skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What server side language/framework did you choose and why?
I've had an interesting discussion in a Ruby/Rails related group.

Without falling into the "Rails is dead, long live XYZ", I would love to know what language/framework you chose for your startup/project/company and why...
I don't know what you're talking about, it's in there plain as day. The company has a department called IT Security. Not IT. Not Security. IT Security. Companies that legitimately care about security integrate security personnel with all of their operations, into every department. Top-down security departments exist to check boxes on regulatory forms. So I will be shocked if "IT Security" is not a made-to-order department whose existence is solely to satisfy things like PCI, HIPAA, etc.
Yeah, this is the kind of "everybody's empowered to push back and insist on doing things correctly" environment that people normally praise. Or at least, they praise until they realize that people will push back and insist on quality, and then they decide it's stifling and prevents them from getting anything done.
Well, there are worse fates than becoming Noam Chomsky.
I'm interested to find out if anyone has actually gotten work through HN's posts of "freelancer? Seeking Freelancer?"

I see a lot of "I'm looking for work" in these type of posts.
Singapore top in global education rankings
So moral of the story is get your free education in Paris and then get the F out to America where the wages are higher?

Also, every job I've ever had provided me with free health insurance. Not sure what the big deal with that is.
It depends on the license of the project you are forking. Let us know the license first.
He went live 30 seconds ago.
I think the fault lies in review procedures that require bringing the rest of the code up to standards if you just touch a tiny part of it. In a shop like this, these rules mean that nobody will ever touch legacy code if they can possibly help it.
I once waited 6 weeks for a backend team to fix a prematurely closed div tag that was screwing up the layout of a news site. The templates they were given were good; they screwed up the implementation. In desperation I had to hack the layout with JS (which I was able to update at will).
I'm getting an error:

Line #16628: Uncaught Extension EXT_frag_depth not available.

I'm using Chrome 54.0.2840.101 (64-bit) on Linux, WebGL: Hardware accelerated, OpenGL ES 3.1 Mesa 12.1.0-devel (git-b010fa8).
Another explanation by Rob Pike which I think is much simpler: https://blog.golang.org/concurrency-is-not-parallelism
Amen! For an enterprise system that doesn't have end-to-end automated tests, this sounds like a sane organization running as best it can. The process is optimized to not let incomplete code make it into production. This is a company doing it right given what they have to start with. Changing that ship won't happen overnight.
Reading the article reminded me that I don't really get the fuzz around iMessage.

It's an iOS-only messaging system (meaning that the majority of the people out there can't use it), and it limited to only certain carriers (it works on only 3 our of 6 in my country, AFAIK), narrowing the audience even more.

Yet, even though it's double-niche, Apple seems to be putting effort, and features into an app, that, apparently, very few people out there can use (I don't personally know anybody how has both and iPhone and a carrier that supports iMessages, me having only the former).
Lots of good advice here, but this is #1.
PayPal Cuts Costs 10x with Docker
I had a very similar experience. The interview guy most likely first saw my resume a minute before the interview. Clearly did not see the code I wrote for them.
I agree. Requiring things like stakeholder signoffs, code review, good test processes, and respect for team resource management is annoying, but it can also be incredibly important when you're trying to keep a big ship afloat.

Without those steps there's another article waiting to be written: "Rogue developer brings down business for six days with a seemingly innocuous 1-line change"
Flagged for politics
Body sensors have the same problem as talking to your phone I think.
In this case it doesn't apply, but Emscripten actually compiles LLVM assembly to JavaScript. The way they deal with malloc is by implement it in JS, that is, instead of calling the kernel malloc(), you're just calling a JS function that expands an array of bytes (specifically: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...)
maybe a place you have to show up and be present for the training and there is someone there with expectations that you have to fulfill. Vs being self-motivated to work independently. In my case I have some personal projects and a couple of online courses in progress but I usually find it easier to play WoW instead. If I had to go to a physical class I wouldn't do that.
Node v7.2.1
That is a valid criticism, but this is basically institutionalized boy scouting, which is a good practice.
Supreme Court gives Samsung a reprieve in Apple patent suit
For established businesses, I wonder if you could come up with a useful metric for how much value you add by rejecting a commit and thus avoiding an operational incident.

Mature, high-profit systems warrant much greater scrutiny on incoming changes than businesses/systems which aren't spinning off money yet. You can err in both ways: too slow where you need to be fast, and too fast where you need to be more careful. And AFAICT companies/organizations build processes, habits, and platforms around one mode and have a hard time switching to the other.
I'll go further and say that this is what people say they want: time to refactor out tech debt. The headline is a lie - there was tech debt that was company policy to take time to fix (parametising some hardcoded variables, amongst other things). "mission critical LoC" is not the same as "LoC" in their little summary.

People beg for time to fix tech debt, and right here is someone complaining about having to do just that.
Startups can afford to have their critical systems explode.
It's nice to reject code, but code reviewers must also be mindful of opportunity costs when wasting developer time on trivial concerns. (Being the cynic that I am, I guess at some point Corporate America will introduce code review reviews to solve this problem.)
>But any idea that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a good candidate for something we're mistaken about.

I don't know about that. Most of human history had ideas/philosophies based on scarcity and tribal thinking. I think it's reasonable to think as society can move beyond that values built in that universe fail.
If we're dealing with a company-wide hard-coded variable that only changes when the company is in danger of layoff, I'm pretty sure that:

(1) Making the variable a configuration variable will do nothing: it's not like you want two different versions of company policies at the same time.

(2) It won't help with testing, because any realistic test of the variable's change will involve changing the company policy and probably the way all systems behave.

In my opinion, making that into a config variable is a mistake. It's perfectly OK to keep as a hard-coded constant.
Code Valley: Join the New Industrial Revolution
And yet it didn't work out well for the company that funded it.

Much like Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (inventors of the mouse, GUI, and object oriented programming), which Xerox failed to profit from.
> I've had an interesting discussion in a Ruby/Rails related group.

if the discussion has a log somewhere on the web it would be interesting to provide a link.

I don't choose this or that tech for the sake of it. I choose the right tool for the job or what the client imposes. So it should mostly be about the requirements. Obviously some techs are more versatile than others.

The community is also important. Getting help from a respectful and friendly community is important. Because there are some really shitty language communities out there...
The process is fine, but sometimes shit is broken and you need to fix it now and clean up the existing mess later.

Why not instead of

> Shirley (Code Review): It is now against company policy to have any hard-coded variables. You will have to make this a record in the Parameters file. Also, there are 2 old Debug commands, an unassigned variable warning message, and a hard-coded Employee ID that will all have to be fixed before this module can be moved to production.

Add at the end:

However, I'll allow the change for now because this is an important update that affects peoples jobs. I want to see every issue fixed before the end of the week and I will not approve any other changes until these issues are resolved.

There, win-win.
> Google's datacenter energy consumption, is difficult to guess, if there are 1 million servers, and assuming each server consumes 10KWH per day, then it makes ~3.5 TWH per year

FWIW, the linked article mentions

> The 5.7 terawatt-hours of electricity Google consumed in 2015 “is equal to the output of two 500 megawatt coal plants,” said Jonathan Koomey

though they don't mention the source
Consult if you can and have the grit.. or join a consulting company as a coder. You'll soon find your PM skills will come in handy.
I'm not sure why this appears here on HN and received so many votes.

Despite being a good site, it has been last updated in 2013: http://darkpatterns.org/whats-new/

I sent them 2 dark patterns in the past which they didn't put; in an email I received long time after inquiring about it one of the developers said they're under the pump and will get to it sometime. And they don't.
You would be in a better position to notice common fallacies etc, but any "list of logical fallacies" is a good starting point, especially those fallacies that can be used to insult, or insinuate, E.g. Specific guidelines about ad-homs. This would also include advice not to use personal information/ circumstances in an argument, unless you are happy to see them criticised.

One of the worst fallacies, us probably the kind that removed the civility from a discussion, and hence the good faith.

As a side note, the worst kinds of guideline is an ambiguous one, that leaves a lot to interpretation, e.g "act civil" is itself a nice rule, but otherwise useless, better off as a heading above specific clarifications.

HN doesn't need to be Wikipedia wrt comment rules, but a few Wikipedia style rules might be good.
Given that the title is "Don’t assume that safety comes for free: a Swift case study", I don't think he's being particularly misleading. "Don't assume" usually just means that one should not take something for granted, not that it is never true. And doesn't appending "a Swift case study" makes it fairly clear that he is talking specifically about this case in Swift?

Also, he does point out in this paragraph that there is nothing inherently slower about the functional approach: "All these functions achieve nearly the same best performance if you disable safety checks at build time (swift build --configuration release -Xswiftc -Ounchecked). This means, in particular, that we get the fancy abstraction (the reduce approach) for free, as long as we disable safety checks. That makes performance a lot easier to understand."

See the Rust benchmarks posted here.

Send him a pull request, and I'd bet he'd be happy to include them for comparison and mention them in an addendum: https://github.com/lemire/Code-used-on-Daniel-Lemire-s-blog/...
Thats a dream orocess right there right?

The solution imo is to tell the higher ups to fast track it if peoples jobs arecat stake.
but not for $15K. maybe 2400 if you finish in a year doing it part time.
I think a Poison distribution would be more appropriate here, so the probability of 1 man in 5 being colorblind, assuming 10% of the population on average is colorblind, is:

e^-0.5*sum((i)->(0.5^i/factorial(i)), 1:5) = ~39%
This is a bit of an aside, but related. What's the appropriate response to someone who continues to post civilly and substantively but unceasingly on a topic, even when asked not to? Is it a type of trolling? Is asking them to stop silencing their voice? Or some sort of "agree to disagree"?

Another issue: when do some topics go beyond the pale and must not be tolerated? Is there such a point?

Perhaps these are off-topic for this thread, but they've been on my mind as part of the larger issues "detox week" is intended to address.
That kills me to hear that. I'm in charge of Web where I am and we make 95 percent of our changes instantly. There is no reason to make people wait; it honestly takes longer to project manage most changes than to just make them, so we just make them, but of course Web sites/front end is a different beast than application or other code.
or worse, work around the process to avoid it
I should probably be more clear. In overall health, fats, carbs, and protein do matter. However, I find it's hard to convince beginners to make drastic changes to their diet.

So thats why I recommend tracking only calories at first. Get used to tracking food and hit your weight goal. Then, when already used to being mindful of your diet, you can adapt it to be more overall healthy.
As someone who doesn't know a whole lot about Bell Labs, its history, how it worked, etc: Why and how did it produce so much great research output? What was different or special about Bell Labs? Answers as well as pointers to other material appreciated!
Can you clarify what the issue is? That's how semver works and how most substantial software projects start – with an unstable API.
There is a reset button if you click the upward-pointing arrow at the bottom of the playfield then the "play" icon.

Also loved this game. Found it challenging - seems like a good starting point is to find the nodes with the least links and put them around the edge, maintaining all the symmetries you can. Love the feeling of inversion that you get when you eliminate a load of crosses in one move.
So... one of the places I work is one of those 'nimble little startups', and it gets more and more bogged-down by the day due to some poor technical decisions taken early. There are seven different kinds of timestamp in the database, for example. That's pure dev overhead that gets applied for everything. And because the nimble little startups are pressed to work on new features rather than refactoring, more tech debt just gets added to the pile...

Also, don't forget selection bias - most small companies, startups included, die in the first few years. Only the success stories make the papers.
Well, I've seen 5 line patch take 6 months (and counting), so...
This is one of those "all of software is a tradeoff" kind of thing. Here, the company optimized for safety, with the tradeoff being that it takes much longer to ship. Startups optimize for shipping, and consequently ship broken code way more often.

OP demonstrates the fatal flaw in having process, in that poorly created process can be crippling. In this case, it may have led to significantly less profits, where if they had a way to fast-track something immediately, they could have avoided the delayed change for something so simple.

Another flaw is that process, if it's really bad, almost encourages people to circumvent it. At large, slow companies, the devs who push the most code are not necessarily the best and the brightest but rather those who can bend process in their favor.
Maybe an early adopter problem, unless they've upgraded the checkout stations to current technologies? The UK ones are mostly quite recent seem to work fine (though I have no experience outside London).
Personally I've never had issues with fits from Bonobos. The actual measurements match up with the advertised sizes.
What? In any large company, you are going to have access controls - not everyone is going to be allowed access to every system. In the example given, the guy was requesting access to a new system he didn't previously have access to; having a security team that is in charge of that access doesn't seem to have anything to do with regulation.
True, but the greater danger of integrating security into every department is discounting security in favor of the main requirement of your department. Your department is viewed for political and performance reasons, budgeting time away from the main goal of your area towards security is technically ... waste.

Additionally, you ignore the business logic cross-departmental issues when you do not have a centralized security department.
>The civility of discourse isn't independent of the content of that discourse.

This statement should probably become a part of civility rules in most communities.
Up to 16 channels... can't wait for files with levels of

reflectivity, umami, saltiness, sweet, sour and bitterness as well as the standard RGBA.
> It's not a fair comparison at all.

Especially since Bell Labs sat within a state-sponsored (enforced?) monopoly until the mid-80s, so there was no direct concern about revenue. Which is not to belittle them in the least as they made outstanding organizational decisions, and had the most enviable pure research->development->production pipeline to this day.

In terms of the R&D USA, the closest comparison is IBM (which also enjoyed a monopoly for some of its existence). MS's monopoly, with the benefit of hindsight, was feeble in comparison even to IBM's -- though they, like IBM, are absolutely one of the greats and have redeemed themselves particularly in the past few years.
Wait sorry - it was camera and microphone that it nags me about. I'll update the other post.

But still, I can't see why Gmail should need access to those devices, and far less why it should harass me so aggressively about it when it works fine without them.

Just conjecture, but I feel like there was a sea-change at Google regarding attitudes towards users' privacy, about the time that adblock became widespread and competition started heating up between them and Facebook for ad revenue. They're behaving far less ethically than they did even five years ago.
Not directly, but it's inspired by this excerpt of Red Mars: https://gist.github.com/andreparames/37844c65d918c89cce7d76c...

(Unsurprisingly, Arkady is my favorite character.)
It's easy to criticize this type of thing as wasteful and inefficient for the one time in a thousand where it really is just a single line code change that doesn't break anything, but the reason things like mandatory code review, required tech debt fixes, and all of the rest end up existing is because developers are notorious for saying, "Oh, it's just a one line change!" and then breaking everything when they slam it through to production without thinking about it.
> whilst Samsung ate up 20% market share in 1 year

Right a 78 year old company with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue is a startup killing big companies.

I'll just note that while Samsung is about half of G&E's age it makes twice as much in revenue.
25 Tech Gifts for Your Friends and Family Members This Season
Because everything is urgent, all of the time.. and so nothing gets improved.
Obviously it depends heavily on where you live and who you are friends with. Here in a major city in the US, virtually all of the people I exchange messages with are on iMessage. For the tiny minority who aren't (I just skimmed my message list and I found exactly three), it pretty gracefully degrades to SMS.
Are there really factories whose policies and parameters are encoded in software vs. under the guidance of humans?

That in itself is amazing to me considering that the tech company I work at, lots of things are just done by fiat.
Except the end result was the boss said DO IT NOW and it got done now.

This seems to be a pretty clear example of not making the process work for you. Unwritten policies. Having to escalate twice because of silly reasons. Hot fixes being miscategorized as features. Is a very urgent fix really the place to be fixing a bunch of other tech debt?
I think they mean that Apple isn't offering researchers the incentives they desire, and may have trouble recruiting them.
cost to business of occasional goof is less here than prohibitively high costs of making any change from these inappropriate and frankly insane processes (I've held management positions at such companies and easily recognise these kind of processes, in fact the post may have triggered some mild PTSD)
Beware of the sheer count, IBM is quite trigger happy on Patent submission. There can be lots of "parking" papers for low complexity or novelty stuff.
I think at this point we've amply demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of people--and I think that's probably a critical mass of people, from a social sense--don't really care about their data and only minimally care about experience.

What do you view is the meaningful reason for users to switch to these other platforms with some kind of better underlying data model? In addition, what's the meaningful reason for a company to adopt such a better underlying data model instead of keeping a data silo and just making better features on top of such a silo?
> a measure of latency, and not of throughput.

You could drive a station wagon full of backup tapes quite far in 6 days :)
Offer and demand explain a lot of phenomena. Companies only disclose sallaries when they need to, in order to seduce enough talent. Industries with a large talent pool to choose from will never do it.
Offer and demand explain a lot of phenomens. Companies only disclose sallaries if they need to in order to seduce enough talent.
What?! How would you even write that combinator in Python? You can't possibly convince me it would be clearer!
Not everyone is using encryption to stand up to the man... the national government isn't everyones prime adversary...
It's a good policy in general, but it needs to be flexible.

"Fix this unrelated stuff or no approval" needs to be overridden by "This is critical". "Fix this before you add this new feature" is pretty reasonable.
Clojure, because it is Lisp, run on the JVM, node and browser.
It's certainly a good thing they're doing, but really all they're doing is bidding higher than other companies on renewable energy, and since we don't have unlimited renewable energy (only as much as we have wind turbines and solar panel arrays &c), all they're really doing is shifting renewable energy usage from smaller companies to themselves. It's not like they're creating renewable energy or anything, they're just changing where it goes.

But at least they're going to create a greater demand to hopefully create a greater supply sometime soon, plus they're paying into the renewable energy economic machine.
[msft] Well, this is an honor - the creator of Jupyter commenting on this thread & not just any comment... but about embedding the Visual Studio Code editor in Jupyter Lab :).

Thanks Fernando, Brian, Min & team for everything you've done with Jupyter. Looking fwd to using Jlab soon!

s
I agree. I'm perfectly fine with a company "exploiting" their earth-friendliness for image. There are some things more important than the free market.
MSR researchers essentially invented differential privacy, so...
It is not a mistake. One literal 3 is not distinguishable from another literal 3. If you change it in one place but forget about another - that can lead to the inconsistent behaviour. Configuration variables are much less error prone