skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A great companion to this article is the Planet Money episode on Venezuela's collapse [0]. It's only 20 minutes long and combines anecdotes with a basic bird's eye view in NPR's typical fashion.

Venezuela didn't save its oil money. It used it to subsidize goods and services for the people, but in some unusual ways. Another choice: instead of making stuff at home, Venezuela imported almost everything it could. The government also kept tight control on the exchange rate between Venezuelan bolivars and U.S. dollars.

[0]: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/21/498867764/episo...
Yes, this is exactly the point that I argued in a previous discussion about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876133
If every hacker uses random.org, it's more cost-effective to compromise the service than to take a wrench to every single hacker's kneecaps. It wouldn't be a targeted attack, but it might be very useful if a sufficient subset of 'interesting' people use random.org.
the very first demo doesn't use Babel: http://codepen.io/sol0mka/pen/ogOYJj

As for the Pug and Stylus in that demo, you can view the compiled HTML or CSS within CodePen, it's in the little dropdown arrow in the top right corder of each box
Yes. It wasn't a mission critical project, so you could afford to kill it, post-mortem it, and build a new, better one.
you mean like updating codec pack for example? :

"Patch to support VP9: https://paste.fedoraproject.org/528850/14846609 First, you need to update the firmware to 1.3.0 libvpx"
Pioneer travel platform connecting members with a chic atlas of global hideaways
Thanks for this. Pendulum is, in my opinion, the most palatable datetime lib for Python. Things I'm looking for are:

- a domain model that doesn't conflate unrelated concepts: a human-perceived 'calendar date' is not the same as a timestamp. The two are not inherently comparable, and should be modelled as distinct classes [1].

- an API design that tries to adhere to the language's typical conventions, and cater to the mental model and needs of the language's users.

Unfortunately, Python has had a warped understanding of datetime from the very beginning, so these two are always at odds. But Pendulum does a better job than most, by normalizing stuff like .tomorrow() to midnight in the given timezone, by having sane defaults that tend to avoid common pitfalls, and by resisting Arrow's fast and loose way of dealing with datetime.

Delorean, a worthy alternative, makes slightly different design decisions, (e.g. about extending the datetime object, and how to treat naive datetimes) and I think a detailed comparison would benefit the community.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12364805
'Coordination' in English ;)
Interesting that you talk about project that never shipped, When I read OP's question I was thinking about already-shipped products that became too hard to run and maintain.

I am curious how long your products/projects were in development for before falling to tech debt? Were these net-new projects?
Wall Street Consensus Trades Fell Apart in 2016
It may not be a direct answer to your question, but this article has a cynical (yet technically detailed) perspective on "blockchain" that might give some insight: https://tonyarcieri.com/on-the-dangers-of-a-blockchain-monoc...
Yes. I tell them all to eat me.
HipExplore represents and markets a curated selection of unforgettable experiences across six continents. They connect sophisticated travelers on a social platform enabling them to plan, share & interact with one another while enabling access to a unique portfolio of destinations on a shared platform.

Time is valuable and trips away are precious. They seek out the little gems that offer genuine, one-of-a-kind experiences - it could be lashings of luxury at a palatial mansion or barefoot bliss on a desert island. They DON’T FOLLOW THE TRENDS, They MAKE THEM
The mission is to become the leading Social Travel Platform & to disrupt the outdated Etravel sector that focuses on revenue & bookings instead of sharing authentic experience and content with passion.

Their algorithm secures the members crème de la crème, one-of-a-kind experiences that make travel what it should be - exciting and rewarding.
Next, their goal is to scale. Check out their site and follow their amazing journey while conquering marketShare. Just launched their Primary seedRound and has commitment from leading VC’s.

Their success is defined by the caliber of community and when future targets are achieved they plan to integrate features such as Travel savings account, Subscription Travel plans
Not with the sale price of the app at least. Just like there is a review process for the app, there is also a separate review process for in-app purchases. 1 tier across all countries for each in-app purchase and the initial sale price.

Now, with that being said, I have not seen an instance of a developer or seller abusing the localization API for this purpose... meaning forcibly charging other stores for the same in-app purchase content. A separate in-app purchase would have to be made in any case for other stores to route to. Apple has a pretty firm fist and I imagine location abuse like this may lead to the seller's account being banned or punished. It may be perfectly allowed however, I haven't dug too deep into the TOS.
> I haven't seen any data, but my guess is that the average person's commute is roughly the same as it was 150 years ago.

I think you'd probably be wrong (though it may depend strongly on which average you take); even with the industrial revolution, working at home, or essentially so (whether yeoman farming or living upstairs from the shop) was a lot more common 150 years ago than it is now, though it may be more common now than it was just before telecommuting.
Managers, here me now.

1) Money is a factor because my job is difficult.

2) Up to date technology is important because I want to build interesting products.

As a developer, these are my motivations.
Do you have a recommendation for a book that covers these topics that's technical but not necessarily a text book?
Money doesn't motivate people past, oh, a half million or so a year, maybe.
I don't believe I agree with your contention, either that authoritarian regimes have more to fear from misinformation or that this relationship is borne out of social media.

Social media is neutral in terms of its content: it can broadcast accurate information or it can broadcast inaccurate information. But it allows that information to reach a much larger audience more quickly than calling on the phone or sending a letter or even wandering the streets shouting whatever you want to spread.

The only significant negative aspect of social media for authoritarians that I can think of is that it allows for non-centralized information spreading, whereas controlling the newspapers and TV is more straight-forward.
It sounds nice right?
The thing is, my whining isn't really directed at you or the GIMP's devs, it's directed at people who blame any complaints about the UI on Photoshop users or whatever. It sounds like you understand that the program isn't perfect and you're focused on making it better, which is obviously great.
This comment contains a couple of strong and unsubstantiated assertions.

1. Wealth disparity is an issue -- this needs to be justified beyond an appeal to fairness. Why is this an issue at all? Is the real issue the decline of the middle class? Is that necessarily connected to increasing wealth in the upper class?

2. The election of Donald Trump is a 'lose-lose' scenario. How? What, specifically, about his proposed policies has a demonstrably negative impact on the quality of life for American citizens and the United States' geopolitical influence?
I'm not negative to blockchains like I'm not negative to linked lists.

I am however sceptical when large amounts of people suddenly decides that they need to swap technology NOW.

Example: javascript. A language that IMO is worse than even php in a number of ways but still manages to attract developer mindshare.

(Yes, I have some experience in classic Javascript / ECMAScript )
The classic popular treatment is:
Godel Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter
I think the future is micro payments. I don't want to pay for a magazine, I want to pay for quality articles, wherever they come from.
Aaron, basically you are looking at a combination of factors:

— a huge momentum that Photoshop has accumulated over the decades;

— huge R&D and marketing budget at Adobe;

— whole businesses built around educating Adobe tools (think Envato et al.).

And the list goes on.

Which is why it doesn't make any sense whatsoever to "surpass other options". But it makes a hell of a sense to create a sensible sophisticated tool for a certain user base. Which is kinda what we do with GIMP, as much as time permits.

BTW, love your photos :)
On the contrary, I keep getting the sort of news that you are missing, on my daily dose of social media. Just yesterday, I got this:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-...

And plenty more critical of govt decisions (ghost city, pollution, food safety) from this particular Facebook page which is quite popular for news in China:

https://www.facebook.com/shanghaiist/
>"Horses are tools that people used. When there's no more use for the tool, it's usage may be reduces. People are not just tools, they are the reason we have an economy in the first place. A solution in some form will have to be put forth if one doesn't emerge."

Putting aside my dislike for considering horses as tools, you're missing an important point. Economies only have to function for those at the top in order to be promoted. You could say that the majority of humans are just seen as 'tools' to the people in power that are driven by profit. To them, as long as they get to maintain their quality of life, what do they care about the masses?

If you think this is far fetched, look at what's happening in places like Flint, Michigan. People were drinking poisoned water for decades, and those in charge knew about it. There's even a story that GM had to get a factory in Flint connected to the Detroit water supply because the Flint water was damaging their parts. Plus Flint is not an isolated case. Some people put profit ahead of people, and sadly a high number of those people are in positions of power.
Regarding bitcoin, the main problem is that a lot of people have large amounts of bitcoin horded from early days and they tend to be biased and start spamming forums about how great it is as it will make them very rich if the adoption increases. This is despite there being very major flaws with the system.

As someone that has actually tried to sell things with bitcoin, there are major flaws with it, and they will never be fixed because these problems are inherent to blockchains. And people trying to get rich quick keep spamming forums and HN with blockchain technology X Y Z without acknowledging these problems.

1. It is really annoying to buy. You need to go out of your way to link your bank account and passport/driver's license at any major exchange, and this takes days or even weeks. You cannot buy it instantly with a credit card or paypal unless you find a shady seller with bad rates. No one wants to sell bitcoin for something that could be chargebacked.

2. No chargebacks. Good for sellers but not for buyers. People might be able to live with this if it weren't for the other 2 major problems.

3. Payment takes forever. Waiting for the recommended amount of confirms will take at least an hour?

These problems are deal-breaking and can never be fixed when using blockchain technology.
The cross-recruiting agreement is controversial; at least there's an argument that it should have been OK.

But Catmull in particular was involved in the more extreme implementations of the deal. In his version, not only did cooperating companies agree not to actively poach, nor to passively extend offers when approached by employees of competitors, but also they agreed to actively report amongst themselves whenever they were approached by employees of competitors.

This probably damaged the careers of engineers who were not completely satisfied with their current employer, because as an exec are you going to give a key project to someone who's about to go work for the competition?

Maybe even the Catmull version of the wage-fixing scheme has some defenders, but I think there are very few defenders of the Catmull form of the agreement compared to the fraction of HNers who are OK with the milder form that merely instructed recruiters not to actively initiate conversations with employees of competitors.
"nobody knows anything about anything". Actually, somebody knows, but they work for someone else.
Unfortunately for insurance reasons you need some sort of medical reason other than GBAT [+]... luckily there seems to be no end of classifications of ailments and diseases (for better and worse).

That is you really can't go to a doctor for not being as successful as you would like to be but you can go if you have some ailment holding you back which is usually the case... ADD, ADHD, Depression, OCD, Anxiety, or Addiction.

Addiction these days is pretty rampant and it doesn't just have to be drugs (e.g. it could be Hackernews :) ).

As for resources I think I saw Cengage have some info available. I can't find the original content but after googling I found this slideshow: http://www.slideshare.net/eaelliott/chapter-6-action-oriente...

[+] "Getting Better All the Time"
I've used the shockcord netting to hold my bike lock... But then, I've found that the Chacabuco was not my bike bag of choice after a couple trips. Replaced it with a hand-me-down CamelPack for exploration and panniers for daily commutes.
They didnt abandon old codebase because it was bad (it was leaner and faster than anything before and after :( ). They did it for economic reasons - taking advantage of all the google work on the blink means Opera "browser development" is currently nothing more than customizing a skin.
They are rolling out touch screen ordering for our local macdonalds. I don't think they fire anyone, but throughput is higher (so I guess that is one or two less jobs per customer served)
Manufacturing jobs did not require enormously sophisticated skills (i.e. the equivalent of a PhD) to be performed.
So "moving up" or "moving to" the new jobs was still possible. If automated trucks replace 1000 truckers, how many of them will be able to transition to "automated truck programmer"? (And note: they cannot move to "automated truck mechanic" because those jobs are already taken by "non-automated truck mechanics")
Oops Nutrition Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
and much slower than Visa, never mind the sorts of transactions where there are algorithms earning big bucks profits from frontrunning trades with millisecond advantages....
the price of robots keeps going down and price of humans keeps going up, somewhere in near future it doesn't make sense to hire a human for a min wage job. we are not there but we will be.
Restaurants are doing that, go download Starbucks or Yelp app and you see.
Thanks that actually makes a lot of sense.
There are Clojure->Scheme compilers?
What do you even mean? NYT has a price sheet for sponsered content/native ads. If you have the funds, you can put any "fake news" you want in the NYT. Much more up front about it than back in the day.

All "news" is fake to some degree or another, it is a fantasy to think otherwise.
I wish it was written in PHP (I suck, I know. I never got to learn any other back-end language).

It looks great, though.

And I love the name and logo.
While I agree with you that that this is a really interesting topic to think about, I don't agree that Germany (Prussia really) would have remained an authoritarian monarchy with a rubber-stamp democracy. There was already a cultural shift before the Great War towards greater democracy and human rights - the war can be seen as the last gasp of the dying monarchies to hold onto power in the face of this movement. We also would not have had the singular individual who was Hitler and all the damage he did.

I think we would have ended up with something very close to a full intergrated EU economically dominated by Germany with a few internal borders shifted around and a declining U.K. outside the EU.
Having someone else's opinion on something that works for them can be helpful if you need a place to start, but it will work best when you develop your own style or techniques.

But one suggestion to avoid a common danger - after reviewing several techniques, pick one and try it for a minimum amount of time - say a month - before trying something different. many people get caught up in productivity pr0n, constantly searching for the "perfect" at the expense of something that "works."
In my experience Sturgeon's Law usually overrules Chesterton's fence.
The op-ed and opinion pages of the NYT have their fair share of rumor & falsehoods

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/opinion/why-i-will-not-ca...

exposed here http://www.redstate.com/mickeywhite2/2016/12/16/new-york-tim...

e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/opinion/liberal-zionism-i...

exposed here http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/220635/why-did-the-new-york-...

I won't make a big list, and it seems are subjects are somewhat partisan, my comment here is not. What I mean to say is that rumor is equally at home on the NYT website as anywhere else.
I posted the link, but am not one of the developers. This got a little attention a couple of years ago, and I thought to look it up today. It has a nice website now at least. I really like the idea behind it (small install, lightweight, fast), but don't know how effective it will be without a larger community. I can honestly do without a lot of libraries as long as there are decent built-ins.

I really wish Pixie just had a REPL and compiled to native code via LLVM so I could give coworkers a .exe.

Edit:

Just looked at the github page. It doesn't look very active to me although I wouldn't say dead. The only small lisps I know of in development are Picolisp and Newlisp.
> The day will come when machine productivity dwarfs that of humans by orders of magnitude

It already does. Have you tried to build a house without power tools?

Strong-form, self perpetuating, Terminator style AI has not even been invented yet and you're jumping to the closing chapters.
Not doing this is like juggling with knives. I cringe every time I see a colleague doing it.
Try the windows release here: https://github.com/nylas/N1/releases

I haven't tried it, but the Linux version works fine with a basic account.
> Let's face it, all the features are there.

You really should prepare for a ton of bricks about to crush you down as people discover that you think adjustment layers, layer effects, or CMYK support is "5% of Photoshop's deep ocean of features" :)
why is wealth disparity the biggest social threat?

Economic rent I can see being concern, especially when regulatory capture is involved, but there are many reasons for increasing wealth disparity that are completely fair.

Many of those being rewarded with wealth have built and led companies that have improved productivity and allowed many of those on the other side of the wealth divide to do more with less. Is it not fair to compensate them accordingly for the ways they have improved general welfare?
In that case... what about just regular plain old Common Lisp?
Not only that, but how can anyone keep up with their new feature releases to get any real value? Seems like a shotgun approach to product development.
Having used several different EDA tools, I completely believe this. I don't know how they can be so poor across the board. It is part of the reason I switched from doing software & hardware to just hardware. Life is too short to deal with bugs in synthesis tools.
Your conscience being immune to and independent of the strong prevailing cultural norms of course.

And yet somehow a handful of generations ago a large number of consciences were pretty definite about the rights of black Africans. Seems impossible to today's conscience.

Consciences change over time. Every generation thinks theirs is the One True Correct belief system. Bah.
> Gtk is not very cross-platform. It looks non-native on Windows, and it's so non-native on macOS that you have to run an X server just to see it.

This has not been true for years now. There is a native port of Gtk that does not require an X server. Gimp is available natively, as are other Gtk apps (Gnucash, Deluge, etc).
Food as Medicine Is No Longer a Fringe Idea
Under drinkjuice's reply to akmittal yes, that's the one comment I'm referring to. But one does not "so much" make.
Very neat but documentation is very sparse, from what I can tell.
> Average empployment time at any single company in the tech industry is now 18-24 months.

The devs who are ok with this have no idea how bad this will bite them later when they're older and nobody wants to employ them. Hope y'all are good at saving money.
This comment isn't against you, because you are right that a lot of companies calculate this way. It is also undeniably short sighted. Because value in this case is literally in the eye of the beholder. If they were worth at least million and mission critical, market rate was 100k-200k. Pay 400k-500k. Guarantee employee knows they are valued and no other company would match because the person isn't worth as much to the competitor.

There was an article a few years ago about a Google employee. Competitor interviewed, offered what they thought was a great package around 500k, found out candidate was making 3mil at Google. Failure on the recruiter part not getting that info beforehand, but can understand more senior folks not discussing till the end.
"The tech has been here for more than a decade. Why don't restaurants do this?"
I'm in automation, so maybe I can answer this.
Small businesses don't have necessary capital to implement automation solutions. While they know that in a long term this would be good idea, they have a hard time doing it. Large corporations are slower to implement any major change, and sometimes they are limited by contracts they have with their clients. Few times when I proposed automation solution to business doing with the gov, the response was "We have contract that requires us to employ these people. We want to automate but we can't".

But once competition automates, all bets are off everyone must automate or perish.
The larger problem is that many people can't differentiate between the two, and will be drawn to fake news if the message appeals to them (confirmation bias).
Yes, exactly, well said.

That's precisely the idea: if a pilot makes errors so grave as to endanger the aircraft, how come the airline training/monitoring in place did not pick up indications earlier?

The people that helped overcome the "pilot error, case closed"-mindset must be thanked (among others) for making aviation today as safe as it is.
You are probably right, but I am privately a bit concerned regarding the crashed Air France Flight 447, and the conclusions made regarding pilot error.

I can't shake the suspicion that the Airbus man-machine interface and programming is partly to blame - possibly only when pushed into an extreme configuration, and certainly just as a topping on other factors.

It's clear however, that it's politically and economically impossible to ground all machines made by the European union's prestige project, Airbus.
My workflow for modifying production data is:

1) Write a select statement capturing the rows you want to modify and verify them by eyeball
2) (Optional) Modify that statement to select the unchanged rows into a temp table to be deleted in a few days
3) Wrap the statement from step 1 in a transaction
4) Modify the statement into the update or delete
5) Check that rowcounts haven't changed from step 1
6) Copy-and-paste the final statement into your ticketing or dev tracking system
7) Run the final statement

It may be overkill, but the amount of grief it can save is immeasurable