,C, and in 2014 D was the best choice. Please click on direct link, torrent or ftp to download a distro image that already contains all the specific drivers and software.

Obviously, I'm unable to provide any evidence for something that doesn't exist.
Domino's Pizza Guy Pooped on My Brothers Lawn?
Even without reproducible builds, that's as "insecure" as any Linux distro. Frankly, I can very well live with the F-Droid maintainers keeping the signing keys.
You're right.

I somehow confused myself by thinking of it in terms of one of the proof techniques for amortized worst case where you derive a fixed upper bound for any "n". Of course this is a much stronger property than needed.
The Minilogue has 4 note polyphony, not 6. But it has a couple of other nice features: voice layering, a three octave keyboard (two octaves is just too small for serious music) and it sounds a lot better too. I especially like those pad sounds.
Couldn't you then say that OSS software has more people looking for flaws to patch, so it would be more secure - not less?

I suppose it does vary by project though.
It doesn't matter; worse is better. 1999 Yahoo Mail was not a good user experience, but it (and other web-based mail services) destroyed the likes of Eudora.

Ubiquity >>>>> UX.
Handmade Hero: Coding a Game Engine from Scratch – Episode Guide
Hi,

Can you share the internship link here?
systemd-nspawn containers are fun also. You can use them to run Ubuntu 16.10 processes on Ubuntu 16.04, among many other things.
I've been reading the code for T0 (a FORTH->C thingy), and I arrived at the conclusion that C# is a terrible language. The code itself is nice and clean if you assume it, though.
Leopetra – All-in-one app, for Pets
Most of the things you mention would still leave the Earth way more habitable than Mars. It would really need to be at the rogue planetoid/gamma ray burst level extinction event rather then global warming or nuclear war.
It's really just that the current is less.
Leopetra is a one-stop app for all pet needs. Look up everything you need to know about your favourite pet (temperament, nutrition & training needs, friendliness, etc..) or just schedule an appointment with a Leopetra certified vet nearby. Lookup ratings of Day Care centres to sit your pet while you are gone, find Pet Friendly restaurants nearby, and much more!
that's a w2 subcontractor not a real job or a proper self employed contractor role
What is the inconvenience of apps?
I don't understand the point of this, aside from the hipster factor.
Yes my last contract in the UK took a few £ a week to manage the umbrella company
Any recommendations for where to look for this type of customer?
"4G Everywhere" does not exist if you leave San Francisco.

You can smell the city on the authors of these thinkpieces.
R, Python or SAS: Which one should you learn first?
Implying you have the resources to do so correctly. Which was the issue with OpenSSL.

Completely unrelated but:

https://tls.mbed.org/

Another small footprint ssl/tls library, very readable code and a pleasure to work with.
For anyone who is looking for a since of scale. There are only around 52,000 total employees @ Google, and there are 3 million+ software engineers. So this quote is either out of context or wildly inaccurate.
I highly recommend Joe Celko's book, SQL Programming Style. [1] He does deal with formatting, but offers a comprehensive usage standard that goes beyond readability to discussing thorny issues like the taxonomy of words like "type," "category," and "code," as well as referencing relevant international standards for identifier naming.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Celkos-Programming-Kaufmann-Managemen...
Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python (2013)
Windows Task Scheduler and a script wrapping an emacs batch command. https://bitbucket.org/snippets/shoover/ggM5z

Alternately, you can invoke the org project/publish system.:https://bitbucket.org/shoover/emacs.d/src/4f5461d826c92c749b...
Let's say the goal is to optimize universal ease of adoption, and maximize virality.

Or, conversely, maybe you want to create a corporation where all employees must communicate in a custom language.
They actually talked about stock grants, which is pretty close to cash.
Pakka – The Smart, Secure Package Delivery Portal
Took me 2 days to find this OpenSSL/Ruby solution
Usually, I'm pretty good at finding docs, posts, solutions, tutorials, etc. and reading through them to find a decent solution.

This time, however, it took me much, much longer; probably because it involved brew, ruby, and openssl without me realizing it. Before anyone says it, I understand it's probably pretty simple, but it wasn't to me and wouldn't be to everyone else, either.

Cheers!
A lot of people's HN accounts, at least for the people who post a lot, are not anonymous. Alternatively if you post a lot it is possible to reconstruct who you are. If comments were being down voted you wouldn't see them at the top of threads - people use throw aways for anonymity not to prevent loss of points.
Until we bioengineer better suited humans.
Help us test our website monitoring Android app (beta)
> New MacBook Pros so popular orders are backed up for weeks

I really, really hope this "Apple is the devil" theme ends in the next few weeks. It's nauseating to see the same headlines multiple times a day on HN, all making the same ridiculous arguments.

The reality is, this time next year, people (pros and causal users) are going to love the Touch Bar, and nobody is going to care about the Surface Dial. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.